Odyssey Read online

  Homer had already watched some of the last men he expected to ring the bell – huge men, tough guys, quiet and steely gray men, super-high achievers in academia, business, and the military, world-class athletes. A few had already been through some of the toughest selection and training courses in other service branches, like the US Army’s Ranger School.

  It was impossible to tell who had it in him to make it through BUD/S.

  All Homer knew on this night in the water was that he had never been so cold, wet, tired, or miserable in his life, before or since. At the outset, one of the instructors had said, “I can promise you I’ve been colder and more tired in the teams than I ever was in Hell Week. True fact.”

  But it wasn’t a true fact. It was bullshit. It had to be.

  Of those 22 men who remained, all suffered various afflictions: fluid in the lungs, early-stage pneumonia, tendonitis and joint pain of varying severity. Cuts and abrasions from rock portage – having to heave their boats over giant jagged rocks in raging surf – or from the obstacle course. Blisters on their hands and feet, in various stages of healing, or getting worse.

  And Homer also knew it was no longer sufficient just to survive Hell Week, which had been the case in years past. Now they also had to perform. This had been made clear. And if they didn’t meet the performance standards, they were gone.

  As Homer spat out freezing water and continued stroking with dead arms, he reflected on the fact that it had actually taken less than an hour and a half for Hell Week to claim its first victim – and not an enlisted seaman, but a Naval Academy graduate, boat team leader, and extremely strong performer. Fifteen minutes of floating out in 60-degree water – immediately after the disorienting Hell Week kick-off of blank machine-gun fire, artillery simulators, and high-pressure hoses turned on them, while they chafed their knees and elbows to meat crawling around on the Grinder – had just been too much.

  They had all been in 60-degree water before. The difference was they now knew they were in for five days and nights of it, nonstop, with little sleep, and virtually without ever getting warm. And thinking ahead, facing the prospect of that much pain and cold, was just too much for some. It took down even the most mentally tough.

  They got out of the water, and they rang the bell.

  Three more quit after the next hour of surf torture and log PT in the freezing water. Ten men were down by the end of the first eight hours. Monday night, the second of Hell Week, would be the longest night of most of their lives. They hadn’t slept in 36 hours, had been cold, wet, sandy, and tormented for 24, and they still had four nights and four days of this ahead of them. An eternity. As they sat eating their evening meal on Monday night – it was a mile run each way, three times a day, with the boats on their heads, just to get chow – they had time to think about all this. And three of them – including another Naval Academy ensign – simply stood up from their plates and DOR’d.

  Time to think was lethal.

  So Homer was trying not to. Instead, he tried to keep afloat.

  Then again, it was said that, in every class, ten to fifteen percent of the candidates would never quit, no matter what – no matter how cold or tired they got, no matter what was thrown at them. The instructors would have to kill them, because they’d never voluntarily leave. So it was these guys the instructors had to make sure they didn’t kill.

  That much time in water that cold could cause hypothermia and death; so not only medics, but also the BUD/S senior medical officer, were usually on hand – and all of them knew their “immersion tables” by heart. These were careful calculations about how much time the candidates could safely spend in water at what temperature, under what levels of activity. But they were still only guidelines, and the men had to be watched closely.

  One of those might-die-but-never-quit candidates was J.B., another Annapolis man. He came out of the surf on one evolution speaking gibberish, which his swim buddy brought to the attention of the instructors. He was taken into the on-site ambulance, and a rectal thermometer shoved up him. His core body temp was found to be 90°, and a prick of his finger showed his blood sugar was dangerously low – not enough energy to stoke the boiler. They gave him glucose to suck on, then got him back to the clinic and into an immersion bath, plus a warm saline drip, with dextrose added in. He was soon asleep with a big smile on his face. But once his core temp was normal, they woke him up, and got him into a dry uniform – which lasted about ten minutes until he rejoined his class and was made to get wet and sandy again.

  But men like J.B. were the exception.

