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  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered and took a knee, pressing his left arm against his side to stem the bleeding.

  Instinctively, he turned clockwise, saw the badly wounded terrorist he had dropped his weight on crawling toward his own rifle, and shot him twice in the back of the head.

  Getting woozy now, Kemper stood, stumbled, took a knee again. Two figures burst through the front door, rifles up, and he spun to engage. He nearly fired, but his operator’s brain still had enough discipline to recognize the helmets, digital cammies, and coyote-grey body armor as belonging to two United States Marines.

  He lowered his pistol as the tense voice finally registered in his ears.

  “I say again, Choctaw One—SITREP? What’s your status, bro? The Marines are there.”

  Kemper squeezed his eyes shut tightly and answered. “Bin Jabbar went out the back.” His voice sounded like someone had stuffed cotton in his ears. “Don’t let him get away.”

  “Jesus, that’s a lot of blood,” a young voice said on his right. “Is that all from him?”

  He felt hands tighten on his lacerated arm, pressing hard; it burned like someone had just splashed acid on him.

  “I’m good, bro,” he choked to the Marine beside him. “Go get Bin Jabbar.”

  “Just gonna get a tourniquet on this arm before you die, dude,” the Marine said calmly.

  Kemper let himself be forced down to a sitting position on the ground. New and different pain flared just below his left armpit as the Marine applied a tourniquet.

  His head felt super swimmy now.

  “Good lord,” someone said from the doorway. “Did this dude kill all six of these assholes by himself?”

  “Someone give me my rifle,” Kemper managed to grunt.

  The Marines hoisted him to his feet.

  He turned to the Marine clutching him under his left armpit and growled at him again. “Rifle, dude.”

  I’m not going anywhere without my rifle . . .

  Someone slipped his SOPMOD M4 into his right hand and he felt other hands dropping his Sig into his holster.

  Black fuzz danced in the corners of his eyes and his legs went to jelly as the Marines dragged him through the door to the Humvee waiting in the alley.

  Chapter 6

  Al Asad Airbase

  Anbar Province, Iraq

  June 5

  0945 Local Time

  Kemper fought back a wave of nausea—which he assumed to be related to the pain medicine they had given him—and stared at the ceiling of the recovery room, which looked more like a plywood warehouse. Gratefully, the field hospital was mostly empty at the moment. Despite how badly his guts churned, he felt nothing in his mutilated left arm.

  He’d refused anesthesia, of course, and so they had instead given him what the Navy surgeon assigned to the Marines as part of the Forward Resuscitative Surgical System had called a regional block. The nerve block had made his arm go completely to sleep after a painful injection of medicine just above his left collarbone. The first doc he’d seen had insisted Kemper allow them to put him to sleep—which had almost earned the doc a fist to the jaw. The FRSS surgeon had arrived just in time to keep Kemper from walking out of the pre-op area and hiking back to the Tier One compound. So, he was awake, but his left arm would be useless until the medicine wore off in, like, twelve hours.

  “What is your name and unit?” a young woman dressed in Marine cammies and a green T-shirt asked from the foot of his bed. She wore a stethoscope around her neck but looked confused as she flipped through a paper chart that, Kemper knew, had a lot of blanks on it. She looked up from the chart at him—studying her longhaired, bearded patient dressed in unmarked cargo pants and a recently-made-sleeveless black T-shirt. She clearly understood he was not a Marine—and perhaps questioned whether he was in the military at all from his appearance.

  “Jack Jones,” Kemper said. The “Jones Rule” was one every Tier One SEAL learned during their deployment brief. If asked, give your real first name plus Jones. That was how covert the Tier One activities were. “I’m with a Joint Task Force.”

  “A ‘Joint Task Force’?” she said. “I’m sorry, what unit is that? Where are you based?”

  “I’ll take care of this, Petty Officer Stancil,” said a man walking up behind her. Kemper shifted his gaze to the new arrival—it was the first surgeon who’d treated him . . . the one he’d thought he might have to punch. His uniform identified him as Navy Commander Sharpe. The dismissed medic nodded and shrugged, placed the clipboard on the bed, and headed off. “How’s your pain, Mr. Jones?” the surgeon asked, having apparently gotten the standard vague and partial read-in that was protocol when the Tier One unit needed to interact with folks outside its mission.

