SEAL Team 666: A Novel

Later they ordered Chinese food, only afterward laughing at the irony of it. A few beers in their guts, then each of them made their way to bed.

The next morning, Walker forced himself out of bed at five. After a quick run on the beach and a breakfast of yogurt, juice, and a hard-boiled egg, Walker joined the others in the conference room. He’d tried to arrange a meeting with Jen last night, but she’d been busy. When he entered the conference room, she was taping several pictures to a board. She wore a knee-length dark blue skirt with a white blouse. He couldn’t help but smile as he watched her work. Then he noticed Holmes staring at him with the same stern expression he gave to beegees or a Girl Scout selling cookies.

Walker went to his seat and sat. Everyone was there except Ruiz, who came in last, carrying a breakfast burrito the size of a Yule log.

When Jen finally turned, she gave Walker a quick wink that was lost to no one. He tried to use his tunnel vision, but he couldn’t help but see Yaya, Ruiz, and Laws all winking dramatically at him. What almost shocked him senseless was when Holmes did the same. As subtle as it was, it was more extravagant because the man seemed to never joke around. Ever.

“Let’s get started,” Jen said.

Other than Jen and the members of SEAL Team 666 there were two other members of SPG—a young man who looked like he knew every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and a young woman who could have been either a candy striper or a porn star. Billings sat in back.

“I’ve brought along Peter Musso and Liz Lake. Peter’s a specialist on the culture and geography of Southeast Asia, where you all will be going. Liz is new to our office. I brought her along to show her how these things are run.”

“If y’all need a private tour, I’m sure that I can provide one,” Ruiz said, true love in his eyes as he addressed the new girl.

“Chum in the water,” muttered Laws.

The girl blushed and turned away. But the young man seemed more than pleased and grinned from ear to ear, as if he was hoping that he could get the same invitation extended to him.

“Let’s get on with it,” Holmes said, as if he were being forced to sit amid a room of fourteen-year-olds.

“Okay,” Jen said. “First let’s discuss the telemetry information we got from the hard drive you brought from Macau. There were two significant findings. One was the GPS history of the ship. It originated in Rangoon and is owned by an export company with nineteen other ships. Now that we have their international identification codes, we can track them once they pass near any of our subsurface tracking buoys. Until then, we believe they’re still in their home-station harbor.”

“Why don’t we know this for certain?” Holmes asked. “Where’s their harbor?”

Jen turned to the SEAL team leader. “Yangon. You would have known it as Rangoon, Burma. The country is now called Myanmar. As far as why we aren’t sure? That directly relates to a lack of assets in the area. We can’t do a physical eyes-on, so we’ve requested an NRO overflight, but right now all satellites are operationally deployed to support CENTCOM in Afghanistan-Pakistan. We’re expecting a pass tomorrow morning. At that point we’ll know for certain.”

Walker thought about the creature they’d encountered in the hold of the old cargo ship. They’d lost Fratty and if it hadn’t been for them rocking and rolling the ammo until they were all but dry, it would have had them, too. Put that beast inside of a mall or on a busy downtown street and it would end in a bloodbath. The enforcer in San Francisco had alluded to a threat to America. If the threat had to do with the chimeras aboard twenty ships sailing to America, then people would be dead in the streets from Los Angeles to New York.

As if reading his mind, Jen continued. “If each one of the ships has the same sort of crates as the first one, and we truly are the target, then our red, white, and blue is in trouble. The CDC assisted us in projection modeling, and if each of these ships has fifty creatures, and if each one lands in a different port, there’s a seventy-six-percent chance that it could be the end of life as we know it within the continental United States. Based on your observations, we think we know how they transform from stone to flesh, but there’s too much missing data. Some of the variables are that we don’t know how they’re controlled, we don’t know how much they can eat, and we don’t understand how they can metabolize their energy.”

“Frankly, we don’t need to find this out,” Billings said from her place at the back of the room. “We’d prefer that the ships on this manifest be destroyed in place. Wherever they are. Regardless.”

“That’s clear,” Holmes said. “We’ll wait for reconnaissance, then launch.”

“Can I get a printout of all the documents?” Laws asked. “I’d like to check and see if there are any clues you missed.”

Musso’s eyes narrowed. He frowned as he said, “It’s in Chinese.”