Chapter Six
Matt hit the ground so hard he saw stars, and while he lay there stunned, at least three guys stomped on his back as they scrambled for the Frisbee he’d dropped.
“You’re ‘it,’ Soup,” someone crowed. Matt shook off his daze and jumped to his feet, searching wildly for who had the Frisbee. He caught a glimpse of it sailing over him and he jumped for it, only to miss by a mile.
“Ha! Shrimp.” The taunt was only too familiar. Matt snarled as he wheeled around and barreled toward Shane’s voice. Shane beckoned to him with one hand as he spun the Frisbee on the tip of his finger with the other, whipping it away a fraction of a second before Matt could tackle him. “Sucker!”
Matt turned his forward momentum into a hip check that sent Shane staggering, his arms windmilling as he tried to keep his balance.
“Whoops.” Matt winced when Shane lost his battle with gravity and came down hard on his ass. “That was way harder than I meant it to be. Sorry about that.” He offered his hand and pulled Shane back to his feet.
“Thanks. No harm done.” Shane clapped him on the shoulder and loped off.
It was amazing, Matt thought as he lunged for possession of a red plastic disk like his life depended on it, how a group of Type-A guys could turn tossing a Frisbee around into a violent, bloody game of Keep Away.
And fuck if it wasn’t epic!
Matt roared, going low to slam into the back of Elias’s knees, taking him down. The Frisbee he’d been clutching skittered away. Matt flung himself on top of it, fully prepared to fight his way out of the dogpile that was about to ensue.
“Hooyah, Instructor Salazar!”
At Noah’s yell, everyone froze, then scrambled to their feet. “Instructor Salazar!”
“How come I’m not holding a beer yet?” Salazar bellowed, and the guy standing nearest the keg rushed to pull him one.
The Frisbee game broke up when people wandered toward the drinks, which to Matt’s relief included several coolers of sodas and water as well as the keg. He noticed a handful of his classmates going for the soft drinks, too, including Shane, although a lot of the other guys were already drunk.
Matt wiped the blood off his split lip with a napkin and ran his hand self-consciously over his shaved head.
The stubble felt weird, but anyone who showed up with more than that on Monday would pay dearly.
One of his fellow trainees had brought an electric clipper to do the honors for everyone, and now with a break in the festivities the unmistakable buzz started up again.
Matt glanced over just in time to see Shane’s blond hair paying the price.
Fuck, even his skull is beautiful.
Most everyone, including himself, was walking around like a Q-tip, but Shane managed to look like a high-fashion model, all sculpted cheekbones and full lips. Damn.
“Hey, Soup, want a burger?”
Matt turned to see the guy manning the grill proffering him one, and with a smile of thanks, he took it.
After fixing it up and loading down his plate with various side items, Matt made his way over to where a bunch of dudes were sprawled on the ground.
He hesitated. A couple of them still weren’t speaking to him, but most of them seemed to have gotten past the room-trashing fiasco, especially since he’d been making a concerted effort to apologize to everyone individually.
Other than doing that and owning his shit, there wasn’t much else he could do.
Taking a deep breath, he dropped to sitting, fist bumps and murmurs of “Soup, how’s it hangin’” greeting him. The conversation was desultory as everyone stuffed their faces, but eventually Salazar dragged a canvas chair over to join them, beer in hand.
“Instructor Salazar, weren’t you with Team Three?” one of the guys piped up.
“I was. Did two combat deployments with them, and when I’m done with my training cycle here, I have orders to Team Five.”
“Ever think about DEVGRU?” someone asked daringly. Matt held his breath, wondering how his instructor would respond to the question about joining the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU, the benign, not-so-secret name for the fabled SEAL Team Six.
“I did more than think about it,” Salazar responded, downing a huge gulp of his beer. “I screened for it. Obviously didn’t make it.”
There were some wide-eyed looks at the admission of failure, but Salazar brushed it off.
“I ain’t ashamed of it. You know why? ’Cause at the end of the day I accomplished something three-fourths of you yahoos sitting here right now won’t ever accomplish—I got my Trident.
I’m serving my country in a way most men can only dream of.
Yeah, I screened for DEVGRU, and guys who’re better than me got in.
I’m still a good SEAL, and I’m still better than you.
” He grinned. “So put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
When the resulting hoots died away, Elias asked about Salazar’s combat experience. After calling for a fresh beer, Salazar got comfortable and regaled them with a story about an urban firefight he’d been in.
