A body thumped against the back of the truck with him.
Van.
He reached toward the man, fighting the pain. Desperate to help his brother who was still bleeding from the blast wounds.
His fingers traced over Van’s chest. They were growing number every second. Felt like they were someone else’s, but even as he lost feeling, his nerves were still sparking enough for him to feel the cold flesh around Van’s neck.
“No… no… Van,” he mumbled. He tried to rouse the man.
But Van’s eyes remained closed.
Only a single dome light illuminated the troop hold.
That light was more than enough for O’Neil to see that Van’s chest was not moving up and down. There was no pulse throbbing in his burned neck.
His mouth lay open, slack. The skin that wasn’t burned and blistered was growing paler by the second as blood drizzled from his nostrils and from his wounds.
O’Neil thought back to when he had first met Van at BUD/S. The guy had made the 50-meter underwater swim look like a breeze. Went all the way to the end of the pool and back, shot out from the pool, and merely nodded when the instructors said he passed.
Like his success was inevitable.
O’Neil had thought the guy was cocky, because he remembered how damn hard that swim was. How much pressure there had been in that moment, if he didn’t make it all the way down the pool and back, that was it for his career in the SEALs. His dreams of being one of the Navy’s elite would be finished with a single desperate breath.
But O’Neil learned quickly that Van wasn’t cocky. He just knew what needed to be done and he did it.
Like when O’Neil’s mom had died, hit by a drunk driver. His dad had passed years earlier from heart disease, and she was the only family he’d had left. Soon as Van had found out, he had booked a flight out from Houston where he was visiting his folks on leave—which came about as often as a hard rain in the desert—and came straight to O’Neil’s place in Virginia Beach.
Van hadn’t said a damn word. Just came over with two six-packs. The guy took the beers out to the balcony of O’Neil’s condo, set them down on a plastic table between the two cheap plastic chairs O’Neil never used.
They burned the night away, just sharing that beer until the morning came.
And Van merely left with a tight hug and a nod.
Might have been odd if it had been anyone else. But with Van, the message had been clear.
I’m here for you. Always will be.
SEAL blood ran thick.
That night meant more than any of the platitudes or flowers or kind words from his mother’s friends and those handful of people O’Neil occasionally talked to outside the teams. Friends from the days when he wasn’t spinning up on some deployment or classified mission.
His mother’s funeral had been a blur of condolences and emotion. But he never forgot what Van did for him, even though the two of them never spoke of it again.
And now, Van was gone.
Other bodies thumped into the truck beside him. The Moroccan prisoners. Some hogtied; others knocked out, gashes in their forehead leaking out over their noses and beards.
Blackness started sucking at the edges of O’Neil’s vision again. He tried to keep his eyes open.
Gunshots blasted outside.
Then yells. Curses.
Another smack of bone against metal.
O’Neil couldn’t fight it. His eyes closed again.
Maybe Loeb and Tate had escaped. Maybe they would reunite with the Rangers. They would fight back.
This couldn’t be the end of his team.
When he woke again, he could feel the rumble of the truck through his body. Felt the warm press of other prisoners around him.
Van had been flipped sideways, pushed over to make room for the half-humans standing around the prisoners, their claws wrapped around handholds in the MRAP’s ceiling. They were chatting in Russian. A couple laughed.
Dark, sadistic laughs.
Demonic.
Van’s jacket had been torn open in the blast. Now that he was on his side, the silver cross necklace he wore hung out, dangling on a chain that almost looked delicate against the dead operator’s muscular body.
Where had Van got that necklace? He’d told O’Neil before, but his head was getting fuzzy again.
Van was Catholic.
Was it from his first communion? His confirmation?
Was it from his parents? Grandparents?
Fuck.
He couldn’t remember anything right now. Just remembered that it was important to Van.
And an urge to take that necklace welled up inside him.
Because he didn’t want the beasts to have it.
The Russians couldn’t have it, either.
That last vestige of Van didn’t deserve to be lost when they fed him to the Skulls or dumped his body into the waters outside the port.
No…
He reached out toward the necklace, gritting his teeth against the pain. Knowing that if he moved too quickly, if he so much as moaned from the effort, the half-humans would stop him.
He needed that necklace.
Slowly his fingers wrapped around the cross. He started to pull. Pain exploded in his wrist. He wanted to scream, to curse. His fingers shook. Sweat poured down the back of his neck, his forehead, stinging his eyes.
Van…
He couldn’t do it. Couldn’t pull it off. He was too weak.
Then one of the half-humans saw him. Glared at him with yellow eyes, lips curling back in a snarl befitting a rabid wolf.
Said something in Russian, then stomped O’Neil’s wrist.
Another crunch. A wave of pain so intense, O’Neil vomited over himself.
Last thing he smelled before passing out again was that vomit mixed with the carrion stink of the animalistic bastards that pointed and laughed at him. His eyes started to close again, exhaustion and pain overwhelming him.
But not before he made a vow.
A vow that he would carry out no matter what.
He would ensure every one of these bastards paid. Every damn Russian responsible for the tragedies in Tangier would answer for their sins.
And then, once more, his mind faded into oblivion.
-27-
O’Neil felt the warmth of the sun on his face and bare chest. Heard the roar of the waves crashing onto the shore. Felt the grainy sand swallow his feet when he pushed them into it.
He turned to see Reynolds standing beside a cooler, talking to a few other guys on the teams. He had a bottle of water in hand. O’Neil didn’t think the guy looked down on alcohol, per se, but he’d never seen the guy so much as lift a can of beer.
Gulls squawked overhead and dove toward a picnic blanket where Loeb’s girls were throwing the birds potato chips, much to their mother Sofie’s dismay. They giggled and shrieked when the gulls got close. Loeb picked them up in his arms, holding them close to his chest, laughing and threatening to feed them to the gulls. He had his favorite cowboy hat pulled down over his brow like he was a vagrant in a John Wayne flick.
Van started chatting with Reynolds. Something Reynolds said must have been pretty damn funny, because O’Neil saw Van actually crack a smile.
O’Neil knew he was dreaming.
But he would rather live in this dream than the nightmare that was his present-day reality. This was a memory, a time before the outbreak. Before the world had been ripped into ragged shreds from the Oni Agent. The beach barbecue was one of their traditional last hurrahs with the troop and their families before they were packed away on a C-17 back to the Middle East or Central Asia.
Loeb took his cowboy hat off, placed it on his eldest girl who wasn’t more than six or seven at the time, then sauntered over to O’Neil. He put a hand over his eyes and looked out toward the white-capped waves breaking and rolling toward them.