  “No pain, Doc,” Kemper said. “Sorry about before.”

  Sharpe raised a hand and shooed the apology away, but his expression couldn’t hide the fact that he’d been waiting for it.

  “All good, son,” he said. “That was a nasty injury, but the surgeon you guys travel with did a great job. I scrubbed in to assist him, but he apparently is no longer around, so let’s tell you what we did.” Sharpe leaned on the rail of the bed, all doctor now. “The top part of this wound, here, just below your elbow”—he indicated the spot on Kemper’s good arm—“was deep, all the way to the bone. In fact, we could see a groove in the bone where the blade cut into it. You had an injury to the ulnar artery, which we ligated—in other words, we just tied the artery off—because you have a redundant system down that low and the radial artery on the other side was uninjured.”

  “Will that mess me up?” Kemper asked, concerned. Tying off an artery seemed like a big deal.

  “Nah,” Sharpe said. “You’ll never notice the difference. There are communications between the two arteries all up and down your forearm, so you’ll get all the blood supply you need everywhere you need it. Almost miraculously, there was no nerve injury at all. You had considerable damage to the muscles up top, but the wound wrapped around your arm before it got to all those tendons in the lower part of your forearm, so no tendon repair was required at all. The rest of it was just the tedium of sewing everything back together.”

  “So, good to go, then?” Kemper said, sitting up. He needed to get out of there and see how everyone else was.

  “Well, I mean, yeah, but you know—you have some recovery time here. We had to put a lot of stuff back together, and it’ll take time to heal. Then you’ll need some physical therapy to get your strength back and get you back to normal function. The good news is that you’ll have a full recovery, but you’ll be doing it back home with your family for now.”

  Back home? What the hell was this guy talking about? He was about to object when a familiar voice called his attention to the doorway at the end of the room.

  “How’s he behaving, Doc?” Thiel asked as he approached, hands shoved into his pockets and the sleeves of his “Bars of Virginia Beach” long-sleeve tee bunched up over his thick forearms, tattoos wrapped around both.

  “Mysteriously,” Sharpe said, shaking his head with a smile. “Excuse me,” the doc said and gave them the room.

  “Dude, how’s Davidson?” Kemper asked.

  “Gonna be okay, bro,” Thiel answered, “but it was bad. They stabilized him in Ramadi and then sent him to the cache in Balad. Said he needed a vascular surgeon or something, and that’s where they have one. Then to Germany, then home, I assume.”

  Kemper clenched his jaw and nodded. “Everyone else good?”

  “Yeah,” his friend said. “TBI protocol on Romeo ’cause he whacked his head in the explosion, but he’s good. Already being an asshole, so back to normal.” They both laughed. “Stitched up some little cut on my scalp back at our compound. Most guys got bumps and bruises. I think Epperson either broke his ankle or sprained it bad, but he’s in the med shop with a TENS unit, refusing to get an X-ray. Perry’s gonna make him, though, so we’ll see.” Thiel shifted his gaze to the bulky bandage on Kemper’s arm.
“And you?”

  “Five by, brother,” Kemper said. “Just a little PT and I’m back in the saddle. Should be able to do that here and be operational in no time.” He looked up at Thiel and gave him a smile he hoped looked genuine. “We still got some ass to kick.” For a moment, he saw Bin Jabbar’s face laughing at him in the second when he realized he’d fucked up. He needed to be here—with his brothers—to make up for that mistake.

  “Thought I heard the doc say you were headed home,” Thiel said, his expression going dubious.

  “Ahhhh,” Kemper said, waving the arm that worked toward the door. “He ain’t from NSW, bro. He’s not used to working with Team guys.”

  “Hooyah to that,” Thiel said. “When you’re done lying around, I got wheels. We can head to the chow hall down by the MWR—the one with the burger bar.”

  “I missed breakfast?”

  “Yeah, bro. It’s, like, almost lunch.”

  “All right,” Kemper said. “Get me the fuck out of here.”

