A pair of surfers were fighting to catch a wave worthy of their efforts.
“Amateurs,” Loeb said.
“Says the guy from Texas.”
“The gulf has surfing,” Loeb said. Truth was Loeb been a West Coast SEAL before joining Team Six. Damn near every SEAL O’Neil had met on one of the West Coast teams had been a part of the dawn patrol at one point or another catching waves as the sun climbed into the morning sky. “You ever rode a wave, brother?”
“Does it count if I was in a Zodiac?”
“Hard negative.”
“I’m afraid not.”
Loeb licked his lips. He had a sun-soaked, tawny complexion. With his slightly shaggy hair, he looked more like a beach bum than a rancher’s son. That day, he had looked positively at home on the beach with his girls.
“We’ll have to change that,” Loeb said.
“I’m willing to try.” O’Neil jerked his chin toward Reynolds. His time on the West Coast had overlapped with Loeb’s. “You ever hang ten with the chief?”
“Nah, brother. Wouldn’t dare.”
“Why’s that?”
“He likes to hang eleven.”
“The hell is hang eleven?”
“Hang ten is when you got all ten toes over the side of the board.” Loeb cracked a shit-eating grin. “Hang eleven is when you’ve got an extra, uh, appendage hanging over because you’re a fan of freedom. Every man’s got their own thing, but I don’t want to see that thing. You catch my drift?”
O’Neil laughed and punched Loeb in the shoulder. “You’re fucking with me.”
Loeb shrugged neither confirming nor denying anything.
That day had been well before Skulls had taken over Virginia Beach and the rest of the East Coast. Before Tate had joined their team when DEVGRU was losing some of their best fighting a battle for a country that O’Neil wasn’t even sure was theirs anymore.
O’Neil stared out at the ocean.
These guys weren’t just some people you saw at the office, then grabbed a drink with every other week after you clocked out. They weren’t just the charming, friendly neighbors that would help you shovel your driveway. And they weren’t just some friends he saw a few times while reminiscing about their lives before they had kids and mortgages and a 401K that seemed to be growing slower than grass in the winter.
These guys were family.
O’Neil looked at Loeb’s wife and girls constructing a sandcastle now.
No, truth was, these guys were closer than family.
They knew what it meant to be dropped into a hot LZ. Knew what it was like to take enemy fire or drag an injured brother into cover even as an avalanche of incoming rounds peppered your position. Knew what it was like to look an enemy fighter in the eye—another human being—and squeeze a trigger, knowing you were taking their life with that simple action.
That their life full of memories and family and brothers-in-arms of their own, no matter how twisted by their own radical ideals, ended as soon as you pulled the trigger while your life continued on.
But you lived with that decision because you made it so your brothers would live, too. Because that fighter had been pointing his rifle at Van or threatening to take down Loeb. That fighter might be the one to set an IED that would blow up Tate’s ride the next day or might set up a mortar in the mountains, raining hell down on the chief’s bed while he tried to grab shuteye.
Yeah, truth was, there wasn’t a proper word to describe their relationship—and no one who hadn’t faced oblivion with a handful of hardened warriors who would lay down their lives for you just like you would for them would ever understand. Even calling each other family somehow didn’t cut it.
O’Neil recalled a time when they had taken out an entire bomb-making operation in a dusty Afghan compound. How a bullet had grazed Loeb’s shoulder. One even hit a chest plate. Broke the plate.
Two shots that could have ended the guy’s life.
And then they were sent home to wait for their next mission. Loeb had been inches from losing his life and as soon as he got home, he couldn’t say a damn thing about it. His wife just handed him their youngest daughter, an infant then, and asked for help changing her diaper.
Yeah, SEAL blood ran different than family blood. No one really understood what that meant except the other SEALs. Not even their wives and girlfriends, parents and siblings.
So when the screams first tore O’Neil from his unconscious fate, he didn’t care about the throbbing pain in his right wrist or the agony coursing up his left arm. He didn’t care about the headache sending spears through his brain and straight out his eyes. He didn’t care about the sickness welling up inside him, forcing him to spew what little he had in his stomach over the concrete floor.
All he could think of was where the hell Loeb and Tate and Van were.
He searched through a crowd of unfamiliar faces. Most with beards, almost all skinny and covered in scratches.
“Loeb! Tate! Van!”
Dizziness started to take over his mind again. He fell into the chain-link wall behind him. He tried to hold himself up, but the effort sent another wave of unbearable pain roaring up through his nerves.
He heard the screams again, echoing all around him. Through his blurred vision, he realized where he was.
The prison. The lab.
The very place they were supposed to destroy still stood. And worse, he was back in a cell with the very people he had tried to save.
“Are you okay?” a voice asked, hands touching his shoulder.
He shrugged away, trying to raise his hands to fight. But he could barely get them more than a few inches off his lap before the agony forced him to abandon his effort.
“Please, please, you are hurt.”
“No… fucking… shit…” he managed through a clenched jaw.
He craned his neck to see who had placed their hands on his shoulder. Realized it was Hassan.
“My brother, please, you will hurt yourself more,” Hassan said.
“Where is my team?” O’Neil asked. “Did they escape?”
Hassan looked down at the ground. “I am afraid they did not.”
“Where are they?” O’Neil asked.
Hassan pointed out of the cell, toward where the screams were coming from. “They are being questioned.”
“Why… why not me?”
“You were unconscious,” Hassan said. “They left you with us.”
Another scream wailed out from the darkened space in the labs beyond the cages. O’Neil bit back against his own pain and tried to grab the steel bars.
“Stop it!” he yelled. “Stop this!”
But no one answered him. The two Russians he saw working in the lab merely looked up at him, then turned their attention back toward a microscope.
“Loeb… Van… Tate… they have them all,” he said.
Hassan’s face screwed up in concern. “Van, he is… May Allah bless his soul with eternal peace.”
It hit O’Neil then.
Again, for the second time that night, he realized Van was gone.
Taken by these monsters.
Footsteps banged down the corridor. O’Neil stared between the bars.
Four men marched toward the prison cell. Each pair of men dragged a person by the shoulders. It wasn’t until they were close that O’Neil realized who those Russians were lugging behind them.
The bastards opened the cell door, then they threw the two unconscious bodies in. O’Neil stumbled toward them, dropping by their side.
Loeb. Tate.
Each with blood dribbling down their faces. Long cuts over their arms. Crimson trickling from the ends of their fingers where their nails had been removed.
“Oh, God, what did they do to you?” O’Neil asked.
Heat started to rush through his chest. He thought of Van, lying next to him in the back of the MRAP. Now probably fed to the Skulls or the thrown into the water.