  And so, in 24 hours of Hell Week, the class had been cut in half – again, after already having been cut in half. Even the class leader – another Annapolis man and experienced surface fleet officer, in amazing physical and mental shape, and who would sooner die than quit – even he was badly shaken by the losses. The instructors had to pull him aside, genuinely concerned, and tell him to brace up, and lead the men – or they might lose everyone in the class.

  During every single evolution, each of them faced a choice: Do I give in to the pain and the cold, or do I go on? It was up to them. Ultimately, each of them was going to learn a great deal about themselves. What they were really made of.

  Right now, Homer was learning he was really afraid of sharks.

  Because there were definitely sharks in these waters. In fact, the whole coastal area was a breeding ground for great whites, who were notorious for occasionally mistaking humans in wet suits for sea lions. So far, on the endless training swims, fins had definitely been spotted, and with terrifying regularity, but so far it had never been cause for getting them out of the water.

  The pool also got a lot of people – the “drown-proofing” exercises, where they were tied hands and feet, and made to float, bobbing down to the bottom, then kicking off again for a lifesaving gulp of air. And floating while tied up was as hard as it sounds – and much scarier. There was also “the beehive” – a mass of 100-plus men floating in the center of the pool, skin to skin, not enough room to paddle or kick, getting pushed down and turned into human hand- and foot-holds for those above.

  The fear of drowning was primal, and terrifying.

  But not letting fear get in the way of accomplishing the mission was a critical aspect of becoming a SEAL. In these first evolutions, the mission was simply staying in BUD/S another day. Seemingly nothing was ever the cause of them getting out of the water – being wet and sandy, freezing and miserable, borderline hypothermia, swimming with sharks, all of it had become a way of life. And, anyway, that was back when the world’s monsters left you alone more often than not.

  The sharks. Not the BUD/S instructors.

  In the end, both left Homer alone on this night swim, which he survived along with the rest of Hell Week, Phase One, and the remainder of BUD/S, finally receiving his graduation certificate – his trident would still be a long way down the road – in the presence of the young woman who was then his girlfriend.

  Ellie.

  His days of Scotch, rotating redheads, and hungover Sundays in the back pew of his church were not completely behind him. But the end of all that was in sight. The seriousness required of anyone who wanted to be in the teams… the expectations of the amazing men who did this work, and who were becoming his brothers… a true understanding of God’s love and forgiveness… and the sincere and selfless love of an amazing woman… all of these were changing him.

  Homer and Ellie hadn’t been married yet. But imprinted forever in Homer’s mind was how she had smiled with pride and happiness at his BUD/S graduation ceremony, in that brilliant and celestial southern California sunshine.

  It was the beginning of everything for him.

  * * *

  After the long nightmare of BUD/S came the subsequent six months of SEAL Qualification Training (SQT) – many more long days, nights, and weeks of in-depth instruction in land warfare, maritime ops, over-the-beach operations, shooting, demolitions, as well as the first taste of hi
gh-speed close-quarters battle in the shooting house.

  In particular, the shooting instruction and practice never ended. Homer always remembered one of the SQT instructors’ parting words, after an intense shooting evolution: “Never forget – we are gunfighters. And there’s no second place in a gunfight. We’re there to win.”

  But SQT wasn’t just more training. It was also another six months of probation, and additional evaluation. Which of the new guys were quick, smart, smooth, and quiet? Who listened – really shut up and paid attention – and who didn’t? They all had stamina, but who were the draft horses who would pull until they dropped, and never complain? It was a separation of the good ones from the really good ones. An endless winnowing. Endless striving to be better.

  In the teams, they had a saying: “Training never ends.”

  SQT was followed by Homer’s Trident Board – a grueling two-hour oral exam, requiring months of study – conducted by a group of serious senior and master chiefs who together had about three hundred years of experience in the teams. Then, and only then, was he finally pinned with the famous “Budweiser” – eagle, anchor, pistol, trident.