“So this dude, he comes out of nowhere, gets the drop on me. I turn around just as he clacks off a suicide vest.” Salazar patted his chest and stomach as if in wonderment he was still in one piece. “Lucky for me, he used demo, not frag.”
“What’s frag?”
Salazar threw the questioner a withering look. “Fragmentation. He didn’t pack the explosive with shit that flies out and cuts down everything in its path. It was just C4, so the guy only managed to vaporize himself. I was completely unharmed. His leg landed on the windshield of our Humvee, though.”
Laughter and some shocked exclamations followed. Matt was enthralled, but Shane’s shoulders were bunched and his fingers were crushing the Coke can he held. After a moment he got to his feet and strode off toward the water of the nearby bay, flinging the Coke can aside.
As unobtrusively as he could, Matt followed. He didn’t know why. Nothing Shane said or did would make Matt think he’d welcome his company at the moment, but he kept going until he was standing next to him, shoulders almost touching.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” Shane swallowed hard, opening and closing his hands as if he was trying to grasp something that wasn’t there. “Just, you know, memories.”
Memories of what? Suicide bombers? Matt looked sharply at him.
“Did you do a combat deployment in the Marines?”
“Yeah, a few months in Afghanistan between screening positive for the SEALs and getting my contract to BUD/S. Just supposed to be support and training for the ANA, but we got into a few skirmishes.”
Shane’s eyes were haunted, with a look Matt had seen on his uncle’s face many, many times before. After a beat of hesitation, he put his hand on Shane’s arm and squeezed. They stood there quietly, gazing out over the bay, until Shane tilted his head back and blew out a breath.
“Fuck. Let’s go.”
Without another word, Shane turned and they strode back toward the others, just in time to hear Salazar say, “Well, enough male bonding. My wife is expecting me home. Gentlemen, thanks for having me.”
People jumped up to walk him to his car while Matt jogged over to pitch in with the cleanup. As he worked, he studied Shane, who was silent and pale. Definitely not just a pretty boy, not if he’d been to war.
When everything was done, Matt looked around for Shane as people started to disperse, but he was nowhere in sight. No one seemed to know where he’d gone, so Matt reluctantly called it a night and headed for his room.
He slept like the dead, and when he emerged again at dawn, intending to go for a long run, he almost tripped over something sitting in front of his door. Smiling to himself, he picked up the freshly painted green helmet and set it gently on the table inside.
* * *
“Drop! Push ’em out!”
Matt hit the asphalt, wincing as his abraded palms scraped the rough surface. He did push-ups as if his life depended on it, the yelling of the instructors in the background a cacophony of sound.
“Your form sucks! What a bunch of losers. Get wet and sandy!”
Matt struggled to his feet and ran over the berm to the surf, the rest of his class on his heels. They were utterly exhausted, shivering with cold, and the sun was barely up.
“This is only the first day, gentlemen,” their new lead instructor, a hard-eyed man named Josh Bernson, shouted as everyone lay with their heads and shoulders in the water, doing flutter kicks. “You wanna be frogmen?”
Matt’s abs were on fire and his breaths came in gasps.
“How bad do you want it, people? How bad?”
They were ordered back to the grinder and dropped for more push-ups and sit-ups. To add insult to injury, the instructor staff sprayed them down with hoses, aiming the water right into their faces. All around Matt, guys were spluttering and coughing.
“Is putting up with a little cold water, a little pain, worth it to you?”
“Hooyah!”
“Form up in your boat crews. Chow time!”
Matt ran to join the five other men in his assigned boat crew. They stood at attention next to their one-hundred-seventy-pound inflatable boat, waiting for the order to hoist it over their heads and run the mile to the mess hall with it.
“Teamwork, fellas. You gotta work together, share the burden. One of you fucks up and gets dropped for push-ups, the rest of you still gotta hump that boat. Don’t be that guy, lettin’ your teammates down, makin’ them pull your weight. Boats up!”
Matt groaned as he worked to lift his section of the boat. It was designed to be cumbersome and hard to handle, and it took several tries for his crew to get it overhead and in proper position to move out.
Bernson noticed their struggle. “You smurf crews have to work a little harder at this,” he yelled at them. “Get it together. Now. If you drop my boat, your pain will be legendary.”
At last they were ready. One by one, each boat crew moved off at a slow jog, which really wasn’t much more than a shuffle.