Chapter 3
ADAM
Three days.
At least, that was my best guess. I could see the sun rising and setting through a crack in the metal near the door.
The majority of the days since being captured had been spent stuffed in this tiny-ass metal box.
Twice a day, they came. They pulled me out of the box.
It was during those times when I was removed from my cage that I prayed for the solace of this spot.
Especially after I’d tried to escape. Clearly, I’d not succeeded.
Who they were, I had no clue. I hadn’t seen my abductors when they grabbed me, and they stayed covered while in my presence. The only piece of skin I’d seen was around their eyes, that showed through their masks.
What I could see of their skin tone coincided with where I’d been captured. The issue was, we were on a black op. Completely clandestine. No one knew we were here outside of a handful of vetted senior SpecOps commanders and one or two well-trusted individuals in the intelligence community.
Someone said something to someone.
I didn’t want to go down that route. These men and women held my life, the lives of my teammates, and the other operators in their hands.
If one of them had divulged info, we were all screwed.
The package we were after was high-value.
If the details of our mission got out, we were all dead. And our families, too.
The door opened, startling me. I’d not heard them approach this time. Light flooded the box as someone snagged my ankle and dragged me from my safe space. Or at least the safest space I had at the moment.
The guttural sounds of Arabic sounded around me as they bagged and flex-cuffed me yet again. They’d learned their lessons the other day when they’d pulled me out the first time. I whipped ass until someone had shot me with a non-lethal round. I had dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes.
They’d also taken my shoes and clothes the other day when I’d pulled my Houdini routine. The motherfuckers. I’d just gotten those boots broken in good.
Once secured me, they half-dragged, half-carried me along between them.
I couldn’t see anything other than shadows.
I knew exactly where we were heading. Given that they’d pulled me out of that fucking box so many times over the last couple of days, I knew the direction and route.
There was a sharp stone coming up that they always bounced my knees off of.
Fuck, that hurt.
As usual, they managed to hit it dead on the money. My knees were fucking killing me. Hell, everything fucking hurt. I’d been beaten, electrocuted, and waterboarded. I was sure that was what I was in for again today.
They might as well fucking kill me, because I would die before I broke. They wanted troop info. Shit that, yes, I knew, to a point, but no way in hell would I ever divulge.
I bounced off the ground as they slung me into the room. I didn’t know if it was the same one as before. I’d bounced off the hard floor so often you’d think I’d be intimately acquainted with it.
“You are stubborn man, Navy SEAL,” a voice said from above me in heavily accented English.
The man was a native Arabic speaker. He was the same man who had interrogated me whenever they pulled me from the box. I found out that smarting off to him didn’t get as much of a rise out of him as staying silent.
Mute it was, then.
He revealed shit when angry. Shit said in Farsi that he probably thought I didn’t know. I sucked at languages. At least speaking them. I could do it, but I never sounded like a native.
Unlike Foster and Rocket.
I’d taken so many damn voice and acting classes to rid myself of the twang, but I kept that Tennessee accent no matter how hard I tried.
Foster and Rocket spoke ten-plus languages apiece; no matter what they spoke, they sounded like they were born and bred in the country.
On the other hand, while I knew a handful of the dialects spoken in the area, with my accent hanging on like a hair in a biscuit, conversing with someone in any of the languages I was fluent in was a nightmare.
“Silence, again?” the voice asked as he grabbed the hood on my head, pulling my head up off the ground before shoving it away.
My head bounced off the stone floor again. Lights flashed, and my brain throbbed.
I’ll be lucky if I don’t come out of this fucking braindead.
Or just dead.
“Tell me what I want to know! Why were US troops at that house?” he yelled into my face.
I responded as I had to every question presented to me since being captured. “Senior Chief Adam DuBois. United States Navy. 3487439012. February twenty-first, 1983.”
He growled, backhanding me. His fist connected with my cheekbone in just the right spot to make my eyeball feel like it had been popped. Pain struck my face like lightning, radiating throughout my body.
“You will talk to me, American. Eventually, I will find the thing that breaks you,” he said in that same garbled, broken English.
