That’s when it occurred to him that he might be experiencing the symptoms of an incipient stroke or heart attack. Starting to panic, he grabbed his chest and fell forward. He couldn’t stop. The communication between his brain and muscles had been compromised somehow.
Without saying anything, Dr. Nikasa caught his head in her hands and guided it into her lap. He felt the fine wool against his cheek and her hard thighs under the skirt. He wanted to put his arms around her and hold her but lost consciousness first.
Chapter Four
If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.
– Lao-Tzu
Crocker lay on a lounge chair by the Caesars Palace swimming pool in the ninety-degree Las Vegas heat, his skin turning reddish brown from the Nevada sun, obscuring the navy anchor on his forearm, a snake wrapped around a dagger bearing the legend “Too Tough to Die.”
The place he thought he really should be was the Ukraine, but his CO, Captain Sutter, had sent Mancini with him to back up Jeri Blackwell. Crocker suspected it was really an excuse to give him time to get his head together. Everyone on the team knew he was suffering from anxiety and the aftereffects of a string of difficult missions.
Despite the sumptuous surroundings and the nearly naked bodies, his mind drifted back to his recent phone call with Holly. She was happy, she said, with her new life. She had told him in no uncertain terms that their marriage was over. All he could do was pour out his heart to her, as well as he could. No sap; no squishy sentiment. He simply told her, “I love you with all my heart and have always operated under the assumption that we would spend the rest of our lives together. I don’t want to be with anyone else.”
She had responded coolly, “I appreciate how you feel, Tom, but that’s not a possibility anymore.”
Bam! Door slammed in his face. A whole bucketful of hurt.
Part of it, he knew, was his responsibility, part of it hers. The fact was that while focusing on his work with Black Cell, his marriage had unraveled. He was fully aware that he and Holly had problems. Both of them had been suffering from different forms of PTSD-Crocker from his various deployments, Holly after she had witnessed the execution of a colleague in Tripoli.
But how can you know what’s going on in someone else’s head?
He had given her space, which is what she said she wanted. They had both sought therapy and supported each other. They both took pride in their physical and mental toughness. They worked things out. The bond between them had seemed rock solid. But it wasn’t. Okay, yes, he had gone on another deployment when she’d wanted him to stay home. But this is what he did for a living. It was his calling, his mission. Didn’t she understand that?
Maybe she did. Maybe that was the problem. Whenever it was a choice between his teams and her, he always chose the teams. But not in his heart! He carried her and Jenny there always. Thinking of them got him through the tough spots.
He had no interest in fighting with her. He wanted Holly to be happy. He promised her half of everything, but…how could you love someone and do something like this? How could you build so much together and throw it away? Maybe the marriage had never meant as much to her as it had to him. Obviously, she had been imagining a future without him for some time. But it didn’t matter. Neither did the beach house, the cars, or their other possessions. Neither did the money he was still sending her every week to cover expenses.
But he still wanted his old life back. Even his eighteen-year-old daughter, Jenny, had moved out and into her own Virginia Beach apartment, where she was living with a friend while she worked three days a week at a clothing store and attended community college.
He wouldn’t feel sorry for himself. That wasn’t in his DNA. He still had his health, the job he loved, his daughter, brother, sister, father, and teammates.
He turned to Mancini soaking up the sun beside him. The two of them had spent the past several days at the nearby Nellis Air Force Base firing range and kill house. Endless rounds of 5.56mm and 9mm ammo fired at paper targets. Endless repetition of cover tactics, fire angles, engagement points. They had been sent to train SEALs fresh out of BUD/S in desert tactics and close quarters combat (CQC).
By 4 p.m. it had been a long hot day, but Crocker’s mind and body still wouldn’t settle down.
Maybe I should take a run in the desert, or swim laps in the pool.
Then he remembered he couldn’t. He was about to meet a young woman that an ST-6 teammate named Storm had set him up with. All the guys had been looking out for him, which meant a lot.
“You hear from anything from Jeri?” he asked, wondering again if their current assignment wasn’t really an excuse to get him some R &R.
“She told us to hang tight,” Mancini replied out of the side of his mouth. Much of his face was covered with thick dark stubble. “She’ll call us if she needs us.”
“Yeah.”
“Where’s the babe you’re supposed to meet?”
He glanced at his Suunto watch-the one Holly had given him. “I don’t know if she’s a babe,” he responded, “but she’s a performer. A gymnast and dancer, according to Storm.”
“I bet.”
The introduction had come after Storm heard that Crocker was going to Nellis. He said, “You two might hit it off. Cyndi’s a fun girl-kind and smart. When you’re out there, you should look her up.”
Over the past several days he and Cyndi had exchanged e-mails. He learned that she had a five-year-old daughter and had moved to Vegas from Spokane a year ago. She was currently part of the Cirque du Soleil troop performing its show O at the Bellagio-described as an aquatic masterpiece of surrealism and theatrical romance. He had a ticket to see it tomorrow night and was nervous about meeting her. Felt awkward and unprepared.
“You stoked?” Mancini asked over the top of the magazine he was reading-his arms, neck, and torso covered with tattoos and scars; his longish dark hair masking the place on his head where he’d been grazed by a terrorist’s bullet in a Paris hotel elevator.
“Kind of. Yeah. What’re you reading?”
“An article about fractals. Images of dynamic systems found in nature-like trees, rivers, coastlines, clouds, even a young lady’s eyeballs. They derive from the principle of recursion but scale differently than other geometric figures.”
“You’re a fucking freak, you know that?”
“Thanks, and back atcha. Who got up this morning at six a.m. for a fifteen-mile run in the desert?”
Crocker smiled. He still had a sense of humor about himself. You performed to the limit of your abilities and hoped for the best. The fact that all individuals were islands held apart by ignorance, distrust, and fear wasn’t his problem to solve. His job was to protect the sheep from the wolves. To help, protect, rescue, and heal people when he could.
Right now he was trying to relax and quiet the stream of second-guessing about the hearing next week. It seemed as though the entire population of Caesars Palace’s four towers had come to cool off in six pools that made up the Garden of the Gods Pool Oasis. Male and female conventioneers, tourists from Asia, vacationers, professional gamblers, high-end hookers, young partiers, confidence men, honeymooners, weekend revelers from L.A. fresh off Route 15. All seemed contained in their private bubbles, barely aware of one another and their surroundings.
When Crocker looked closely he saw that the statues were molded of plaster and resin, and many of the human bodies had been sculpted, tucked, and smoothed by surgeons.
“That her?” Mancini asked, pointing to an approaching tall, dark-haired woman in a leopard-print bikini and large designer sunglasses, her back straight, her chest and chin thrust forward as though she were a movie star attending a premiere.