“Sir, I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”
Karson’s statement threw a cold bucket of water on the growing activity of the room. The president stared at him for a long moment before speaking again.
“Admiral, I’m hoping that you haven’t gone off the reservation on this,” he said slowly. “I understand that you work SOCOM and sometimes the rules take a backseat when speed matters, but this isn’t an operation you can clear.”
“No, sir, not me,” Karson said with a shrug. “However, I’ve recently learned that there is a…community of people who are fully aware of these incidents. As it turns out, they don’t seem to have much tolerance for people playing around with certain things.”
“Please! I swear, it’ll never happen again!”
The pleading man was pinned down to his chair, unable to move as the man in black casually stepped past him and opened the window of the high-rise corner office. He stepped back and gently pushed the rolling chair back away from the desk before tapping away idly on the computer.
When he was done, he looked over at the frozen man, unnaturally black eyes piercing him to the bone.
“Two thousand three hundred and forty-four,” Alexander Norton said coolly. “That’s the number of people you killed.”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like that!” the man, Aaron Caffrey, vice president of United Fuels, pleaded. “It was just supposed to—”
“Give Benthic a black eye — yes, I know.” Norton shrugged, tapping some more on the computer. “Figured you’d give your new company an edge in the lease war when the property rights were up for renegotiation, right?”
“Yes, all right! Yes! It was just about business!”
“Right.” Norton clicked print. “Well, that’s done.”
“W-what’s done?”
“I just sent a company-wide memo and press release to all of your contacts,” Norton said, “in which you confess to having known all about the chemical by-products of frakking on that site and burying the information so that you’d have a negotiations edge when you hopped companies.”
Aaron paled white. “You what?”
“Don’t worry.” Norton walked over to him, picked him up easily, and dragged him across the room. “You won’t be around to face the consequences.”
“What? What?”
“Guilt ridden, you see. Almost two and a half thousand dead; it was just too much for you,” Norton said, clucking sympathetically. “Shame, really.”
“No! Wait! Don’t do this! I can—”
Norton twisted, gaining momentum, and casually heaved the man out the high-rise window. He could hear the man scream out the last word as he vanished from sight.
“Of course you can pay,” Alexander “The Black” Norton said as he turned around and walked casually out of the office. “And you just did.”
Harold Masters watched the ambulance pull up from where he was sitting across the street. The target had made one hell of a mess when he hit, and it seemed somewhat pointless to bring an entire ambulance to pick him up. He suspected that a set of Tupperware would probably have done the job.
“Enjoy the show?”
“Hardly,” Masters said, not even flinching when Norton appeared by his side. “Everything go all right?”
“You could have come along.”
“I’m active-duty navy, Alex,” he said. “I shouldn’t even be here.”
“We’ve done worse, you and I.” Alex shrugged. “And likely will again.”
“Sooner than you know.”
Norton frowned, looking over at his friend. “What are you talking about?”
“Word just came down that the team’s a go.”
The man known to an entire hidden subculture of the world simply as “The Black” grimaced in response. “I was hoping that your lot would be done with that after this debacle.”
“ ’Fraid not,” Masters said with a dry smile. “Welcome to the Teams, Consultant Norton.”
“This is still a bad idea.…You know that, right?”
Masters shrugged. “I don’t give a damn.”
Alex sighed. “You need to let this go.…It’s not going to end well for you.”
“I’m not going to let anything go, Alex,” Masters said. “That squid took my team and my career. As far as I’m concerned, I’m in all the way until it’s dead or I am.”
Alex Norton didn’t say anything as they walked away, but he knew which ending it was going to be. The Kraken had existed for as long as men had gone to sea, presumably far longer. No one had ever gotten close to killing it before, and no one had ever even seen the damned thing aside from its tentacles.
Harold Masters wasn’t going to be the first, no matter how badly he wanted it.
The world just didn’t work that way.
EPILOGUE
Karson handed a file to his secretary. “File this.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, taking the file as he walked into his inner office. “How was your day, sir?”
“Long,” he told her, closing the door behind him.
The woman eyed the door for a long moment before taking the file and walked over to the nearest cabinet. She checked over her shoulder again, then flipped the folder open quietly.
A few minutes later she closed down her computer and pushed the intercom button. “I’m taking my coffee break, sir.”
“Understood, thank you for telling me.”
She walked outside, heading down the street to a nearby café. After getting her order she took a seat by the window. Someone joined her within seconds.
“You have something?”
She nodded. “The navy has cleared the activation of a new SOCOM unit for dealing with what they call incidents.”
“So they are more deeply involved that we’d hoped?”
“Yes. The unit was active last week,” she said, glancing around. “In Barrow.”
The man swore. “That was from across the veil?”
“Apparently.”
“Find out what happened. The Clans need to know.”
She nodded. “I will.”
He sighed. “What is this new unit called?”
“SEAL Team Thirteen.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Evan Currie is the bestselling author of the Odyssey One series, the Warrior’s Wings series, and more. Although his postsecondary education was in computer sciences, and he has worked in the local lobster industry steadily over the last decade, writing has always been his true passion. Currie himself says it best: “It’s what I do for fun and to relax. There’s not much I can imagine better than being a storyteller.”