Page 12 of Eight Years (The Trident Trilogy 1)

Chapter Six

Mason

Virginia Beach, Virginia

2019

“I swear to God if I don’t get to shoot someone pretty soon, I will lose my goddamn mind,” Butch says as he empties yet another practice round down-range.

“Yeah, I don’t think your goal should be shooting people, and from what I can tell, your mind has been gone for years,” Ty says.

“Oh, yeah, now you’re going to talk. You don’t say anything for days at a time, but today you have an opinion.” Butch ejects the empty mag from his pistol and sighs as he walks away.

We just completed another day of training, and we are all getting twitchy. Believe me, the last thing you want operators to be is twitchy. We haven’t been sent out on a mission in almost a month. It’s fucking annoying. It’s like an athlete training every day, but never getting on the field. I just want to get an op or, better yet, get back on deployment. I’m in the worst mood I’ve been in for a while and, believe me, that is saying something.

“Mason, I need to talk to you before you leave tonight.” I turn around to see Culver standing next to our ready room.

“You got something for us?” I ask hopefully.

“Yeah, maybe. Not sure about it yet. Stop by my office on the way out.”

Culver is an old SEAL, a captain now. He’s the head of our unit. Decent guy. Smart. Wound as tight as a top, though. I really don’t want to end my day with any more bullshit.

The guys are all headed out to the bar. Again. Like every night. It’s where we spend the most time besides the base. I tell them I’ll meet them there with no intention of showing up. All I want to do is go home and sulk on my couch. I’ve been doing that a lot lately, and honestly, it’s the only thing I have the energy to do. Being inactive makes me tired. Way more tired than going hard for weeks on end. When we’re working, my adrenaline surges. When we’re home, it dies away. It’s on life support right now.

I knock on Culver’s door as I walk in. “So, what’s the new op?”

“We have a new agent coming in tomorrow morning to explain it to us. It’s some kind of snatch-and-grab in Sarajevo.”

“Sarajevo? That hasn’t been active for years,” I say.

“Yeah, I’m not sure what it’s all about. Friend of mine at the agency calling in a favor. They think the guy is somehow tied to radicals in Afghanistan. Maybe even part of the Hadzic Network.”

“Yusef Hadzic? Haven’t we tried to go after him about twenty times before?” I personally had been on two raids that ended up being dry holes. I’m not even really sure if he’s still alive, to be honest.

“Yeah, I know. Again, not a hundred percent sure. We’ll find out tomorrow,” he says.

“Who’s the new spook? They replacing Raine?” I hope they aren’t. Raine is pretty solid. And, most importantly, she has been easy to train.

“No. This is just a one-time thing. She’s been tracking this guy. Has all of the intel. She’ll work with Raine,” Culver says. I’m noticing something weird about the way he’s talking about her. I can’t put my finger on what it is yet.

“You ask Raine about her?”

“Yeah. Apparently, she’s a rising star in D.C. Mainly an interrogator, but supposedly a very effective one. Broken some big targets, especially for her age. She’s just in her mid-twenties.”

“She ever worked outside of D.C.?”

In general, I hate everyone from D.C. They usually bring a lot of red-tape bullshit with them. I’m not a very patient person, but I’m guessing most people have already figured that out.

“Yeah, she’s been in-country extensively, but never attached to one of our teams. I think she just comes in after the HVT is in-house. Here’s her file.” He pushes it across the desk.

I flip the file open and review it quickly. I’m not all that interested if she’s just going to be with us for one mission. Millie Marsh. Age 25. NYU and George Washington graduate. Fluent in Bosnian, Spanish, Pashto. Semi-fluent in Farsi and Bari. Fine. Whatever. Sounds like your average agent.

I leave Culver’s office more frustrated than when I went in. I didn’t join the teams to sit on my ass, and I definitely didn’t join them to go after some soft target in Bosnia. The teams have been nonstop for almost two decades. The War on Terror has kept us busy, but it’s slowing down now. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but it’s frustrating. I feel like fifteen years of my life are coming to a crashing halt.

Our next deployment is still a month away, and I can’t wait for it to get here. When I’m home, I have too much time to think. Thinking is a bad thing. I need distraction, and I need it quickly. My non military friends, all two of them, think I’m crazy when I tell them I want to be in Iraq or Afghanistan for three or four months at a time. And, they’re not wrong. I mean, it’s not exactly fun.

The best way I can describe it is, you know that vacation feeling? The night before you leave, you’re all hyped up, can’t wait to get there. And then the first few days are great, just how you imagined. But by like day four, you realize you’ve gone too hard—you’re hungover, sunburned, and all your clothes are dirty, so you start thinking that going back home won’t be so bad. Then, you get home, you wash your clothes, your sunburn fades, and all you want to do is go back on vacation. That’s how deployment has always felt for me. Can’t wait to get there to do the job I fucking love. After a few weeks of it, I’m exhausted and dirty, and can’t wait to get back home. After being back home for a few days, I’m bored and twitchy, and can’t wait to get back on deployment. It’s a vicious cycle.

My family doesn’t understand my life choices either. My brother followed my dad into the family business. They run a liquor wholesaler in Houston. I probably would have done that, too, but when my mom died when I was ten, my life turned upside down.

I remember my dad showing me a dilapidated house in our neighborhood when I was about that age. He told me to stay away from it. That the guy living there had been injured in the Vietnam War, and had gone a little crazy. As I got toward my teenage years, I started resenting my dad and doing the opposite of whatever he asked of me. So, the perfect rebellion was to visit the crazy man’s house. I went over there when I was twelve or thirteen. Just walked right up to his door and knocked. I was already almost six feet tall by that age. I wasn’t afraid of much. Frank answered the door with a beer in his hand. It was ten in the morning. He asked me if I wanted one. I said yes, mostly out of confusion. We sat on his front porch and drank our beers, and he started telling me about being in the navy, and about being one of the first-ever SEALs.

From the second he started talking, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. He didn’t make it sound romantic. In fact, he made it sound like hell. But I saw the way his face lit up when he talked about his team, his brothers. I knew I wanted that. Against my dad’s wishes, I joined the navy right out of high school. I got my trident by the time I was twenty. That makes it sound easy. It wasn’t. It was hell. But, it was perfect hell—dirty, exhausting, painful. Everything Frank told me it was going to be.

I’m thinking about all this on my way home and it’s not sitting well. I do a U-turn toward the bar. All the guys are there already when I walk in. Pete has my whiskey ready by the time I walk by the bar. I join the rest of my team over by the pool table. They’re all jawing at each other about something. More of the same. I sit on a stool drinking, looking around at tonight’s offerings. They’re everywhere. The Frog Hogs. That’s what we call them. The girls that come to the bar just for us. It’s not a very flattering nickname, but believe me, they earn it every night. They’re all carefully orbiting the pool table, not having the nerve to just walk over and start talking, but making sure we see them when we’re ready. I don’t see anything worthwhile, so I just keep drinking. Eventually, that will make the offerings start to look better.

I’m about four whiskeys in by the time Butch and I finish off our last victims. No one beats us at pool, and we never let anyone break up our team. Why mess with perfection? Butch is trying to convince someone to lose another hundred to us. As usual, I let him do the talking. It’s what he does best. As I’m sitting back on my stool, something at the door catches my eye. And that’s when I see her. For the first time in weeks, my adrenaline starts surging.

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