Half-past midnight. Finn poked his head in the door at general mess. Not much was happening at midrats tonight. People were eating, staring at the TV, hardly talking. Everyone seemed to be in when-the-fuck-do-we-get-out-of-here mode. By now a good number of ship’s company had figured out what Finn knew that afternoon: they were in a holding pattern. For how long? Who knew.
He headed above to walk the upper decks again. Through the ladders and passageways, noticing and cataloging the different ranks and ratings and body types and personalities. Unrated E-1s and E-2s, swabbing and polishing in their endless cleaning missions. Air traffic and intel crew clomping down to their berths after a long day on the island or in the cluster of offices at the island’s foot. Flight deck crew and mechanics heading above to the flight deck or below to the hangar deck to service their various aircraft.
All at once, Finn felt a hot prickling up the back of his neck.
He stopped. Closed his eyes.
Mukalla outskirts, dead of night. Their platoon had silently surrounded the tiny compound. It was a classic SEAL op, the thing they did best: breach charge, flash bangs, zip ties, hoods over heads, and they’d be out of there, prisoners in tow. In and out. The moment their breacher blasted the door they would flow through that compound like high tide through a sandcastle. If everything went according to plan. Though of course most plans went to hell the moment the first shot was fired.
Finn opened his eyes.
Remembering those last moments in the dark, waiting for the signal in his ear.
You never knew what you were running into in the seconds after that breach charge went off. A wall of steel-jacketed AK gunfire. The boiling hot flash of an IED. Crazy-eyed men wielding razor-sharp daggers, screaming women coming at you with their fingernails and teeth. Or just a crowd of disoriented, terrified people jarred from sleep. You never knew.
It all depended on the quality of the intel.
In Mukalla they’d had bad intel.
Finn continued walking, clocking the various species of nighttime personnel. A pair of yellow shirts laughing quietly over some private joke, making their way below to wash up and hit the rack. There went Schofield striding purposefully past in the direction of the fantail. Another handler in his green jersey and goggles, heading the same general direction. Dozens of faceless individuals all going their separate ways yet all swimming to the same rhythm, the endless pulse of the ship’s vast metabolism: operating it, feeding it, cleaning it, maintaining it, servicing it.
He stopped again.
Now he remembered what it was that had stirred that particular memory.
Those last few moments, waiting for the signal to breach that compound in Mukalla, he’d felt something.
A hot prickling up the back of his neck.
So why was he feeling it again now?