Brian Ridder missed SEAL Team Six, the camaraderie, the bullshit practical jokes, the nearly constant ragging on each other, the adrenaline high coming off a successful op with all your pieces in the right places, no holes leaking. At five eleven and a hundred and seventy pounds, he was still in good shape, but a lot of the time his head wasn’t straight.
But he was glad that he was finally out, because his knees hurt most mornings, his back gave him such hell that even a half dozen extrastrength aspirins every day didn’t do much but dull the pain back to a near-constant Niagara Falls roar, and because he was finally a full-time husband and dad of three boys.
It was two in the morning in Virginia Beach. Brian was sitting up in bed, his body drenched with sweat, his sheets so wet again that his wife Cindy was going to accuse him of pissing himself, and they would have another of their ferocious arguments. He thought that he was losing his mind, but he was more frightened these days than he’d ever been in Afghanistan or Iraq or any of a dozen hot spots where he’d been dropped. Usually into the middle of some serious shit.
The hell of it all was that he thought he missed the action, and yet he knew that he shouldn’t. He knew that he loved his wife, and yet a lot of a time lately he couldn’t stand her. And the boys; he loved them with every fiber of his being, and yet a lot of the time they got on his nerves so badly that he wanted to smash the little bastards in the face.
“Man up, for Christ’s sake,” he’d shouted in his sleep a couple of nights ago, and Cindy had grilled him about what he meant.
“Are you losing your fucking mind or what? she’d screeched. “Because if you aren’t, I sure the fuck am.”
Besides his being wigged out half the time, money was their biggest problem. He’d gotten out of the navy after seventeen years—three years short of his pension. No monthly payments, no base exchange privileges, and even worse, no medical or dental. Larry, their youngest, needed braces they couldn’t afford. Cindy’s teeth were giving her fits, and the dentist she’d gone to wanted fifteen thousand to put her mouth right. But there was absolutely no money for any of that.
He had no real trouble getting jobs—he’d driven a bus for the city, had worked on a road-repaving crew, had even done some rough construction, mostly framing for garages and other small buildings. But he’d trained all of his career to be stealthy. Hide in broad daylight. He’d practiced swimming five miles in the open ocean, jumping out of aircraft flying at thirty-five thousand feet, and free-falling down to a couple of thousand feet before opening his chute. And he’d been trained to blow up shit, and to kill people with a variety of weapons, including his bare hands.
He had skills that didn’t translate into civilian jobs, because he didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut when he figured something was wrong.
For a few months he thought about applying with one of the major contracting companies to go back out in the field. Afghanistan, Iraq—there were high-paying jobs out there. But he could not think about picking up a gun again. Ever again.
He got out of bed and took a pee without turning on the bathroom light. Cindy had rolled over, but if she was awake she didn’t say anything. He went down the hall to check on the boys, all of them sleeping soundly, and then padded into the kitchen, where he got a gallon bottle of milk from the fridge and took a deep drink. It was another of Cindy’s pet peeves, his drinking out of the bottle like that. Now the boys were doing it. And leaving the toilet lid up, not picking up after themselves, never bothering to put their dirty clothes in the hamper or their dirty dishes in the sink.
The kitchen looked out on the small backyard, where he’d planted a couple of apple trees a few years ago when he was on leave. They were big now, and in the summer they were great for shade.
He started to go back to bed when he thought he saw something moving near the eight-foot-tall wooden fence that separated his yard from the Digbys’, who were on vacation. Their five kids—three girls and two boys—liked to come over, especially on weekends, so he and Roland had put in a gate. It was ajar now, or at least it looked like it, and his anger spiked.
A couple of months ago Cindy had told him that she was sure she’d seen some guy in their backyard. A Peeping Tom. It hadn’t been Roland, but whoever it was had come through the gate.
She’d wanted him to call the police, but he’d told her that she’d been dreaming, and that had started another terrific fight.
He went to the window and, keeping to one side so that he wouldn’t be so easy to spot, looked out across the yard. If anyone had been there, he was gone now. But the gate was still half open and that was bothersome. Either the guy had left and not bothered to close the gate, or he’d come around to the north side of the house, where he could look into the bedroom windows.
“Son of a bitch,” he said under his breath. He debated for just a split second whether he should warn Cindy and call the cops or take care of it himself.
He went through the hall and into the laundry room, where he unlocked the back door, eased it open, and poked his head outside for just an instant. Nothing moved, so he slipped outside and headed past the kitchen windows to the corner of the house.
Someone was tapping on something. For just an instant it almost sounded like Morse code, but it dawned on him that what he was hearing was someone tapping on a window. With a piece of metal. The muzzle of a pistol.
Time slowed down, and his heart, which had been pounding, settled into an even rhythm as it did when he was about to walk into a close-quarters battle somewhere in Badland.
He peeked around the corner. A tall man dressed in dark clothes stood at the bedroom window. He was tapping the muzzle of what even in the darkness at a distance of twenty-five feet Brian recognized was a silencer tube.
The bastard was trying to wake up Cindy and he meant to shoot her.
Keeping low, Brian stepped around the corner and raced silently toward the guy, who at the same moment fired two shots through the window.
“No,” Brian shouted at the last instant.
The shooter turned and fired once directly into Brian’s chest, and then stepped aside.
Brian’s knees gave out and as he fell his momentum carried him forward and onto his side, at the shooter’s feet. The man’s eyes were lifeless, no expression in them whatsoever. The pistol was a 9mm subcompact Glock 26. A toy, but deadly in the right hands. And the son of a bitch had shot Cindy with it.
Breathing was getting tough, but all he could think about was the SEAL’s dark humor: incoming rounds have the right of way and sucking chest wounds were nature’s way of telling you to slow down.
“Why?” he managed to croak.
“For Usama.”
Everyone on the assault team that night in Abbottabad knew something like this was possible. A couple of days ago Pete Barnes and his wife had been shot to death in Florida. But his old boss over on the base coming up on his thirtieth year, told him that the word from the top was that the hit in Florida was an anomaly: “Some son of a bitch redneck with a grudge against the world opened fire at the museum. If he’d been targeting you guys he wouldn’t have taken out Pete’s wife.” Taking revenge on the assaulters was one thing, but killing the wives was stupid.
The shooter pointed his pistol at Brian’s head.
“Why our wives?”
“Not just the wives,” the shooter said. His English had an odd accent that Brian couldn’t quite place. Maybe German. This guy wasn’t a redneck with a grudge. He was a pro.
But then what he had just said suddenly registered. Not just the wives.
Brian started to roll over so that he could reach the bastard’s legs and bring him down, stop him from hurting the boys, when a thunderclap burst inside his head.