ROC Air Force Fokker 50 aircraft
23,000 feet over the Jeju Strait, 265 miles south of Incheon, South Korea
1057 local time
Conza rubbed two knuckles into his left inner thigh just above the knee, where the skin and underlying tissue remained stubbornly numb, despite the more than two years that had passed. It was a nervous habit that didn’t make anything feel better, especially since numbness was the opposite of pain, but he found himself doing it whenever he was reminded of his roots.
Sitting here on this slow-ass transport plane, he was indeed reminded of his journey to get here, and that he was a former Navy SEAL. However far he’d come, however well he’d mastered his prosthesis, he was not the man he’d been when he had been kicking ass in SEAL Team Five and then augmenting DEVGRU on deployment. Part of him was, literally, left behind on the battlefield. But more than just his left leg had been taken from him. Despite joking with former teammates about being a pirate, and the omnipresent positive attitude he endeavored to maintain, he knew the scars he carried were not just those on his stump of a leg.
His wounds were deeper.
And invisible.
But Sharon had seen them all too well. His former fiancée had gone on the journey of anger and resentment with him for more than a year before giving up. Now they were “friends,” whatever that meant, but he would never ask her for more, not after what he’d put her through.
He missed his leg, but he could live with that.
He still struggled to live with the loss of the two brothers who had died in that shitty little compound on the Turkish border that day. That scar still throbbed, red and angry.
“You good, JC?” Hurley asked from across the narrow row between them, and he realized he startled as he looked up.
He smiled back awkwardly at the SEAL master chief. He’d always known Hurley would end up at a place like Group Eight. Dude was a brainiac even way back when they’d made it through BUD/S together.
“Yeah, all good, bro,” he said. “Just running through fires for the infil, you know?”
“Yeah, yeah…I get it,” Hurley said. The SEAL stole a glance at Conza’s BDU-covered prosthesis.
“You worried about my mobility, brother?” Conza asked, and felt himself bristle defensively.
Hurley laughed and the laughter cut the tension.
“Nah, brother,” the SEAL said. “I trust you, man. You say you’re all good, then you’re five by for me, man.”
He offered knuckles, which Conza bumped with his own.
“Swimming was always such a bitch for me, you know?” Hurley said, smiling. “You remember…?”
Now it was Conza’s turn to laugh.
“Swimming is a bitch for you? Jeez, Hurley, you’re a friggin’ Navy SEAL for shit’s sake. A damn Tier One frogman. And you can’t swim?”
“I didn’t say I couldn’t swim, just that it’s a bitch for me,” Hurley answered good-naturedly. On their five-mile-long qualifying swim during BUD/S, Hurley had almost not made it—claimed he wouldn’t have made it if not for Conza. The freezing water had turned their limbs to noodles, and Hurley started falling back as they swam as a pair. When Hurley started talking about quitting so he could warm up in the safety boat, Conza had turned back to encourage his teammate to push through the wall. When Hurley waved a hand at the boat, Conza had punched him as hard as his own numb arms would allow.
“Damn you, Hurley, if I have to redo this swim because of you I’m gonna kick your ass,” he shouted.
Then they’d both started laughing like idiots.
But they pushed through, and finished.
They’d graduated BUD/S, completed SQT, and served at SEAL Team Five together. When Conza had augmented with DEVGRU for a deployment, it was because of Hurley, who had screened for the JSOC unit a year and a half earlier, and his recommendation.
Had he not lost a leg in Syria, Conza felt he likely would have screened for DEVGRU after that deployment. Hell, they might even be teammates at Group Eight together right now.
He felt his throat tighten.
“I’m just sayin’,” Hurley continued, snapping Conza back to the moment. “Had it been me, and me being a weak-ass swimmer, I don’t think I could have made it back, bro. I have no doubt you’re up for the swim, I promise. I’m just in awe, ’cause I still hate doing it with two legs.”
Conza laughed again and shook his head.
“Well, we’re just swimming from the mini to the Capella,” he said. “I’m not planning any Ironman competitions anytime soon.”
And that was the truth, for sure. If this mission had been to swim a long distance, he would not have insisted on going. But getting from the submerged, autonomous UUV a short distance to the Korean freighter Capella would not require much of a swim. In fact, most of the swim would be the ascent.
Getting up the side of the ship would be more work for him with the prosthesis.
But he trained daily, sometimes twice a day, and had no doubt he was up to the job.
Hurley had already leaned back in his seat, popped his AirPods back in, and closed his eyes, and Conza welcomed the silence.
He was glad to be on the mission, where his dual background in intelligence and special warfare made him much more of an asset than sitting with Ryan on the Dunham.
He admired the hell out of the quirky lieutenant commander. The entire time on Penghu, not a single person had mentioned her presidential pedigree, which he appreciated. But what he appreciated more was that she didn’t wield the Ryan name like a hammer to get what she wanted. She relied on her instincts, intellect, and integrity. She was the perfect spook, if there was such a thing.
I’m just cut from different cloth, he thought, and wondered how long he’d be able to stay in this billet before he got too restless to be a productive contributor.
He looked across the empty window seat and out the window and the puffy white clouds below them. They should be feet dry in South Korea soon, and he glanced at his watch. Less than an hour until they landed in Incheon, where they would be whisked quickly away with their gear to the ROKS Yulgok Yi l, a guided-missile destroyer slightly larger and bulkier than her Arleigh Burke cousin in the States, but fast enough to do the job. The challenge they’d faced during the mission brief was just how the hell to get the team aboard the Capella, which was already at sea on her scheduled run from Korea to Tianjin. With Chinese satellites, reconnaissance aircraft, and drones on high alert, they couldn’t very well fly out to the freighter and fast-rope aboard without raising suspicion. But when the Group Eight team told him about their favorite new toy, an AI-augmented, semiautonomous, unmanned undersea vehicle—a minisub drone—the plan had fallen into place. They would board the destroyer Yulgok Yi l, which would have no problem overtaking the Capella before she crossed into the Bohai Sea, putting her north of the border with North Korea, where ROKN operations would raise significantly more suspicions. The UUV could return to the destroyer—or all the way to port for that matter—on her own with the new-generation battery she ran.
Once aboard the freighter Capella, they would blend with the crew as best they could, and be available to help with the exfil should the proverbial shit hit the fan.
Quite frankly, they were there more for a late-stage maritime interdiction than to help get the Task Force 99 team and their package out of China and onto the ship. If the spooks from 99 got in a firefight while still in port, there wasn’t much a handful of SEALs, no matter how elite, would be able to do to help them. But Group Eight brought advanced communications, cyber, and ISR gear to the fight—much of which Conza knew almost nothing about, and they had chosen not to read him in on, other than to tell him it was all very “badass.”
How and when those capabilities might come into play was unclear, but Conza was glad to know they were there.
Conza pushed away any remaining worries or doubts, putting them in a box and placing them at the back of the top shelf of his mind, just as he trained himself to do years and years ago. It was a skill that kept him frosty as an operator, but did very little to improve conflicts in his relationships with women. He pressed his head back into the headrest and reclined the seat the full ten degrees it seemed was available to him by pressing the button on his armrest, and then closed his eyes. He flipped his real leg up on top of his prosthesis to get more comfortable, and then went through the exercise of relaxing his face and neck muscles in turn, knowing it would drift him off to sleep in minutes, just as it always had.
Sleep was a weapon.
And he would need it, since it seemed, somehow, he’d managed to bullshit his way back into the fight.