  Thiel pursed his lips. “Mercer wants to talk to you first,” the SEAL said. “Gonna be here in a minute. He rode down with me, and I think he’s getting a brief from the docs right now on you and Davidson both.”

  Kemper’s stomach sank.

  Time to pay the piper.

  “Okay,” he said, trying to look nonchalant. “Is he pissed about something?”

  Thiel lowered his head and raised both his eyebrows. “Dude, are you serious?” He looked over his shoulder and around the long room to make sure they were still alone. “That was some crazy shit, bro. What were you doing? Sprinting around Ramadi like you’re fucking Batman. What the hell, man?”

  Kemper forced confused indignation onto his face. “‘I will draw on every remaining ounce of strength to protect my teammates and complete my mission,’” he said, quoting the SEAL creed.

  Thiel shook his head. “Don’t give me that shit, Kemp. That was some rogue-ass vigilante shit, bro. That ain’t gonna fly in the Teams—not even at the Tier One.”

  Kemper sighed. “So he’s pissed?”

  Thiel snorted. “You might want to lead with ‘Sir, that will never happen again . . .’”

  Kemper gritted his teeth and thought hard about how he was going to save his career.

  Chapter 7

  Al Asad Airbase

  Anbar Province, Iraq

  June 5

  1010 Local Time

  Kelso Jarvis kicked the door of the white Toyota Hilux closed with a booted foot and headed for the double doors of the low building that the Marines had converted into a Level II field surgical hospital, his mind on the SEAL inside. Hours ago, he’d watched the infrared silhouette of his newest Tier One SEAL squad leader with mixed feelings. Kemper’s rash decision to pursue Bin Jabbar seemed an obvious and serious breach, worthy of serious consequences. Jarvis knew the importance of teamwork and “team before self” as well as, or even better than, anyone, and he’d tossed men out of the Tier One for less egregious offenses.

  But there was something about this Jack Kemper.

  He ran over again in his head what he’d seen on the feed. Kemper had conducted the assault flawlessly at the beginning. When things took a terrible turn, he’d kept his tactical priorities, secured the building against remaining fighters and any who might join, checked on the other half of his team at the rear, prioritized security and CASEVAC, then coordinated with the TOC and with the perimeter Marines as he pursued the target who had slipped away.

  I will protect my teammates and complete my mission.

  Where had Kemper broken the promise demanded by the SEAL creed, really?

  What hung with him, though, was the ruse—generated on the fly while surrounded by seven men bent on his death. In that moment, Kemper had thought to spin a tale, to calmly convince Bin Jabbar he was the front man of an overwhelming force. The gambit hadn’t worked, but it had been brilliant. Still, even that wasn’t what had impressed Jarvis. His amazement had come from the cool, calm, confident delivery of the lie—like a seasoned undercover operator working in a NOC.

  Jarvis pushed through the left side of the double wooden doors leading to the foyer of the building occupied by the Marine Expeditionary Forces medical support battalion. Only he and a few others in the Tier One ever wore marked uniforms, and this was such a time. As a result, Marines and Sailors from the FSSG looked up to the rare sight of an O-6 with a trident on his chest strolling through their space. Many of them straightened up, nearly to attention, and he walked through a cloud of “Good morning, sirs,” requiring him to at least grunt a reply.

  “Skipper?”

  He turned to see Lieutenant Commander Mercer just inside an office, talking to one of the senior officers from the Shock Trauma Platoon.

  “Just checking on our boy, Neal,” Jarvis said.

  “Yeah,” Mercer said with a tone that suggested Kemper’s wounds should be the least of the new Tier One SEAL’s worries. “Well, the doc here says Kemper was lucky. Lots of muscle damage that will heal quickly, but no significant tendon damage, no long-term problems for the one artery that got damaged, and no nerve damage. He’ll head from here to Germany, then to Virginia Beach, and back to Tampa for intensive PT for a few months. Full recovery is the prediction. I intend to be sure he recovers less quickly from the wounds I’m about to inflict.” The SEAL officer wore a sour face. “Any thoughts you have before I rip him a new asshole and assign him to administrative duties pending transfer?” Mercer added as a courtesy.

