Page 29 of See You Soon
Danny looks at me while holding his cigarette in between his lips, taking another hit as he studies me, hard. He blows the smoke up into the air and it lingers towards the sky.
"See you soon, Cherry."
Three Months Later
Chapter12
danny
Afull moon is glowing high in the sky giving us all some light to the darkness that swallows my team and me. It's the first mission of the deployment and it has me on edge. I love the thrill of being in a black hawk as it transports us. Every time I get in a helicopter with my team it feels like the first time. Tonight gives me an eerie feeling, I know too well. We are tasked with rescuing two captured soldiers taken hostage by a terrorist group. Rooker, Kane, and I with a new guy named Lopez travel carefully as we near our target area on foot now, the air ominous. The reaper breathing down my neck, as always, trying hard to get into my head.
Tonight is the night.
The words sound condescending and mimicking. I shake my head.
Fuck off.
Our night vision goggles strapped onto my head tight allowing me to see better. We silently get comfortable in a woodsy area near the village that the terrorists have called home for the past few days. Tall trees and bushes offer us cover to settle in and attain surveillance. We're on a hill that surrounds the village giving us the perfect position on our targets. The middle of the night tends to give us an advantage.
"Fuck man, what I would do for some tamales right now and not this MRE shit," Lopez complains while settling underneath a tree. Lopez is our communications guy. He relays any messages or alerts out to higher-up personnel while we work.
"Texas, I swear, if you start talking about food again, I'm shutting off your radio." I snarl.
We all have operator names we use on the mic when addressing each other. We don't want to risk the enemy getting a hold of our real identities. Lopez is Texas. He was born and raised there, and he chose that for himself.
Mine’s Grim Reaper. I have the most successful missions on the team, along with the highest kill count in the military so everyone branded me with it. I didn't give it to myself.
Rooker is Cobra since it's his favorite snake species and when he strikes, he's fast.
I look at the stars and I can't help it, but I can feel myself getting distracted. What I would do for whiskey and a cigarette… and a Cherry.
Every time I get stressed, I think about whiskey. Whiskey makes life better. Then my mind saunters to El Devine and how it's been my favorite place to be recently. There isn't a day that goes by I'm not thinking about my cherry... my sweet Ari. Her taste has me addicted but I know this isn't a line I should cross... I can't cross. I can't take her without feeling like a piece of shit. She's already clouding my mind and I can't imagine how I will be if I capture her. Her smell and her touch are already altering my mind. The aftermath of Whiskey can't even compare to the effects she has on me. What she could do to me is ruthless. What I could do to heris worst.
"Grim!" Rooker snaps me out of my thoughts, his voice painfully loud in my ear. The earbuds vibrate with his voice. We use these tiny things to communicate with each other.
"Shit, Cobra! What?" I snarl quietly.
"There's movement in that building. You see that open window. Fuckers left it open." Rooker breathes.
"I see it," I confirm as I turn my position underneath a tree that has a brush surrounding the bottom.
"You sure you're okay man?" Rooker doubts me in my ears. He's not concerned about my well-being. He's getting suspicious of my behavior and I don't blame him. He can tell something is different about me and he's right. Rooker is the dad of the team because of his parental behavior around us. He's also a dad to two daughters and husband to his wife, Noel. Even though he's the oldest of the group, I'm still the one in charge of the team.
In a midsize window, there's a room with a light left on, on the second floor of the building. It's our small window to confirm the identities of the hostages. Our intel has led us up to this point so we have to confirm if the hostages were really in this location. Then breach and rescue. If only the process was that simple.
I grab my binoculars and study the room. The room is absolutely plain. Nothing inside of it but concrete walls and floors. Sitting in the middle is a man and a woman sitting strapped to a chair with a cloth over their heads. Their hands are tied behind their back, and they have OCP pants on, and camo shirts with their dog tags hanging over their neck. It looks like they’re the hostages we've been looking for, but we need confirmation of their identity.
"It looks like it's them, boys. Intel didn't fail us this time. Bane, can you get a closer look at those dog tags? See if their names match up right." I order Kane while still looking in the room. Bane’s Kane's operator name. Bane’s his favorite DC villain. Subsequently, it rhymes with his actual name.
Dog tags are required to wear while deployed. Information like the person's name, blood type, and religion are on it. Our hostages are one female and one male belonging to the army. The female is a medic and the male is an infantryman. Their Humvees were blown up a few days ago and they were kidnapped from the crash site. The other soldiers in the Humvee died on impact when the crash occurred.
"Yup already doing it Grim."
By the looks of it, they've been already interrogated pretty well. Their uniforms are torn in some areas, dirty, and drops of blood on their shirts. Their arms look bruised, and the male has a mark going around his neck as if he had been strangled by a rope.
Fucking vicious psychopaths.
I clench my jaw. This is why I signed up to be in the Navy. I always had an overwhelming urge to protect people from evil. And this… This was just a taste of the pure evil I’ve seen in my career. I became a Navy SEAL at eighteen. I'm thirty-three now and rest assured, I've seen a lot of sinister shit that war can bring.
