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  The young flight engineer grabbed the first aid box off the bulkhead and tossed it to Master Chief Collins. “You take care of them,” he said. “I have to be up front.” He stepped over Tucker and disappeared into the darkness of the cockpit.

  Flesh wound, Tucker thought, looking at Ricard’s leg. Too much bitching and crying for it to be a serious wound. Anyone can live with a flesh wound. He should know, he had had enough of them. He looked at Brute. A dark patch on the man’s right side was growing. Tucker rolled over and scrambled to where the huge Seabee leaned against a row of web seats. Brute had his hand over the wound.

  Tucker reached up and pulled the hand away. Bubbles appeared around the wound. “Brute, you’ve been shot.”

  The man nodded. “I figured it was something like that, sir,” he said, his voice trailing off.

  “Master Chief!” Tucker shouted. “Give me that kit.”

  “Sir, I need it for this—” Collins started, turning toward Tucker and Brute. He stopped talking when he saw Brute. “Jesus Christ! Here, Ricard. Press this over the wound!”

  Brute’s eyes shut, his head rolled to the side, and the huge body fell onto the deck of the pitching helicopter.

  * * *

  Tucker rolled Brute’s head back and forth without lifting it from the vibrating floor of the helo. Ricard was hunkered over Brute. His bandaged leg sticking out to the side.

  Tucker thought, Think yourself lucky Ricard; it could have been your balls.

  A moan came from Brute. He’ll live. He’ll be laid up for a while recovering, but he’ll live. I have seen worse wounded up and walking days after the doctors finished with them.

  While Brute moaned, Ricard rapid-fired to everyone how much pain he was in.

  Master Chief Collins had pulled himself into one of the web seats, strapped in, and was chugging a water bottle. Tucker draped an arm over his eyes and rested. Somewhere, someone should be happy. He looked up on the web seat. Brute’s backpack with the laser device leaned against the bulkhead, bouncing slightly with the jarring of the helicopter. He hoped the jarring didn’t damage the item, but then again, that wasn’t his problem. The mission they had assigned his team had been done. The French may later suspect them, but the presence of those terrorists would deflect suspicion from them.

  He rested his head on the deck and started his breathing exercises to relax his body. Maybe the leg would quit aching by the time they recovered on the Mesa Verde.

  Yep, somewhere, someone is happy and taking great credit for this fantastic idea.

  CHAPTER 13

  The door opened to Captain Xavier Bennett’s in-port cabin. Commander Harrison stepped out into the passageway. His eyes met Fulbright’s. He nodded, his eyes slightly moist, and without a word stepped by her and Lieutenant Commander Tom Kilpatrick, the ship’s JAG.

  “Come in, XO!” Bennett shouted from where he sat. He leaned over and picked up the cloth napkin that had fallen from his lap onto the deck when he had stood to shake Harrison’s hand.

  The two stepped inside the in-port cabin as he wiped his lips. “Shut the door,” he said, quietly. Many things in the Navy make life exciting — adventurous even — but along with anything good, there is an equal and less enjoyable counterpart. He just did one of them.

  He tossed the napkin onto his plate and stood up. Pushing the dishes together, Bennett quickly stacked them. He set the first stack on the nearby food cart. Fulbright and Kilpatrick shifted forward and removed the remainder. No one spoke. These weren’t moments for idle conversation. Combat pulled more nonsensical conversation than a lunch where a professional Navy officer’s career had been jerked from him because of stupidity.

  “Thanks,” Bennett said. He lifted the silver plated coffee urn from the tray and held it toward them briefly before pouring himself a cup. “Want some?”

  “Yes, sir, that would be fine,” Fulbright said, taking the urn from him.

  Bennett sat down and motioned the two officers to join him.

  “It’s done,” he said. “It wasn’t nice, but he knew it was coming. In a way, I think he was grateful for the honorable way out that was offered to him. Next time remind me not to do something like this over lunch. I realized halfway through that he would always think of this moment like a condemned man recalls his last meal.”

  “I take it I can tear up the court martial papers?” Kilpatrick asked.

