SEAL My Home: Bad Boys of SEAL Team 3, Book 2 (SEAL Brotherhood Series 9) (27 page)

“You fuckin’ disobeyed a direct order, son.” Collins was the maddest Rory had ever seen him, squinting around Kyle to deliver a nasty sneer, making his left eye twitch. He stood ramrod straight and barked at Kyle, “And whose fuckin’ idea was it to send a fucking puppy gram?”

T.J. and Cooper worked hard to stifle a snicker, but Collins didn’t find it funny at all, and Forsythe was ballistic.

“It was an accident. The Jeep was bouncing all over the road. We were traveling like a bat out of hell and my finger slipped. It’s not my computer, sir,” Rory pleaded.

“You were given express instructions
not
to mess with the negotiations,” said Forsythe with his lips making one firm line.

That got Rory’s attention.
Negotiations?

“I guess I did the right thing by keeping your computer, in light of this. I sure as hell never counted on you being this stupid, son,” added Forsythe.

“Let’s get back to the Team building where we’ve got some plans. We’ll respond to him there.”

Oh, good. They have a plan.

He’d give them a few minutes of his time, and then he would be out of there, working up a plan of his own. If they found her location and she was gone, there wouldn’t be anything left but scorched earth. If it took the rest of his life, he’d get even.

‡

M
egan woke up
stiff, the pain in her hip from being tossed about and equal to that in her rear from the fall onto the concrete. Her feet were swollen, the bottoms stung from cuts and who-knew-what embedded in those cuts, festering. It was daytime. Filtered light shone through the white cotton pillowcase still covering her head and neck.

As she tried to right herself to sitting position, she felt the case unstick from the clotted tissue crusted on her nose and cheeks. The unmistakable metallic taste of her own blood in her mouth and down the back of her throat was coupled with the warm sensation that new blood was flowing down between her breasts again.

With her hands tied in front of her, she lifted the pillowcase, pushing it back on her head, then with her fingers she pulled down the headscarf and used it to blow her nose quietly. It did help to clear her breathing passages a little but the bleeding continued. She was so weak she could hardly take in a deep enough breath to expel and dislodge some of the dried material.

She looked around her. A broken window was on the opposite wall to the right. The place had been some sort of storage facility. Boxes and packing material littered the whole area. A workbench was to her right, peppered with glass jars of some sort of gray meat that looked like fish.

At least with the hood pushed back, she could get some air. It was a blessing the room was cold for the wounds she was suffering on her thigh, wrists and ankles. It was a blessing the headscarf kept her neck and chest warm. She didn’t know how many hours had passed by, nor how many hours there would be to come in this cold and depressing condition. Instead, she chose to focus on the heat from her own breath and leaned her head back to touch the wall, grateful she didn’t have to sit on a cold floor, grateful she could sit at all, and grateful she could make some of her own body heat on the mattress.

And I’m still alive. I’ve survived so far. I haven’t given up. I won’t give up, nor give up the hope that one day I’ll be able to walk out of this place of horror.

She managed to move herself to the side a foot or two so she could pee into the mattress and then moved back again so she didn’t have to sit in it.

She thought about the folly of her complaints. She thought about how she’d taken her everyday life for granted. How ungrateful she was of all the opportunities she’d had, all the places she’d traveled, how she’d grown up without parents at a most important time for a young girl and she’d survived.

If she ever made it out alive, she wanted to travel to all those places she read about in her books. She’d take a cruise, go dancing at midnight under the stars in the warm night air. She’d travel to Paris and visit Italy, and maybe visit Buenos Aires and learn to tango.

She remembered her parents and missed them. She’d been guilty of being too busy to sit by their graves and talk to them. To hold her little brother’s virtual hand when he got so afraid of the dark. To tell them she had survived and was happy. That everything turned out well. Was this nostalgia for things past her body’s way of preparing for an ending of life? Would this be all that she did, all that she accomplished? How could she have dreamed about so many things and done so very few of them?

Megan knew she hadn’t started this war. But she refused to be a casualty in it. If they came to her, if they filmed her death, she would try to look bravely into the camera so people would see her eyes, so maybe someone somewhere who had influence over all the craziness of the terrorists’ world would see she was a good person. A strong person. A person who should have lived, not a person to be discarded in some grand scheme she didn’t believe in. Someone might see the waste of it all and say enough is enough. Some woman, perhaps, who just wanted to live a life with her husband and children in the warm bubble of freedom instead of in the shadow of fear, intimidation, bloodshed and war in a society that had gone completely insane.

Then she thought about Rory. She couldn’t help the tears from falling as she felt the power of what he had become. What he stood for. The intensity with which he loved. And now she knew what he needed. He needed a kind heart, a happy spirit, and a place where he could belong, where he could heal between deployments, someone who honored the sacrifice he was willing to make for his country. Someone who could give him a home and family of his own, something he never had growing up. Something he deserved. Something he could have for his very own. Something no one else in the whole world had.

Her love.

Megan wondered what Rory would do in this situation. He’d be looking for things to use, ways he could escape or defend himself or ways he could disable an assailant. What had she seen? She racked her brain. What did she know and didn’t even realize she knew?

