“Understood,” Mike said, sighing. “I don’t just get to be myself the rest of my life, do I?”
“Nope,” Pierson said. “When I retire, I’ll be nobody. You’ll always be, at least until the terrorists get worked down to a regional nuisance, the guy who killed Osama. Sprayed him with poison gas then cut his head off. Arguably, you should be surrounded by bodyguards the rest of your life. Knowing you, though…”
“Ain’t gonna happen,” Mike said. “I’m a good enough bodyguard, thanks. That it?”
“Except for the paperwork,” Pierson said with a nod. “And running you over the instructions. Yes.”
“When can I get discharged?” Mike asked. “I have a bunch of money to spend.”
“As soon as this gets cleared up,” the colonel replied. “And we’d really like a written after-action report…”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Mike replied, grunting. “What happens on the mission, stays on the mission. Let’s get started on the rest of it, though. I have people to see…”
It was a shitty day in Athens. A weak cold front was coming through and the light, misty, rain was soaking into Brenda McCarthy’s sweatshirt as she walked up College Street. The conditions fit her mood, which was crappy. The girls had been given A averages for the semester that had been “disrupted” as the administration put it. But since the beginning of this new semester she’d had to contend with being “One of the Syria Girls.” The whispers and looks in class were bad enough. But the experience tended to attract… the wrong kind of guys. Guys that she really didn’t want calling her “Babe.” Guys that, frankly, set off her creep meter.
So it was just adding insult to a screwed up day when some loser sitting at the Starbucks called out to her.
“Hey, Babe, it is Babe, isn’t it?”
She spun around to deliver an angry reply and stopped as the man stood up and took off his sunglasses. She stood still as he approached to where he could speak quietly.
“I don’t like it when most people call me that,” she said, her face working, trying not to cry.
“Well, I don’t know your real name,” the man said. “But some people call me Ghost.”
Book Two
Thunder Island
Chapter One
“Hey, Mike, how was the fishing?” Sol Shatalin called from the dock.
“Pretty good,” Mike yelled, as he backed the forty-five-foot Bertram up to the pier. “Grab my lines, will ya?”
He’d spent the first month or so pretty much out of sight of land, working on his tan and fishing, using various products to get the scars to look older than they were. By the time he started taking his shirt off in public, they didn’t look fresh except to a very trained eye. Now he fished and SCUBAed in the area of Islamorada, and his “address” was Slip 19-C, Islamorada Yacht Club.
Spending that much time offshore had had another benefit; he caught a lot of fish and learned how to catch them and how to fillet them, which brought more money than whole. Now, he rarely went out without at least making gas money. In fact, since he really lived a pretty Spartan existence, he was living pretty much on money from fishing. Of course, it wouldn’t have covered the payments on the Bertram, but he’d paid for that in cash. All three-quarters of a mil.
He’d recently, though, been considering a developing lackanookie condition. He could fix that easy enough by a run up to Athens, but he’d started to think he might be using the girls, and that was the last thing he wanted to do. He hadn’t been in contact with all of them, just a core of about twelve. And of those twelve, he’d only had sex with three. It had been healing for both sides. And with a few of the others, he’d just slept, and that had been healing, too.
But he didn’t want to get into a habit of just turning up for nookie. He wasn’t planning on spending his life with any of them, for various reasons. And they needed to get on with their lives. For that matter, every trip to Athens meant a possibility of somebody who recognized him from a class putting Mike Harmon, former SEAL and jerk in class, together with one of the “Syria Girls” and getting four. So letting the girls go, slowly, was a good idea.
But it wasn’t helping his lackanookie.
There were, as around any major yacht club, various “boat bunnies.” But they didn’t appeal, either, even the good-looking ones, and they were in short supply. It was a philosophical thing. He didn’t mind paying for sex; he’d done it often enough in various third-world countries. And he didn’t mind having a girlfriend who was “a little hard up.” Christy, his ex, had been a live-in aspiring actress who didn’t make her share of the rent most of the time before they’d gotten married. But boat bunnies lived “on the kindness of strangers” as Mae West would say. It was prostitution, but even hint at that fact and you got one hell of a telling-off and generally a cleared boat. Then there was the issue of “Bluebeard’s Stateroom.”
The boat had five cabins: the “master” cabin forward (with a really nice bathroom, the nicest he’d ever owned) and four “regular” cabins, two with bunk beds and two with doubles. He’d converted one of the doubles cabins into his “team locker.” Besides using his “special” status to buy various interesting weapons, he’d contacted a company that sold gear to the teams and ordered, well, one of everything. He now was as well equipped as anyone on a team: body armor, ammo vest, everything down to boots and wetsuits. He didn’t figure he’d ever need it, but he also hadn’t figured he’d end up in Syria shot to shit.
But he’d really rather not have to explain to a boat bunny why one of his cabins had a weapons’ locker, weight set and various military equipment. The cabin was locked, but some of the boat bunnies wouldn’t have cared. More than one owner had come back to find their boat stripped of everything valuable and their “girlfriend” gone. Which was why he called it “Bluebeard’s Stateroom.” And another reason not to pick up boat bunnies.
He considered what he wanted to do for the evening while running the lackanookie in the background. Fixing dinner and eating alone was getting tiresome but so was going out alone. Finally, he decided to just bite the bullet and go over to Rumrunners II and get dinner. They didn’t cook mahi as well as he did, but he also didn’t have to do the dishes.
As he pulled out of the club in the truck, the air conditioning going at full blast, he considered, again, whether he should get a pussy-mobile. He’d kept the truck even though he could buy any car in the world for some of the same reasons that he didn’t like boat bunnies. If he met a girl, he wanted her to like him for him, not for his money. So far that hadn’t worked very well, so he was considering getting a car that would reflect his… how did Pierson put it that one time… “comfortable” status. A Ferrari would do that but he really liked the look of the Jaguar XK-8. It was just a sweet-looking car. Not as hot as the Ferrari or the Bentley Fantom, but… great lines. Like a woman’s body. And much more of an eye magnet than a five-year-old pickup truck.
There were people sitting outside of Rumrunners, some of them quite pleasantly female. But it meant the place was probably packed. He wandered into the open air front and got in line for the hostess anyway.
“How many in your party?” the cute little blonde asked. Quite shapely, she reminded him of Bambi, same pretty face and curly blonde hair. As he thought that he got hit with a nasty flashback of the blonde bending over to scavenge ammo from the dead, arms and legs covered in blood and lovely blonde bush reflecting in the red flare light. “Are you okay?” the girl asked hurriedly.