  Bennett nodded. “For the time being, we won’t need them. He accepted my strong suggestion that he take his twenty-one years of active Navy service and retire. This way, I pointed out, he would have a pension for his family.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “I think he expected me to relieve him. I suspect he was surprised at first when I didn’t call you in, Tom, to make sure he knew his rights, and inform him to stand by for a court martial. As it is, voluntarily, he will ask to be relieved by fifteen hundred this afternoon.” Xavier glanced at the clock on the bulkhead. “About three hours from now.”

  “I had him sign the document attesting he understood his rights, sir, before the investigation ever started.”

  Xavier nodded. “I know, Tom.”

  “Who’s going to take his place?”

  “You are, Ellen. Commander Harrison is going to relieve his XO before he requests to be relieved himself. He did recommend, and I accepted, that his operations officer, Lieutenant Kincaid, would fleet up to executive officer. Kincaid comes from a long line of Navy families. I knew his father.”

  “Aye, sir. When do I shift my stuff to the Churchill?”

  “Later today. Plan for around dinner — between six and eight tonight. That should give him and the current XO, a Lieutenant Commander Richman, time to pack their seabags and report to the Mesa Verde.”

  Fulbright refilled her cup, leaned left, and did the same for Kilpatrick. “They going to be staying with us long?” She set the urn down on the table.

  Bennett shook his head. “Nope.” He looked up at her. “Arrange for one of our helicopters to take them to Monrovia this afternoon.”

  “That should do it then, Skipper,” Fulbright replied. She lifted the cup and held it lightly between both hands. “There’s the early morning Air Force C-141 they can catch to the states.”

  Xavier nodded. It is never easy to deliver bad news, but it’s doubly so when you’re the reason for it. The lunch had been awkward for Harrison. The officer knew why he was here, but Xavier observed the niceties of lunch, discussing the incident informally after reminding the officer that he had had his rights read to him a while back. Harrison had sighed as if resigned to the fate he knew was coming his way.

  Afterward, Xavier had told the commanding officer of the Arleigh Burke — class destroyer that there were several things working, and none of them looked good for Harrison. The initial investigation was complete and now the legal beagles would bubble to the top and start tearing it apart looking for loopholes to close and charges to bring. He opined to the shorter man sitting across the table from him that it would be another couple of months before that portion of the investigation was complete. Xavier noticed that the faint discoloration on the man’s left cheek had turned a deep red. Harrison started to pick up the glass of water in front of him but quickly put it down when his nervous hand shook the glass, causing of the water to spill slightly over the top.

  Bennett had looked away at the time, uncomfortable in the presence of the man’s fear. Someday — not now nor in the near future — Harrison would recall this moment and it would pass quickly through his thoughts to be discarded as one of life’s moments; or would he forever remember this as some sort of last meal of the condemned?

  On a positive note, Harrison had stepped up to the plate, acknowledged his responsibility for whatever happened on the Winston Churchill during the alleged lock-on of the ship’s Anti-Air Warfare radar to the French maritime reconnaissance aircraft. The admission failed to earn any respect from Xavier, though, because every Navy officer knew that whether good or bad
, intentionally or not, onboard or off the ship — it didn’t matter: the commanding officer of a Navy vessel was always responsible for whatever happened on board his or her ship, and to state the obvious didn’t change Xavier’s opinion of the man earned over the two months the ships had sailed together.

  But, Harrison was someone’s golden boy, as evidenced by the Navy reaching down below the promotion zones and pulling him up to the next pay grade. If it hadn’t been for this dumb error that may have cost the lives of those pilots, Harrison would have someday been wearing the stars of an admiral. Too bad. The Navy tolerates minor mistakes in learning the art of command, but some, such as this, are the kiss of death and the culprit might as well pack up, go home, hang up the uniform, and find a job cooking hamburgers.

  “He seemed to have handled it well,” Fulbright offered. She set her cup on the table and ran her hand across the soiled white tablecloth to get a few drops of coffee off her hand.

  “Sir, are you going to call Admiral Holman?” Kilpatrick asked.

  “Why do you ask, Tom?”

