SEAL Team 13 st1-1 Read online

  “Beowulf assault rifles, Auto Assault–12s, Smith and Wesson 500 revolvers?” she growled, eyes rolling. “Compensating for something, are we?”

  That caught his attention, and he matched her eye roll. “You aren’t in on the mission brief, Captain. You’re not cleared for it, and you don’t know what we’ll be doing. You are here to help manage the administration of the team. So go administrate.”

  “You’re treading close to insubordination, Commander, as always.”

  “That’s a weak threat, Captain.” He shrugged. “I’m here on the admiral’s request and authority. He may have reactivated my commission, but I didn’t ask for it. You want to bring me up on charges, go ahead. You can’t burn my reputation any more that the government already has.”

  She glowered at him for a long moment, then shook her head. “You can’t keep the details to yourself, Commander. That’s not how the Teams operate.”

  “The Teams operate on need-to-know,” he countered. “My team already knows the details, and you don’t need to know.”

  “That’s not how it works!” she snapped. “Command decides who needs to know what.”

  “Not this time.” He shook his head. “Not for this mission.”

  “Bullshit!” she snarled at him, infuriated that he’d gotten her to curse, then doubly angry when he just seemed amused by it. “I’m not putting these in until I get some answers.”

  “That’s all right, I already did.” Masters shrugged, pulling a second sheaf of papers from a pile and handing them to her.

  Captain Andrews blinked, grabbed them, and quickly scanned the pages. The single word “approved” stamped on the bottom glared back at her.

  “No way in hell did you get these through so fast,” she breathed out as she shook her head. “No way in hell.”

  Masters just shrugged. “You have a lot to learn about the Teams, Andrews. I had Admiral Karson copy us onto the testing division’s supply authorization. We’ll get whatever new gear is being considered for deployment.”

  He stood up as she gaped at him, and then brushed past her on his way out of the office. “Don’t worry about it, Captain. Just think of all the time you’ll save by not having to fill out requisition forms.”

  The hurled epithet that followed him out the door brought another wide smile to his face. He’d always wanted carte blanche to fuck with the brass, and as long as Karson needed him, there wasn’t a thing anyone short of another admiral could do about it.

  They may have dragged his ass back in, but Hawk Masters was going to extract every ounce of value from the situation he could.

  After all, he only had just so long before the whole thing fell in on him anyway. One way or the other.

  * * *

  “Well?”

  “He’s begun recruiting.”

  “Anyone we know?”

  The young man shook his head in response to Percy’s question. “Mostly no. We know their names, but they’re drifters. Not expected to last much longer anyway.”

  “Interesting,” Percy acknowledged.

  “We do know one person on the list, however,” the young man added, frowning slightly. “Alexander Norton.”

  Percy stiffened, thinking. “I know that name. I can’t remember where.…”

  “He crossed over when he was eight.…”

  “Eight.” Percy reached up and grabbed the paper the younger man was holding out to him. “That seems…highly unlikely.”

  “Yes, sir.” The young man nodded, agreeing.

  Crossing the veil at eight years old was practically a death sentence — there was just no way a child could hope able to defend himself against the things that would take notice of him. Heck, few adults survived the experience. Most were slaughtered within minutes, some within days, and the largest chunk of the rest went insane and killed themselves.

  Children took the shift in reality with more equanimity, but physically they were meat for the grinder.

  “He was taken in by Emilio,” Percy whispered, reading the paper. “The Black. Is he a practitioner?”

  “We believe so, yes.”

  Percy thought back to the matriarch’s orders and sighed, shaking his head. “All right, go. Send Robert back.”

  The young man nodded, falling back before turning and leaving the room.

  It was clear that Masters knew more about the actual situation than anyone had realized; otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to find someone like Alexander, who had survived across the veil since he was eight. No, for Masters to have contacted Norton, he had to know a great deal indeed.

  That made him dangerous.

  A few moments passed, and then Robert Black walked into the room. He was a nondescript sort of man, the kind you would miss in a crowd. Percy knew that that was one of his main skills, actually, and only that knowledge kept him from severely underestimating the man. Robert was five foot eight, slim, and had the sort of looks that left you trying in vain to remember anything distinctive. He had been working for the Line of the Clans for many years, and barely seemed to have aged in the fifteen that Percy had known him.

  “Sir?”

  “We have a target.”

  Robert nodded. “Who?”

  “Navy man, by the name of Masters,” Percy said, handing over the file. “He’s a security risk.”

  “Immediate?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” Percy replied. “We’re fairly sure he hasn’t talked yet, but he’s obviously in the know, and the navy is at least aware that he’s holding information they want.”

  Robert nodded slowly, reading the file. He raised an eyebrow when he noted the location. “Coronado? You want this done on a base full of navy SEALs?”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “No.” Robert shook his head, smiling slightly. “It should be…fun.”

  * * *

  Hawk Masters rubbed his eyes, pushing the grainy grit around more than soothing them, tired of looking at sheet after sheet of paper. Even setting up a small squad entailed a mountain and a half of paperwork, despite the fact that they weren’t “official” at this point.