  After that he was allowed to join, but not yet deploy with, SEAL Team Three, which was also based at Coronado, along with the other odd-numbered SEAL teams. Rather than going into combat, he entered his squadron’s 18-month pre-deployment workup and training cycle. All told, it took at least 30 months to produce a fully qualified and deployable SEAL.

  And even after his first deployment, he was still a new guy.

  Another thing Homer always remembered was the welcome address for his intake at SEAL Three, delivered by the team’s Command Master Chief (CMC), the senior enlisted man in the unit: “Until a man has been here for at least five years, we consider him a guest. You show me that you didn’t come here to work hard and become a warrior, and I’ll see that you get a set of orders back to the fleet. It’s happened before.”

  So Homer had set off down a very long, very hard road.

  But not one without its rewards, and moments of joy.

  There was his and Ellie’s marriage ceremony on the cliffs overlooking La Jolla cove, just up the coast from San Diego. And then their abbreviated honeymoon, Homer racing back for his first deployment to the brutal, freezing, and unforgiving mountains of Afghanistan’s Kunar Province – including the Korengal Valley, nicknamed the Valley of Death, with its lethal mix of al-Qaeda, Taliban, and allied warlords, at that time possibly the most dangerous place in the world.

  And after that, deployment after deployment, mission after mission, al-Anbar Province in the western Iraqi desert, back to Afghanistan, Syria, back to Iraq… And then, while he was away, the birth of his son, Benjamin, who he didn’t even meet until he was four months old. More deployments followed on the heels of that one. Between them, going back to Coronado just long enough to do repairs around the house, hug his wife, and remind his young son that he wasn’t the boogeyman.

  During the counter-terror wars, America’s special operations forces were in nearly constant rotation. And despite their much smaller numbers, they suffered casualties many times higher than conventional forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  But, all that time, Homer also experienced the joy of the lifelong friendships made in the brotherhood of the teams, forged in the singular and indelible crucible of combat. But before long, he made the choice to leave those brothers behind, when he got the nearly unprecedentedly early invitation to try out for DEVGRU – the Naval Special Warfare Development Group.

  Previously and more commonly known as SEAL Team Six.

  DEVGRU was one of only two military special-mission units, under the secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), universally agreed to be “Tier-1”. The other was the US Army’s 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta – also known as the Combat Applications Group (CAG), Army Compartmented Elements (ACE)… to outsiders, Delta Force.

  To those in and around it, simply The Unit.

  Inside JSOC, and across their missions hunting al-Qaeda cells in Iraq and Afghanistan, then ISIS commanders in Syria and Kurdistan, these two units were also commonly known as Task Force Blue and Task Force Green.

  But, by whatever name, DEVGRU wasn’t just the pinnacle of naval special warfare – it was, along with Delta, the highest peak of military special operations in any service branch, in any military anywhere in the world. It was the very tip of the spear.

  And Homer had been invited to try out for DEVGRU after only two years of operational experience with his “vanilla” SEAL team. Actually, he’d merely been invited to apply for the initial screening… which would qualify him for the more extensive screening and review boards… then physical tests that dwarfed the regular SEAL PT standards… and finally rigorous psychological screening… all of which might lead to an invitation to the eight-month selection and training process, which would itself give Homer a 50/50 chance of actually making it in.

  So he felt a sharp sense of excitement, and fear, as he moved his young family across the country to Virginia, there to begin the unforgiving eight months in Green Team, DEVGRU’s training and selection wing. Much of this was spent in the shooting house, usually called the kill house now. In those endlessly re-configurable and ricochet-free rooms, they would practice their deadly high-speed ballet of room clearing, hundreds and thousands of times.

  Despite the complexity, the speed they were conducted at was fantastic, the margins for error tiny – and just when Homer seemed to be having a great day, in a fraction of a second he would screw up in some way, and the instructors would take his rifle away and make him run through the scenario with a broom, just to make him feel like an asshole.