  “Well, Captain, the legal officer at Commander, Amphibious Group Two asked me to call him once a decision was made, and I didn’t want to call him and have him tell Admiral Holman—”

  Bennett held up his hand and smiled weakly. “Tom, is this some sort of lawyerly thing where periods, commas, and breaths aren’t taken when talking?”

  “Sir?”

  Bennett saw the look of confusion on his legal officer’s face. “Sorry, Tom. Trying to lift the spirits in the compartment.”

  “Oh,” Kilpatrick replied, his eyebrows arching deeper. “My spirits are fine, sir.”

  “Well, that makes at least one of us here. As for your question; no, I haven’t called Admiral Holman yet. I will probably do it after we finish here. After I’ve talked with him, then you can start discussions with his legal department.”

  “So, what was the final decision, Captain?” Fulbright asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders slightly. “Just what I said and nothing else. When Commander Harrison returns to Mesa Verde this afternoon, he will bring a request for immediate retirement. Tom,” Xavier said, nodding toward the lawyer, “I need a note for him to sign promising on pain of court martial a promise he will never, ever speak of the incident on the Churchill.”

  Kilpatrick nodded. “Sir, I can do that, but time and higher authorities have in the past ignored such a document. Look at the USS Liberty back in 1967.”

  “I know, Tom, but I want to impress upon him as much as possible that the incident is classified and as such must be protected for the good of the country.”

  “What if—”

  “Tom! Stop that,” Xavier interrupted abruptly. “I hate ‘what ifs.’ He’ll sign it. He’ll sign anything right now.” He pushed his chair back. “That’s it. Ellen, go pack your bags and tell the Engineering officer he’s the acting XO until you return.”

  They stood as Xavier stood.

  “How long will I be on the Churchill, sir?”

  Xavier shook his head. “I wouldn’t suspect too long, Ellen. I’m sure Admiral Holman already has someone standing in the wings with his or her seabag packed ready to take the next aircraft out here. I would be very surprised if he didn’t.” He walked over to the door and grabbed the knob. “The officers and sailors aboard the Churchill are what’s important now. When something like this happens, it casts a dark cloud across the crew of a ship; a cloud that must be lifted as soon as possible.” He opened the door for them. “Whoever Admiral Holman sends will be someone who has already had command and can take over for the months needed to divert or direct a new commanding officer to the destroyer.”

  He bit his upper lip for a moment, then looked at them. “I think as I get older and realize how much evil there is out there, the more emotional I become when good wins. When freedom to follow one’s heart and mind is not dictated by the narrow constraints of zealots and cults. I may be in the minority, but I don’t think the French are the adversary some of our fellow Americans believe. We make the French nervous with our might, which is too bad, because the real threat to both of our nations lies in the Jihadists who kill for no other reason than their arrogance.”

  He shut the door behind them. Moments latter he was speaking with Admiral Holman, who had been pacing the deck in his office at Amphibious Group Two — an office that would be Xavier’s next summer.

  * * *

  “Duncan; Dick Holman here, shipmate,” Holman said when Admiral James answered the telephone.

  “Okay, Dick. What’s the story?”

  “I wanted to bring you up to date on Tucker and the Seabee SEALs.”

  “Don’t call the Seabees SEALs, Dick.”

  He laughed. “Look, Duncan, you had to declare Tucker a non-SEAL for this mission.”

  “I know, and it wasn’t comfortable. Nothing about this mission has been comfortable. I have a message on my desk reassigning Commander Raleigh back to Washington in a SEAL billet. I was going to bring him back to Washington and let him do some admin shit for me for a while. The man needs a break, but he turned me down. Said he’d finish the mission he was sent to do; train the new Liberian Army.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me. Somewhere deep down inside everyone of you snake eaters is—”

  “Don’t say it, Dick. We’re as normal as any other Navy officer.”

  “If you say so, but I think you and your folk are the only ones who believe that. As for your ex-SEAL, Commander Tucker Raleigh, I expect to have his report on my desk later today.”

  “Wait a minute, Dick.”

  A few seconds passed before Rear Admiral Duncan James spoke again. “There! He’s no longer an ex-SEAL. I’ve signed the papers returning him to full duty, so quit calling him an ex-SEAL.”