  He pursed his lips as he signed off on another form, one that would get him some of the heavier ordnance types for the AA-12 shotguns he’d requisitioned, and then pushed back from the cheap desk as he looked around the base housing where he was now living. He already missed his cement walls and rammed-earth fortifications.

  It was going to take time to get used to living on base again, Masters realized. It didn’t help that the sound of the ocean kept him from sleeping at night. He’d had nightmares for years after the Fitz went down, sleeping with a loaded shotgun because it was the only thing that offered him any comfort. Cold comfort, of course, since he knew that a twelve-gauge would provide as much protection against that thing as spitballs.

  Honestly, it was a miracle he hadn’t blown his own head off, either accidentally or otherwise, those first couple years after being discharged. It had taken three more to find out just how deep the rabbit hole went, and another couple before he worked his way down to sleeping with a forty-five.

  By then he’d figured that if the forty-five wasn’t enough to take out whatever was coming for him, it’d do a cleaner job on his skull than the shotgun. No reason to make it any messier than it had to be for whoever had to clean up.

  In the SEALs, Masters had lived by the credo that the only easy day was yesterday. But he couldn’t remember any easy yesterdays, not since crossing the veil. The things he saw when he was out from under its protection, well…they didn’t exactly lend themselves to a decent night’s sleep.

  The experience of having his eyes opened to the real world was not something he’d ever forget, any more than he could forget losing most of his team and an entire destroyer to that hellspawned abomination from the depths. He’d since learned that crossing the veil was invariably a traumatic experience, but for most it didn’t involve coming face to tentacle with a god kin.

  Hawk slowly cleaned
up his desk, putting away the requisition forms and materials he’d gathered as his mind wandered back to the past. There were a couple old sayings about ignorance. First that it was bliss, and second that what you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you.

  Truer words were never spoken.

  The veil was the only thing that stood between the modern world and the monsters of old, and when he’d learned about it, Masters had wanted to cry. It was like a cosmic joke that the ultimate defense against evil was powered by the ignorance of those it protected, and he felt like he was the punch line.

  It flew in the face of everything he’d been brought up and trained to believe, making a mockery of his life up until that point, and utterly destroying him in more ways than one.

  To this day, Masters questioned the sanity of those ancient bastards who’d deployed the veil in defense of the planet’s human population. Yet humanity might not have survived the Dark Ages without it. The best research he could muster on the subject was ambivalent at best, and completely contradictory at worst, but it didn’t seem as though humans would have had a chance at winning in an open conflict.

  Finally worn out, in both body and mind, Masters flicked off the lights and prepared himself to try and get a few hours of forced sleep before work started again in the morning. It was only a matter of time before something else slipped through one of the growing holes in the veil and he fielded his team for the first time.

  It was going to be one hell of a show when that happened.

  He almost smiled as he settled himself into bed and closed his eyes. Through the terror, through the horror, there was still that small sliver of his soul that screamed for revenge. It was the last surviving part of the man who had become a SEAL fifteen years earlier.

  It was going to be glorious to be that man again.

  * * *

  Sneaking onto a modern US Navy base actually sounded a lot harder than it was. As with most bases of its nature, the one at Coronado was designed more to withstand an assault or the curiosity of civilians than it was to block a single intruder. Against a man like Robert Black, the base’s defenses were entirely insufficient. The fact that he was a man of the Clans made it all the easier for him to gain entry.

  He vaulted the fence, razor wire and all, landing in a roll on the far side before silently coming to his feet and vanishing into the midst of the base buildings. Just then, a roving patrol circled the corner. The K9 unit paused near the point where he’d made his entry, the German shepherd suddenly backing into his human companion and whining softly.

  “What’s wrong with you, boy?” the military policeman asked, kneeling down to pat the dog as he swiveled his powerful flashlight around.

  He didn’t see anything, and finally shrugged it off.

  “Probably a cougar pissed on the fence,” he mumbled to himself as he tugged the resisting dog past the area so that they could continue with their rounds.

  Already halfway across the base, Robert Black paused when he reached the darkened housing units where the Clan’s intelligence had placed his target. Like most military housing, it wasn’t built for defense, relying instead on the outer fence and patrols for protection. It was literally child’s play for him to silently pop the lock on the front door, letting himself in like he owned the place.

  The poor construction of base housing made it slightly tricky for him to cross the distance to the bedroom without making noise, but not insurmountably so. Black took his time, inching across the space with swift and sure motions, testing each floorboard before letting it take his full weight. Within a minute he’d crossed the room and was outside the bedroom, his hand closing on the pommel of his blade as he edged the door open.

  He grimaced in annoyance at the digital clock that was flashing in his face from the room’s nightstand, noting that the red LCD screen had been turned away from the bed, most likely because the room’s occupant hadn’t much liked it beaming in his face either. Black slid into the room, pulling the long, curved blade from behind his back as he approached the bed.

  After his third step into the room he felt the door close softly behind him, and he froze in momentary surprise when the clock light went out just as the door silently contacted the frame.