  Jarvis knew it wasn’t really a question. Clearly, Mercer felt punishment was a no-brainer. And perhaps it should be, but there was something else here.

  Something about this Kemper . . .

  It would be trite to think it was because Kemper reminded him of himself. He didn’t really, though there were some similarities perhaps.

  “Why don’t you let me talk to him first, Neal,” Jarvis said. “Then I can share my thoughts and he will be all yours. Fair?”

  “Perfectly, sir,” Mercer said, but his tone indicated confusion. The situation seemed pretty black-and-white to the squadron commander, and that meant Jarvis would have to sell this guy on keeping Kemper if that was the decision. He couldn’t have the boss not believing in one of his leaders, for sure.

  “Something I’m missing, boss?” Mercer added.

  “Maybe,” Jarvis admitted. “I’m not sure yet. Let me talk to him.”

  Mercer nodded, and Jarvis headed to the double doors of the recovery area.

  Maybe thoughts of the whole new world he was preparing himself for were biasing him about Kemper. There would be no black-and-white in the murky grey world of the new task force he would be standing up next year, after the “retirement” from the Navy that had not yet been announced. The Joint Intelligence Research Group would be the super-secret tool this war on terror needed, and there, he would need men who could live in the middle of that murky grey view of the world. With a little more time, Kemper might just be one of those men.

  He nodded to a cammie-clad doctor with “Sharpe” on his name tape. “Commander Sharpe,” he said in greeting. “Okay to talk to my guy?”

  “Yes, sir. Of course,” the surgeon said. “Only patient in there right now.”

  Jarvis pushed through the swinging doors and saw Kemper in the lone occupied bed, arguing with the poor girl beside him.

  “What I’m saying is, I’m leaving shortly and I don’t need this damn IV. I’m hydrated, for crying out loud. And I have to pee—again. I want my IV out and I’m going to the head. I’m not peeing in your friggin’ thermos again.”

  Jarvis shook his head as he approached. At least it sounded like Kemper was trying to clean up his salty SEAL language for the poor girl he was arguing with.

  “And I told you, they said you’re headed to Germany, and you can’t travel on the medical flight without an IV. I’m just doing my job, and you’re making it harder than it should be.”

  “Maybe I can help,” Jarvis said, his voice the
rough gravel of the SEAL legend persona he knew his men needed him to be. Always, he had a sixth sense that allowed him to know just which of his myriad personas any situation or group needed.

  “Sir,” Kemper said, sitting up straighter in the bed.

  “Stop being an asshole, Mr. Jones,” Jarvis growled.

  “Yes, sir,” Kemper said, then turned to the young medic. “My apologies,” he added, a child forced to make nice on the playground.

  “Give us the room, Petty Officer,” Jarvis said to the medic.

  “Gladly, sir,” the woman said, making no attempt to hide that she’d had enough of Kemper.

  Standing beside Kemper’s bed with his hands clasped behind his back, Jarvis watched her leave. When the doors swung back closed, he turned to his SEAL.

  “Wanna tell me what happened, Jack?” he asked, his tone softer now.

  “Sir?” The SEAL seemed surprised by the use of his first name, but also—wisely—seemed to be treading carefully, like he was walking through a minefield.

  Which he is . . .

  Jarvis pursed his lips and nodded. “So, listen to me, Jack. You may be at a crossroads here, careerwise, son. Mercer wants your ass on a spit, and I’m deciding whether to give it to him or not. You’ll want to be more honest than cautious here. We’re gonna chat a moment, you’ll tell me where your head was during the various decision points on this operation, and then we’ll decide what happens next. Clear?”

  “Clear, sir,” Kemper replied, his voice tight.

  “Problem with any of that?”

  Kemper sighed, resigned, perhaps. “None, sir.”

  “Walk me through it, frogman.”

  Kemper did, starting with the infil and how they’d approached the breach. He walked through the breach, the clearing of the room, engaging the fighters upstairs, and the explosion as the second element breached the rear gate. He walked through the securing of the stairs, moving to the rear, checking the team status, arranging the Marines to collapse in and provide both security and CASEVAC. Then he paused.