Good luck with that.
“Do not fool yourself. Everyone has a breaking point.” He grabbed me by the hood again and pulled me into a sitting position.
I knew what was coming next. Electrodes to the sensitive areas of my body. It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were just the electrodes, but they liked to add water to the fun and games. That was when things got real.
As my bound hands were dragged over my head and fastened to the pulley, I let myself check out.
Even though I couldn’t see anything, I closed my eyes and let memories of better days float to me.
It was like I was swimming or treading water in a sea of all the best memories and events I’d ever experienced, and they ebbed and flowed until one was enough to overshadow what was happening to me physically.
The memory latched onto my psyche and took over.
SPRING 2004
The team had been gearing up for deployment for the last few weeks. It was one of our last nights in Vah Beach. We’d only just gotten here, and we were getting ready to leave.
I planned to get as much damn sleep in my own damn bed as I could. I was working my ass off to make it to Green Team. If things went well on this deployment, when I came home, I’d be heading to Tier One operator school.
Now that I was this close, I was doing everything I could to make sure I was up to speed on what we were heading into. I’d chatted with my counterpart, whose spot I would be taking when he rotated home, and I’d studied everything I could get my hands on about the region.
It wasn’t my first deployment as a SEAL. Rocket and I’d both been sent outside the wire a few times with a few different teams to fill in when a team member was undeployable. I still couldn’t believe my dream job was now a reality.
Mine and Rocket’s.
Brock and I had both joined the Navy on the fast track to this point. We’d walked side-by-side, saving each other’s asses every step of the way. I still couldn’t believe we’d both been chosen for the same BUD/S class, much less put on the same team upon graduation.
We were transferred to Vah Beach to fill a couple of spots on the same team, which shocked us both. The reason the team had two openings was scary as fuck. Any time an operator or any service member was killed fucking sucked, but when it was someone you knew, it really fucking sucked.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
I strode to the door and snatched it open.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I asked the asshole on the other side.
Rocket held up a thirty rack and a fifth, his eyebrow cocked. “Um, I live here motherfucker.” He pushed past me. “I forgot my key.”
Fucking Rocket.
He didn’t know the definition of moderation. It was all or nothing. He went all-out all the time. No stop.
“So much for getting some rest,” I laughed as Brock pulled out the shot glasses. He poured us both a couple of shots and popped the lids off a couple of beers.
“Fuck rest. We’re getting ready to head out for our last deployment before getting the nod for Green Team,” Rocket said as he held out a shot glass to me.
I took the glass, clinked it with his, slammed it on the kitchen bar, and yelled, “HOOYAH!” before I downed the shot.
If I couldn’t spend what could be my last night stateside getting some rest, I couldn’t imagine hanging out with anyone else. Everyone else on the teams had been in this exact spot. Same as I had before. Every one of us could commiserate with the nerves and anticipation that churned in my belly.
That wobbly feeling was something we all experienced the last few days at home, but Brock and I had been side-by-side from the get-go.
So, no one knew exactly what I was feeling as much as Brock.
He’d been right there with me; it was his last deployment before we took that final step to being Tier One operators.
Plus, we were filling some pretty fucking big shoes. The guys that the team had lost were long-time members of the teams. Both had more than ten years under their belts.
Hours later, we were in a bar. We’d run out of Jameson and beer at the apartment, so we’d made our way to a local frogman drinking hole.
It was filled with frog hogs looking for a roll in the hay with a SEAL, or maybe even two.
Some were looking for something more permanent, but they were mostly clueless.
SEALs were never fucking home. The divorce and breakup rate was high for us.
My head was foggy, and my vision was swimmy. I shook my head, trying to get my eyes to both point in the same direction at the same time.
“How’d we get here?” I said to no one in particular.
A giggle next to me pulled my attention. I swung my head around, and my whole body felt rocked as if I were in a boat in the waves offshore at Coronado.
“Fuck! How much?” I asked as I teetered on my barstool. I felt like I’d been swimming in heavy surf.
“You motherfucker! I’m not a prostitute!” Stomping and swearing combined with a crash and laughing.