Chapter 11
The mission was going well.
That was the problem.
Mason sat with his back against a concrete wall at the edge of a forward position and turned that thought over the way you turned over a rock to see what was living under it.
The air was thick. Hot, even at this hour.
The kind of heat that didn't bother him anymore in any practical sense but that his body registered as wrong, because he had been calibrated to Coronado's salt air and marine layer for over half his life, and everything else on the planet was a deviation.
He thought about the mission.
The aid worker, Hartley, had been located within eighteen hours of their deployment. Intelligence had come in clean and fast and specific. Location, guard rotation, entry points. They'd executed the extraction at 0200 local time, four days ago. Hartley was already home.
That should have been the end of it. Instead, they were staged here, waiting on additional extraction orders that had been pushed twice with no explanation.
Nothing had gone wrong. Nothing had snagged. Every piece of intelligence had checked out. Every timeline had held.
Mason had been doing this long enough to know that wasn't normal.
Intelligence was never this clean. Timelines slipped. Something always snagged. The mission that went perfectly from start to finish was a story you told later with a kind of disbelief, because it happened maybe twice in a career and it was a thing of legend.
This felt weird.
The call window came at 0300.
He moved away from the others and found a spot by the perimeter wall where he could talk quietly and still keep an eye on the approach. He dialed. She answered before the second ring.
“Hey.” Her voice ran through his body like warm honey.
“Hey.” He settled against the wall. “Did I wake you?”
“I was having the best dream, and it just got better.”
He smiled. The first real smile in six days.
“Wanna tell me about the dream?”
“Nah. Like I said, this is way better.”
“Tell me stories.”
Sophia’s soft chuckle stole his heart all over again.
“There once was a ten-year-old girl who had very strong opinions. About everything. It never occurred to her that going up against authority might not always be the best course of action.”
Mason settled against the wall even more. “I like her already.”
“I thought you might.”
“Did she have all of her ducks in a row?”
“Naturally. She was just supposed to write two pages about Earth's water cycle.
Evaporation, condensation, precipitation, the whole diagram with the little arrows.
She typed up six. Single spaced. She included a bibliography.
Four sources, Mason. She's in fourth grade.
She cited the NASA website, a children's science encyclopedia, a book about planetary geology that she checked out from the school library, and I really want you to hear this, a peer-reviewed journal article about subsurface ocean evidence on dwarf planets, because the assignment was called the water cycle and not Earth's water cycle.”
Mason chuckled. “She’s still stuck on Pluto?”
“Yep.”
“So let me get this right. She didn’t think the teacher’s assignment was clear enough, so she figured she could take a detour.”
“You got it in one. Give that girl an inch and she takes a mile. That, my love, is all you.”
“What are you talking about? I follow orders.”
“You’re a SEAL, your job is to figure out ways to get things done in any situation. Improvisation should be your middle name.”
He loved that she knew him so well. He was also getting a hell of a kick out of his daughter. “Then what happened?”
“Lisa wrote two pages about Earth and then the other four were a formal argument that Pluto's hydrological evidence made it eligible for inclusion in the unit and its exclusion was an oversight.” Sophia paused.
“Mrs. Hendricks gave her an A and a note that said 'exceptional commitment to your argument.
' She has carried that note in her pocket for three days.”
“I love that kid.”
“I know it. Better yet, she knows it.”
“How's Kayla?” he asked.
“Good. She's good. She aced the math test she was worried about.”
“And the art?”
A small laugh. “She's getting there. The perspective is starting to click. She's stubborn about it, which means she'll actually learn it.”
“Good.” He smiled at the dark. “And Conrad?”
“You mean Conner?”
“That’s what I said, Conrick.”
Her giggle was a delight. “Cat thought he might sit with them at lunch, but he walked past them at the last minute.”
“How’s her posse? Are they all killing it at lacrosse?”
“They--” She started. Then she paused. “Yeah, they’re all killing it.”
“Is something wrong? Is it Delgado?”
“No, he’s great. He’s treating the freshmen really well.”
“Then what is it?”
She paused. “It’s nothing.”
It was something. But this was the deal. She handled things while he was gone. All of the wives did. They were all damned lucky, they had strong, smart women.
He didn't push. Pushing from ten thousand miles away when he had four minutes left on the window and no ability to act didn't serve either of them.
“I love you,” she said, when the compression started. She always felt it too, the way the time ran out.
“I love you, too.” He meant it with everything he had. “Sleep when you can.”
“Same to you.” A pause. “Be smart, Mason.”
The line went quiet.
He stayed where he was for a minute. The perimeter was still. The air was still. He could hear Drake somewhere in the dark talking quietly to Clint, nothing he could make out from here, just the low register of men he'd worked alongside for half a lifetime.
He got up and went to find Drake.
Drake was cleaning his weapon. He did it the way he did everything, efficiently, almost aggressively, with the focused attention of a man who needed his hands occupied so his brain could work.
“You got a few minutes?” Mason asked.
Drake didn't look up. “What I've got is time I can't spend sleeping. So yeah.”
Mason sat down across from him. Kept his voice low. “This mission.”
A pause in the cleaning. Subtle. “What about it?”
“The intelligence came in fast.”
“Faster than usual,” Drake agreed. He resumed cleaning. “I noticed.”
“The location was confirmed in eighteen hours. We had guard rotations in twenty-four. The extraction was textbook.” He watched Drake work. “Nothing snagged.”
“Not once.” Drake set down the piece and looked at him. “You thinking about that?”
“I've been thinking about it since the first night.”
Drake was quiet for a moment. He picked up the next piece. “You want to know who the intelligence came from.”
“I want to know the whole chain.” He looked at the perimeter. “We got deployed fast.”
“We always get deployed fast,” Drake noted.
“Black Dawn was supposed to be up, but we got pulled in instead.”
Drake set down his gun. “Yeah, that’s fucking weird.”
“Clint might have channels.”
“He might.” Drake picked up a piece again then held it up to the light. “You know what I keep coming back to?”
“Tell me.”
“The aid worker. Hartley.” He kept his voice flat. Professional. “Gets grabbed in a very specific location. In a very specific window. When his usual security detail had a gap.” He paused. “Who knew about that gap?”
Mason looked at him. “Are you asking because you have an answer?”
“Nope,” Drake said. “I'm just asking the question.”
Mason thought about patterns. He thought about three clean pieces of intelligence. He thought about an extraction that had gone exactly according to plan in a part of the world where nothing ever went exactly according to plan.
He thought about a call window, and a woman's voice, and the particular quality of a half-second silence before the phrase it’s nothing.
“Get some sleep when you can,” he said.
Drake picked his weapon back up. “Mase.”
He stopped.
“Something going on at home?”
He didn't answer right away. Just long enough.
“Get some sleep,” he said again, and walked away.
He found a quiet spot and opened his notebook.
A physical one, paper, an old habit that had saved his life twice in circumstances where a phone would have gotten him killed.
He wrote for ten minutes. The intelligence chain as he understood it.
The timeline from deployment to extraction.
The specific circumstances of Hartley's kidnapping that had triggered their orders.
He looked at what he had.
He thought about Sophia saying it’s nothing with half a second of silence in front of it.
He closed the notebook. Then he opened it again and added one line at the bottom of the page.
Next window—ask Sophia directly.
He'd known for twenty-two years when she was carrying something alone. He wasn't going to pretend otherwise.
He put the notebook away and went back to his position.