  Dick Holman chuckled.

  “How about that asshole on the destroyer who started all this crap?” James interrupted.

  “As I was saying, before you so rudely interrupted,” Holman said humorously. “I will fax or email you a copy of the report as soon as I get it. As for the skipper, he has decided to retire and go off to some farm in Iowa.”

  “Iowa?”

  “Well, some farm somewhere, I presume. That’s what all fired Navy officers do. They go back to the land.”

  “And where in the hell does it say that, Dick? Is it some sort of Naval Academy lore that you have to become a farmer if you fail at sea?”

  “Shouldn’t be doing this, you know. Personally, if I’d had my way we would have court martialed the son of a bitch instead of letting him get off so easy.”

  “Someday, sometime, someone will discover all this, Dick.”

  “And they’ll make millions exposing what will be called a cover-up. And you can bet your bottom dollar it’ll be us assholes in uniform who’ll be blamed for it.” James let out a deep breath on the other end.

  “But, we have seen our duty and done it. It may not be something we enjoyed doing, knowing it could have blown up in our faces, but we did it, and thanks to Raleigh, it was a success.”

  James chuckled. “Yeah, a better success than we thought. According to the Daily Read board, the French have attributed an attack on one of their bases in the Ivory Coast to the African National Army we keep reading about, but no one seems to know anything.”

  “That’s strange, too. According to Commander Raleigh and the debrief of the other three, they did have French Legionnaires chasing them, but were ambushed by Abu Alhaul terrorists.”

  “Could be, Dick. Maybe we’ll know more later. So, what now?”

  “Well, I have a full Expeditionary Strike Group approaching Liberia along the coast. They should arrive in the next few days. That will give me—”

  “Two full SEAL teams.”

  “Yeah, but kind of late now. I still have the VQ-2 EP-3E reconnaissance aircraft in Monrovia. So, we’re going to do some fleet reconnaissance missions to see if we can locate any Abu Alhaul elements first, and second, find out more about this
growing African National Army. So far, the ANA hasn’t done anything in Liberia, but they’ve been active all along the borders, including our French friends’ Ivory Coast. What my intelligence officer tells me is that the ANA is as much an enemy of Abu Alhaul as we are. After all, this General Ojo, as he calls himself, freed some of our missionaries.”

  “He had them and let them go,” James said, his voice low. “What a pity. Missionaries. Just what we need in America, more religious zealots.”

  “Ah, what a shame!”

  “Oh, go screw yourself.”

  “That only happens when I’ve been to sea six months or longer.”

  * * *

  “Halfpenny” Baines threw down the clipboard. He knew his face was turning red. It always did when he was pissed off, embarrassed, or frustrated; and right now, it was a combination of all three. He looked up at his director of the Joint Staff, Lieutenant General Winifred Hulley. “I should be happy, shouldn’t I?” he nearly shouted. “ Everything went well. The team brought back something that may be part of the French laser weapon, and the French are blaming the African National Army for attacking their airfield and blowing up the aircraft. Of course, as soon as they realize a piece of sensitive equipment is missing, they won’t be thinking that.”

  “Yes, sir,” Hulley said, his jowls bouncing with each word, his face expressionless. “I know I’m happy about it,” he said unconvincingly. “I’m sure across the Potomac they’re happy about it,” he added in his monotone voice.

  “Then, why don’t you think I’m happy?”

  Hulley shrugged. “Didn’t get to kill anyone?”

  “If I didn’t know for a fact that you had no sense of humor, I might think you just tried to pull a joke.”

  “No, sir. Never would do that,” Hulley said, a slight twinkle in his eyes. “What now, Chairman?”

  Halfpenny braced his elbows on his desk and clasped his hands under his chin. He bit his lower lip as he stared at Hulley, who was standing in front of the desk. Finally, he took a deep breath and put his hands on the table. “Not a goddamn thing, Mr. Director. We can’t court martial the skipper who was responsible for the deaths of four”— he held up four fingers—“Air Force pilots — one of whom is the son of an Academy classmate of mine. We can’t tell anyone of our success in reclaiming our own technology because we can’t let anyone know we ever lost it.”