Tonight would be no exception.
O’Neil carried a rebreather mask and tank along with NVGs, his suppressed rifle, a waterproof camera for intel gathering, and his share of explosive charges. Van had the team’s sledgehammer, and Loeb carried their bolt cutters. As was tradition, the newest guy, Tate, had their collapsible telescoping tactical ladder, the most cumbersome gear. An operator on fireteam Delta had the group’s handheld surveillance drone packed in a dry bag.
O’Neil never knew if they would need all those tools when they went on a special recon or direction action mission, but he always knew that if they didn’t have one when they needed it, they sure as hell would regret it.
“All right, boys,” Reynolds said, addressing the troop. “You all know the mission. From what we learned from our Moroccan guest, nothing is dramatically different from what we expected, with one caveat. There may be prisoners within the facility.”
To O’Neil, that was a huge fricking caveat. It meant that they couldn’t just blow the whole base to atoms and throw their explosive charges everywhere they damn well pleased. Sure, the rules of engagement had been altered when they had been fighting mostly Skulls instead of people, but now, with real human enemy combatants back in the game and the potential for innocents to be caught in the crossfire, the situation had changed.
Reynolds didn’t have clear answers from the brass on how they should treat the Russians they found in the facility nor what they should do to prevent needless civilian deaths, but he had told the SEALs that they would operate how they always had—with professionalism, no different than when they had been in Afghanistan.
With two squads of Rangers covering them, they patrolled north through the ruined neighborhood. They passed other luxury villas and boutique hotels. The walls separating the properties were often pocked with bullet holes. Spent bullet casings covered the streets and filled the gutters, where chewed-up bones stuck out of the grimy muck. Distant howls from hunting beasts drifted over the otherwise quiet city, only accompanied by the occasional tug of the breeze through the palm fronds.
Occasionally, they saw cars that had been abandoned. Some with corpses still inside them; others with broken windows and scratch marks peeling at the vehicles, the passengers and drivers’ bodies nowhere to be seen.
Every time they heard a snap or crunch, they paused, waiting to ensure no Skulls prowled across their path. At one point, O’Neil thought he even spotted a stray cat. It disappeared almost as soon as he set his NVGs on the animal.
It was a wonder the thing had survived so long when every Skull he had ever come across was far from picky when it came to its choice of a protein-based meal.
They made it the main road, the Route de la Plage Merkala, without incident. As they drew closer to the medina and the Tangier port, the road became even more clogged with vehicles. Many were blackened or covered in bulletholes.
Water lapped against the coast. The rhythmic growl of it breaking against the rocky shores provided ample cover as they crunched over gravel and broken glass. Reynolds held up a fist, drawing the SEALs and the Rangers to a halt.
O’Neil looked ahead to see what had caught the chief’s attention. There appeared to be two large military trucks that had been parked perpendicularly to the street to block the flow of traffic. On both sides of them were light armored vehicles—Panhard AMLs. O’Neil recognized the French armored cars. They were cheap, relatively efficient, and maneuverable. But neither of the cars with their the long 90 mmm cannons appeared to have done much good against the Skulls.
As they slowly approached the barricade, O’Neil counted the skeletons of at least thirty soldiers who had been torn to pieces by the Skulls. Their bones were covered in teeth marks. Many were broken, their marrow sucked dry. Weapons lay next to several of the ruined skeletons, and tattered bits of camouflage uniforms fluttered with the salty breeze coursing in from the Strait.
Beyond the failed military barricade, O’Neil saw the curve of the first jetty. The manmade strip of large stones and concrete tetrapods protected docks filled with smaller vessels. He could just make out the silhouette of yachts and tugboats. Beyond those docks, the rest of the port was shielded by large concrete and metal-paneled walls that appeared to be topped with razor wire.
“That’s our cue,” Reynolds said. “Mask up, fins on.”
As the SEALs donned their SCUBA equipment, the Rangers spread out to establish a defensive perimeter. The howls of monsters hunting within the city carried over the buildings and streets. It sounded as if more and more voices were joining the calls every minute.
O’Neil wondered if the monsters had found one of Khalid’s friends.
They navigated over the rocks to the water. Each frothy wave slapped them with a dose of biting cold. As he stepped deeper, he started breathing through his mask and rebreather, then let himself drop into the dark waters. He slipped on his fins, propelling himself further from the shore and bobbed next to the rest of the team.
Reynolds waved at the Rangers, and the soldiers began their trek back toward the villa.
O’Neil uncoiled a line that he had been carrying, letting each of the SEALs on his and Delta’s teams grab hold. Reynolds took a second line to lead Alpha and Charlie.
Then at Reynolds’s signal, they dove. Without the benefit of moonlight to pierce the black waters, they could hardly see each other much less the depths below.
O’Neil kicked, feeling the tug of the other divers behind him on the line. This was the best way for them to stick close together. Otherwise they were liable to lose each other blindly kicking through the waves.
They also didn’t want to risk swimming at the surface where an observant guard might spot them—or worse, a hungry Skull. So instead of navigating with sight, O’Neil had to rely almost entirely on a combination of his diving gauge to measure how deep they were and his ruggedized GPS to ensure they were roughly on course to entering the port.
Besides looking at his gauges, he might as well have been swimming blind.
The journey reminded him of a particular training exercise in Washington. One where he and his team had been assigned to plant mock explosives on a ship in the middle of Skagit Bay, north of Seattle. A mixture of navy sailors and army grunts were supposed to be on the lookout for them, equipped with spotlights and acoustic sensors to detect their approach.
O’Neil hadn’t been afraid of his fellow service members. He had been confident in his team’s abilities to evade them. But as they dove through the darkness, blindly hanging onto a line just like now, his mind kept returning to what a fellow SEAL had told him earlier that day. There had been reports of orca activity in the same area.
Logically, he knew there were no records of a killer whale attacking a human in the wild. But he couldn’t help thinking that the SEALs looked like, well, seals. That he probably seemed like a slow, wounded version of one of the orcas’ favorite snacks.
He would never hear or see one of the creatures coming, propelling itself out of the black, its huge, curved teeth snapping through his body in an instant. Then that would be it for his career on the teams.
Every time he had heard clicking or bubbles in the dark waters, he worried that was a sign of an orca coming straight for him and his team.
In the end, they had completed the mission with no interference from any predatorial wildlife.
O’Neil had never admitted those fears to anyone.
He thought he would have sounded ridiculous.
But now, slowly advancing through the frigid waters of the Strait, he wondered how unfounded those fears were.
Every time he heard a noise or splash, he couldn’t help imagining what might be responsible. He didn’t think Skulls could swim, but after Lithuania, he knew to expect anything. That included aquatic Skulls who might be after them now. Paddling through the water with claws that would tear through their air lines and wetsuits. The beasts would turn the water red with their blood, dragging their bodies into the depths or perhaps back toward the shore where they would pick the SEALs’ bones clean.