She’d heard the freeway overhead. There were sea gulls, lots of them, flying outside the broken window. She could not see any buildings, but did see large pampas plumes that grew near the bay. Perhaps they were close to a landfill or a public dumping ground. Something was attracting the birds. She smelled fish and some sort of sour smell.

It was vinegar. And the bits of grit on her feet, when she concentrated on it, they felt like grains. Grains of rice. She guessed it was Saturday still, or Sunday. If she could last one more day, perhaps two, maybe others would be nearby on Monday. Someone who could get her some help.

She heard a bell from a church. Then when she concentrated further, she realized it wasn’t a church chime. She had been hearing a bell from a buoy, one of those in the harbor, not where the expensive boats were, but in the brackish water that was shallow. Recognizing the smell, she remembered a little fishing village where Lindsay had talked about having pancakes with Brady, some place the SEALs liked to go, away from the fast glittery life of San Diego. She’d seen that place before one time when she’d gotten lost. There were modest trailers and fifth wheels with the truck motors long-since silenced, where old fishermen still lived. There were twice as many decayed boats in dry dock as there were ones that might be seaworthy, owned by men who fished every day. Where there were lots of seagulls that shared their catch. Men who lived on unmentionable things that survived in the dirty water of the inlets.

Tilting her head backward, concentrating, she smelled the faint odor of a fire. And where there was fire, there were people. The sounds from the freeway were softer than they had been last night. She guessed it was early morning, not during commute times, not a workday. Maybe a touch of fog still hung on the cliffs like it did so many mornings there.

She wondered if they were going to feed her. Careful not to make a sound she decided to explore her surroundings a bit. Standing up against the wall, using it to brace herself, careful not to lose her balance on the lumpy mattress, she carefully took tiny steps toward the corner, toward the workbench with the shelves.

She touched one of the cool jars, shaking it. She opened the metal lid, heard the sucking sound as the vacuum seal was broken. The smell nearly bowled her over, but urgent to get food in her stomach, she held the jar with both hands poured some of the disgusting contents into the side of her mouth and swallowed the cold slimy material. She used her fingers to stuff the disgusting-smelling meat far back enough so her molars could crush it before she swallowed the cold chunks.

It didn’t taste as bad as it smelled, which was another blessing. After her initial gag reaction, she discovered she could finish the whole jar, and then reached for and did the same thing to another. There was a handful more, she noted. If left all alone, she now had food that could last her for several days, and enough liquid in the jars to help supplement her lack of water.

Scanning the shelves further, she found some discarded soda cans and two long necked bottles with cracked bottoms, contents having exploded leaving rusty ribbons down the back of the wall and crystalline light brown flakes of what looked like dried beer on the shelving. Stepping off the mattress, she found the concrete floor littered with broken glass from the window.

Megan’s feet hurt already, but she was able to navigate around the glass with small steps, bracing herself against the workbench until she reached a bag from a fast food restaurant, the contents long since dried up. However, she did notice a set of plastic utensils wrapped in cellophane, and after stooping over, found the wrapper contained a fork, a spoon and a serrated-edged sparkling white knife. She slipped the fork and spoon into her bra and slid the knife up her long dirty cotton sleeve, which was a minor feat. Megan noted even though the blade was serrated, it would not be nearly strong or sharp enough to cut through her wrist or ankle bindings.

A large metal trashcan stood at the end of the workbench, propping up a broom and dustpan, and the area looking freshly swept. It took forever to make it over to the galvanized bin, but when she peered inside, she found pieces of lumber with nails embedded in the ends, like from a broken doorframe, and several old telephones, some without handsets, and some with broken dials. She also found a plate of sheet metal like the flange on an old wood stove.

Hearing a vehicle arrive outside, she took one of the pieces of lumber, grabbed one broken bottle, and tossed the fish jars through the broken window into the yard outside to hide the evidence of what she had eaten. She carefully returned to her place on the mattress, buried the bottle against the wall at the corner nearest the shelving, end to end with the thin piece of doorframe. She took care to make sure the nail that jutted out was safely sheathed in the mattress.

The last thing she did was reluctantly pull the hood down over her eyes, sit back, and wait.

‡

W
hen Rory, Kyle
and the rest of the team entered their Team 3 building, they saw something they’d never seen before. Right in front of Rory, holding a briefcase, stood Raymond Corrigan.

The buildings were only for active team members, even retired SEALs from the teams rarely were admitted. Instructors were not admitted. Even LPOs from other active teams were not admitted. Occasionally they’d have an Admiral, their Chief or Master Chief. The President of the United States had been to one back east. Nevertheless, there, looking fit and well, was the man who called himself his father.

At a loss as to the correct protocol in such an unusual situation, Rory quickly began introducing Raymond to Kyle, Coop and several others of the team he’d not met in the hospital. Corrigan shook T.J. and Brady’s hands warmly, slapping their arm. “Nice to see you again, boys,” Corrigan said to both of them.

Rory motioned toward Collins and Forsythe.

“All taken care of, son,” Corrigan said in his raspy, commanding voice.