  And he knew the next screw-up could get him booted in a heartbeat, because guys were getting booted left and right.

  Almost anything was grounds for it – the most fractional hesitation or tiniest error in the kill house, a low rating by a peer, any question raised by the trainers or commanders of his fitness to be there, would having him clearing out his locker. The attrition rate in Green Team, although much lower than the eighty percent-plus of BUD/S, was still another fifty percent on top of that. And that was among the most skilled, talented, and experienced special warfare operators in the world.

  But Homer survived yet again, and thrived, and was quickly picked up by Red Squadron, as part of DEVGRU’s twice-yearly internal draft. And then it was back to Afghanistan… then to Libya, Syria, Yemen, Mali… new friendships, an even more deeply bonded and unbreakable brotherhood… and the secret ceremony where he received his tomahawk from the tribe-within-a-tribe known as the Redmen…

  Buying a house and settling into Dam Neck, the birth of his daughter Isabel, even dicier deployments… Finding a new church, but never really becoming part of the fellowship there, because he was virtually never there… And then, finally, getting cherry-picked for the North Korea mission.

  That was six months before the end.

  The end of everything.

  The Point

  Michigan, USA - Western Manistee National Forest

  [Present Day]

  Shunk.

  The collapsible spade sliced into hard-packed earth.

  Skreeth.

  A blade full of dirt skittered across the underbrush.

  Sarah Cameron dug, in the dark forest clearing, at the center of a five-by-five-foot square of ground, the corners of which had been marked with seedlings – plants that didn’t naturally grow there. Two of them had survived. It was enough.

  Fifteen feet away, Homer stood motionless and upright, pulling security. He faced out, rifle held at low ready, head on a swivel, NVGs down. These were a precious surviving pair of the last-gen four-barrel devices, which cost the now nonexistent U.S. Department of Defense $65,000 a pair. They overlaid a thermal view on top of the light enhancement, making living enemies and running vehicles pop out of the background like pop-up targets.

  The trouble was, the dead didn’t have body h
eat, making them recede right into the blackness again. And while Sarah’s backup supply cache had been buried a good two miles from the overrun cabin, neither of them could know for sure how close the dead were. In a world covered by death, you never knew. You only knew they couldn’t be far.

  So neither of them spoke.

  A few minutes earlier, they had rumbled Sarah’s explosion-pummeled truck offroad, onto a muddy two-rutter, which turned into a single-rutter, the track disappearing into the darker blackness under the forest canopy. Soon they’d had to dodge thick copses of old-growth trees.

  Finally, the trees were too thick to dodge.

  They rolled it to a stop, as a cold breeze wafted through the blown-out windshield, the forest around them silent as an open-air tomb. Both the front and rear windows of the vehicle had been blown out – when Sarah tossed an HE grenade at her own freestanding diesel fuel tank, in order to give Alpha team their only chance of escape, in the process destroying hundreds of rampaging dead, the fence that surrounded the cabin, and also—

  “Where’d you’d cache these supplies?” Homer whispered, breaking the mood he could feel darkening. “Back in Canada?”

  Sarah smiled in the dark. “Hey, it was your commanders talking about giant herds roaming the land, millions big…” She trailed off, still not believing what they’d heard in Handon’s long-distance radio call with the carrier, the USS John F. Kennedy. “But even before, you know how it was – get overrun, the entire county might get overrun. And the point of the cache was to have a chance if we lost everything else. But, lose those, too…”

  Homer nodded. “And there’s little point. Check.”

  “Check?”

  “It’s SEAL-speak. Means: Got it.”

  “Roger that,” Sarah said, with a smile. “Come on. Short hike from here.”

  So they had hiked in. And now they dug. Rather, Sarah dug.

  Cradling his short-barreled assault rifle by the pistol grip and vertical foregrip, more like a baby than a weapon, one eye on the darkness and the other on the excavation, Homer smiled as he mentally replayed that old line from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly: “In this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend: Those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.”