Still feeling unsettled, he went to see his CO, Captain Sutter, and told him he was ready to deploy.
“Come back in three weeks and we’ll talk,” Sutter said bluntly.
“I’m ready now, sir,” Crocker insisted.
“No, you’re not.”
Sutter ordered him to see the team psychologist, Dr. Petrovian, a jovial guy with a pink face and round wire-rimmed glasses.
“What’s on your mind?” Petrovian asked.
Crocker didn’t want to talk about himself but knew Sutter would be on him if he didn’t. “So,” he said, “I’ve been a little on edge. The last mission we went on was intense. A number of my guys got hurt.”
“I heard you were interrogated and tortured. How do you feel about that?”
“Angry.”
“How did the loss of control affect you?”
“I wanted it back.”
“Are you afraid of being captured again?”
“It’s the third time it’s happened. I’m getting used to it. Not really.”
“Are you worried that you won’t be sent on more missions?”
“No. But I’m dying to finish this one!”
Petrovian nodded, then cleaned his glasses on the front of his button-down shirt. “You say you’re on edge. Does that mean you’re having trouble sleeping?”
“I’m having trouble sitting still.”
Petrovian was aware of Crocker’s aversion to medication, so he administered the same psych evaluation Crocker had taken before, with the usual stupid questions, then recommended meditation. So three times a day-after his morning run, after he returned from shooting at the range, and just before going to bed-Crocker sat alone in a dark room with a candle burning and listened to the flow of thoughts in his head. He didn’t try to stop or control them, he just listened.
What he learned was: One, he had a burning desire to find Alizadeh and kill the son of a bitch. Two, he was disappointed in Holly. Even though he loved her deeply, she wasn’t as available to him as before, and he needed her, which bothered him. And three, he spent a lot of time fantasizing about Mercedes, who had e-mailed him a picture of herself standing with her back to the camera on a beach at sunset, wearing a bikini. Under the photo was the message: “Happy New Year! XOXO, M.”
The meditation helped him focus. It also got him out of his own head.
He called his sister, who had been leaving messages for him at the house telling him she was worried about their dad. When he called his father, he sounded good. They talked about the Redskins making the NFL playoffs and the benefit his dad was organizing for the VFW.
“You still friends with that woman?” Crocker asked.
“You mean Carla?”
“Yeah, Carla. How did things work out with her landlord?”
“She moved into another apartment.”
“How does she like the new one?”
“She likes it a lot. Why?”
He didn’t feel right about grilling his father or asking if he was giving Carla money-which is what his sister was worried about-so he let it go.
Next he went to visit Ritchie, who’d just returned from three weeks at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, where he’d had reconstructive surgery on his face and jaw. Ritchie was excited that in another two days he’d be able to eat solid food.
“I’m dying to sink my new teeth into a burger and fries,” he said. “I think about it, even more than sex.”
Crocker was glad to see that Ritchie’s outlook was positive and his face had almost healed. Except for some discoloration in the skin they had grafted from his ass and tightness under his jaw, he looked the same.
“Is it okay if I call you butt-face from now on?” Crocker joked as he left.
“You can call me whatever you want. Just call.”
Cal was in Sacramento visiting his sister. Akil was snorkeling somewhere in the Caribbean with his German girlfriend. Tré was convalescing at his parents’ home in D.C. Mancini was busy replacing the roof on his garage.
When Davis’s very pregnant wife saw Crocker standing at the door of their blue and white split-level, concern quickly crossed her face. “You taking him away again?” she asked.
“No, it’s a social visit,” Crocker answered, shivering in the cold.
The two SEALs bundled up Davis’s one-year-old son, took him to a nearby playground, and loaded him into a swing.
“How’s it going?” Crocker asked.
“Better,” Davis said as he pushed his son, who screamed with delight every time the swing ascended. “I had a hard time…back there.”
“Barinas?”
“Yeah.” His blue eyes seemed even bluer than before.
“It’s perfectly natural in our line of work to get scared shitless sometimes,” Crocker said.
“You ever think about the people you kill?” Davis asked.
Crocker didn’t like to admit it, and he never mentioned it to other members of his team, but sometimes he felt a kind of kinship and almost a little sympathy for the men he battled. Not sick bastards like Alizadeh, who terrorized, maimed, and murdered innocents, but common soldiers and guards like the two he and Tré had killed in the store in Juárez.
“Yeah,” Crocker said.
“Me, too.”
Alex Rinehart’s grandmother descended the basement steps of her brick colonial house and found her grandson seated at a desk in front of the window. His brow deeply furrowed in concentration, he studied an open book and scribbled something into a spiral notebook.
She set the tray with a glass of nonfat milk and a plate of freshly baked Toll House cookies beside him and read the title of the book-Advanced Quantum Physics Workbook.
“My,” she gushed. “Is this something you’re studying for school?”
Alex looked up at her and smiled with a look of pure love that touched her heart.
“Oh, Alex!” she exclaimed, ruffling his unruly dark hair and hugging him to her chest.
He squirmed free because he didn’t like to be touched, grabbed a cookie off the plate, then quickly looked up at his grandmother to see if she was okay.
She was. She’d grown used to his strange behavior, and understood that despite his unease around others, he had strong feelings and real affection for people. But she was worried. Recently his teachers and therapists had observed that he was withdrawing further. The drugs Dr. Struthers had prescribed hadn’t seemed to stem this process or even help. This was ominous, the doctor had warned, and could lead to Alex completely retreating into a world of his own.
He devoured a second cookie, gulped down half the milk, and returned to the book with an intensity that startled her.
“Alex, darling, is that something you’re studying at school?” his grandmother asked again.
Instead of answering, he turned to a clean page of the notebook and started writing furiously, covering the paper with notations and equations.
“Alex, can you hear me?”
He kept writing as though she wasn’t there, stopped, rubbed the top of his head vigorously, ripped the page out of the notebook, crumpled it, tossed it onto the floor, then resumed writing on a new sheet.
“Alex…” she whispered, picking up the balled paper and depositing it in the wire basket.
If he heard her, he didn’t stop or acknowledge her in any way. She literally felt heat rising from his head.
“I love you, Alex. I want you to know that. There are a lot of good people in the world. I’m sure there are some nice boys at your school who’d like to be your friends.”
His concentration was so intense that his grandmother couldn’t tell whether he was enjoying himself or in agony. The pace of his writing seemed to pick up. Alex was working himself into such a frenzy that his grandmother found it disturbing to watch.