  * * *

  Masters woke up when the light changed against his eyelids, his wiring trick with the alarm clock and the door setting off an immediate ingrained response from his nervous system. He willed his body still as he tried to identify what had caused the change. Someone’s in the room.

  He opened his eyes just as the light from the clock went out again. He couldn’t quite make out the shape of his visitor, but the gleaming crescent of a blade against the reflected lights from outside was enough to cause him to move.

  His fist came up from under the covers, revealing the gunmetal blue of his Colt 1911 as it tracked onto the rough center of the person in his room. The crescent gleam of the blade vanished as it was drawn back, flashing in a sort of strobe as it arced down through the faint reflected light.

  Sparks erupted as his gun was jarred heavily, Masters’s finger tightening on the trigger in reflex. The 1911 roared in the dark room, the muzzle flash giving Hawk a momentary glimpse of his assailant. The shockingly ordinary figure had a slightly annoyed look on his face as he pressed his blade into the pistol.

  If Hawk wasn’t busy fighting for his life, he might have thought the man was disgusted with something. As it was, however, he was too busy trying to keep his Colt between himself and the blade pressing down on him.

  His wrist was badly twisted, the finger trapped in the trigger guard near its breaking point, so he braced the pistol with his other hand and kicked out as hard as he could through the blankets weighing him down.

  The impact wasn’t anything to write home about, but it shifted his attacker aside slightly, giving Hawk the chance to deflect the force of the blade and roll to the side. Sparks erupted against in the black room as the blade scraped along the side of his barrel, finally sliding off into the night table.

  Hawk continued with the roll, bringing his left elbow around and driving it into the back of his assailant’s ear as hard as he could. There was a muffled grunt and the man went down to one knee, but a subtle shift in his stance caused Masters to jump back just in time to avoid losing his entrails to a reversed slash of the man’s blade.

  He backpedaled for distance, intent on bringing his Colt back into play with as much fanfare as possible. Arm extended, pistol honing in on the shadow’s center mass, Masters squeezed the trigger again, but the gun didn’t go off — instead, there was an impossible tension in his trigger. He squeezed harder for a moment, then realized that his gun had jammed somehow. He grabbed the slide to rack it back and clear the obstruction, only to almost freeze in shock as his hand fell across an unfamiliar landscape.

  The slide had been sliced almost in half, and the spring inside could be felt under his palm. It was clear that while the weapon had saved his life from the blade, that had been its last act. He jumped back again as the shadow slashed at him. He reversed his grip on the gun and clubbed down at the assailant based on his best judgment of where he was.

  A meaty thud and a satisfying hiss were his rewards this time, causing him to whip the gun butt up and around in an attempt to beat into the man’s head and face with the heavy steel frame. Masters grunted in surprise as the shadowed figure easily caught his hand and twisted it hard, pulling him in close as his wrist went numb and the gun dropped to the ground.

  Unbelievable strength, he had time to think before he was pulled off his feet and thrown across the room with such might that he tumbled right through the wall of his bedroom and into the small bathroom.

  Plaster dust floated all around Hawk as he shook his head, trying to clear the stars from his vision and the debris from his face. He looked up, and the streetlights filtering through the high bathroom window showed him the silhouette of his attacker as the man kicked back the ragged edges of the hole in the wall and began to step th
rough.

  Hawk scrambled to his feet and grabbed the ceramic cover from the toilet, swinging it as hard as he could. The man’s arm came up, blocking the attack, and Hawk shattered the cover across it. He blinked, shocked to see that his actions had barely fazed his attacker, and scrambled out of range of the man’s long curved blade.

  “I don’t suppose we can talk about this?” he asked. He hadn’t expected a response and wasn’t disappointed when he didn’t get one.

  The figure cocked back its arm and slashed forward. Masters dived under the attack and hit the bathroom door with his shoulder, splintering it off the frame as he rolled into the small living-area-and-kitchen combo. He bounced off a wall, scrambled along the floor as he tried to get his balance, and finally dove for the coffee table in the center of the room.

  * * *

  Robert Black snarled silently, his lips drawn tightly around his teeth as he stalked forward. This man was becoming aggravating. SEAL or no, there was no way that he should have missed his first strike, and now it seemed as though he’d have to hurry. The single shot the man had fired might not have injured him, but the entire based had probably been alerted by now.

  Determined to end the fight quickly so he could slip back out of the base before the entire situation became a debacle, he strode forward with his blade at the ready. A massacre on a US military base would bring attention that neither he nor the Clan needed.

  Masters’s arm blurred as the SEAL retrieved something from the coffee table and twisted to fling it at him. Black parried the incoming object with his blade, sending a dive knife spinning away into the shadows of the darkened room.

  This has gone on long enough, the annoyed assassin thought as he vaulted the cheap sofa and lashed out with his blade in a bid to pop the annoying navy man’s head from his torso.

  He was surprised when his target lunged at him instead of retreating, blocking the blade by planting his shoulder into the striking arm. Then came a piercing pain and sudden pressure in Black’s belly. He grabbed the navy man by the throat and squeezed, only to feel more pain and pressure as the man jerked his hand upward.