He returned to the table as Ritchie was telling the others about a trip he’d made to New York City over the weekend with his fiancée, Monica, and how they’d enjoyed the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall, ice skating at Rockefeller Center, shopping at Barney’s and Bergdorf’s. Monica had expensive tastes, and Ritchie, who had grown up in a trailer park on the outskirts of Dallas, seemed not to mind.
The two of them were planning an April wedding in D.C., and Crocker wondered after they were married how much longer a strong-willed, financially independent woman like Monica would want Ritchie to continue in SEAL teams. She’d want to have him around to travel with her, ski, play, have fun. Even though the pay was decent (around $100,000 a year, including his E-6 base pay, special skills pay, imminent danger pay, special assignment pay, and reenlistment installments), the hours sucked. It was the most exciting and challenging work Crocker could imagine. But the many days away from home wreaked havoc on relationships and families.
He was more aware of this than ever as he watched people pass by on their way to spend the Christmas holidays with loved ones. They had a right to be happy, especially this time of year. And a right to be protected, too, which is where he and his team fit in-to guard the sheep from the wolves.
Across the table he saw Mancini tearing into a huge mound of salad.
“You become a vegetarian?” Crocker asked.
“Teresa put me on a diet,” the big man said, raising his thick eyebrows. “All the fresh veggies you can eat. A prescribed amount of protein. No rice, pasta, bread, cookies, or cake.”
“Good luck.” He had watched Mancini adopt and slip off numerous food regimens in the past. Not only was his wife an amazing cook, but the guy loved to eat.
“How many years you been on the teams?” Crocker asked him.
“Four years with Team Two. Eight fun-filled years now with Six-excuse me, DEVGRU. How about you?”
“Two years with Team One, three with Two, and twelve now with DEVGRU.”
“We’re the old-timers,” Mancini said, glancing at Ritchie, Cal, Davis, and Akil sitting next to them, ribbing each other and cracking jokes. “Why’d you ask? You thinking of retiring?”
“Hell no,” Crocker groaned. The idea repulsed him. Even though he was in his early forties, he had no plans for slowing down.
“Me neither,” Mancini said, wiping salad dressing off his lips and beard. “And soon we’re going to have some new toys to play with.”
“What do you mean?”
“I spent a day last week with the people of DARPA.” The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, was the most active and experimental military technology research facility on the planet.
“Yeah? What’d you see?” Part of DEVGRU’s mission was to test the latest weapons and gear. For his part, Crocker tended to put more stock in the value of training and preparing first-class operators than in technology.
“They showed me some wicked cool new gadgets,” Mancini said, grinning like a kid on Christmas morning. “I got to fire a BAE laser cannon, which shoots a laser blast as far as a mile and a half. They’re developing a version of it to deploy on navy ships, to temporarily blind pirates and other terrorists. I fired a handheld version that shoots out this green beam of light like something out of Star Wars.”
“No shit.”
“But the most radical thing by far was the invisibility cloak they’re developing.”
“Invisibility? Really?” It sounded like something out of one of the Harry Potter movies he’d watched with his daughter.
Mancini said, “A couple years from now, you’ll be able to wrap this cloak around you and walk into a building or enemy encampment completely unseen.”
“Are you serious?” Crocker asked, checking the score on the TV beyond Manny’s shoulder. The Heat were ahead by seven points with four minutes to play.
“It only works for a fraction of a second now, but the engineers at DARPA expect to improve it soon,” Mancini explained.
Crocker feigned interest; his mind was elsewhere. “How’s it work?”
“It’s made of sheets of carbon wrapped up into tubes. Each page is barely the size of a single molecule, but it’s hard as steel. The sheets are heated electronically, which causes light to bend away from the carbon nanotube sheet. It’s basically the same as creating the pool-of-water effect you see when you’re driving on a desert highway. They’re also experimenting with metamaterials, natural materials that have a positive refractive index, to make tanks and ships invisible.”
“Amazing,” Crocker said, signaling the waitress.
“Isn’t it?” Mancini leaned across the table and whispered in Crocker’s ear. “And they gave me something for us to try out.”
“What?”
“You’ll see. They’re tiny little drones, the size of my thumbnail. I’ve got two of them taped into the lining of my suitcase.”
“Cool.”
They landed early Christmas Eve morning at the Simón Bolívar International Airport. A tall Russian Venezuelan woman named Zoya from the Tara-Omega travel agency met them at the gate and helped them through Venezuelan immigration and customs. They were traveling as survival experts under the employ of a Canadian company called Balzac Expeditions and were purportedly in Venezuela to organize a trek into the Amazon jungle.
“I’ve booked you for a one-week stay at the InterContinental Tamanaco Caracas, which is right in the heart of one of the city’s most prestigious shopping and business districts, Las Mercedes,” Zoya said as her heels clicked down the terminal concourse. She seemed eager and efficient, and looked very young.
“If you need to extend your stay, you can continue at the same rate,” she explained in perfect English.
“Great,” Crocker said, half asleep. At 6 a.m. the terminal seemed vast and deserted. “And you got us a vehicle?”
“A one-year-old Honda Pilot. Will that meet your needs?”
“I don’t see why not.”
She led them to the silver SUV, which was parked in a three-story lot near the terminal. “One last thing,” she said, handing over the keys. “The security situation in Caracas is deplorable. Currently we have an average of one murder per hour just in the capital. So keep your eyes open and don’t travel alone, especially at night. Street gangs here like to rob and kidnap foreigners.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Crocker said.
She glanced at his biceps and added, “You guys look like you know how to defend yourselves, but be careful.” Then she handed him her card. “Call me if you need anything. That’s my cell phone.”
“We will,” Akil said with a smile. “Maybe you can show us around later tonight?”
“Tonight is Christmas Eve,” she explained, holding her reddish-brown hair back and shielding her eyes from the early morning sun. “I’m spending it with my family.”
“Then have a Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas to you, too.”
Fog shrouded the emerald-green mountains on both sides of the Autopista Caracas-La Guaira. When it cleared, Crocker saw thousands of little shanties clinging to cliffs. The local government called them “informal settlements” but they were really enormous, sprawling slums. Modern office towers dotted the narrow valley ahead. The Garmin GPS map on the dashboard indicated that they were traveling roughly north to south, from the airport on the Caribbean coast to the capital city, which lay inland.
“Venezuela is a country of approximately twenty-nine million people,” Mancini reported. “About a fourth of them live here in Caracas, which as you can see offers limited space because of its topography. So the city has an enormous housing problem on top of the huge disparity between rich and poor.”
“Good to know,” Ritchie said from the rear seat.
“Despite Chávez’s socialist Bolivarian revolution, which was supposed to redistribute wealth to the poor, the country suffers from double-digit inflation, soaring crime, chronic shortages due to government meddling, and the expropriation of successful businesses and ranches,” Mancini added.