-14-
The interior of the house looked like it had come straight out of some British period piece television show. Just inside a hall lined with an exposed brick wall and wood beams on the ceiling, the bags they’d prepared back in Maryland were waiting near a pot-bellied stove. They picked up their packs and made their way through the house. Tall bookcases adorned a reading room filled with plush leather seats and surrounded by walls stained by tobacco smoke. The kitchen was fully stocked with dishware and a tea kettle on the stove. Flowery wallpaper completing the dated appearance.
All throughout the house, O’Neil saw signs of what life had been like before the war, from periodicals dated just before the collapse to clothes in a laundry hamper that he presumed hadn’t yet been washed. There was a bedroom filled with dolls and frilly dresses; another chockful of posters celebrating Manchester United and others depicting video game characters O’Neil just vaguely recognized.
Cots and sleeping bags had been placed throughout the bedrooms.
“Guess we’re sleeping on the floor,” Loeb said.
“That a problem for you?” Van asked.
“Not at all,” Loeb said. “I’ve dealt with worse. You can give me a concrete bed if I can shut my eyes without being eaten by a Skull.”
“You can say that again,” Tate said, dropping his pack near a pile of blankets in one corner of the room. He shook his head.
Loeb dropped his pack near a cot. “Anyone see a sat phone around here I can use? I’d like to talk to Sofie and the girls, just to let them know I’m okay.”
“I’m going to go see the commander anyway,” O’Neil said. “I’ll check with him.”
As he walked down the hall, he tried not to think about what had happened to the family that had left all this behind. Because in the master bedroom, the one where several desks had been pushed together and a few American Naval officers were conferring over maps and charts of the area, he saw claw marks in the walls and along the doorframe, splintered wood that could only have come from one source.
“LT,” O’Neil said, entering the room.
Smith was one of the officers hunched over a desk. He looked up. “O’Neil,” he said, leaving the desk. “I hadn’t realized you already made it inside.”
“Just got in a minute ago.”
Smith let out a long breath, closing his eyes for a second. “I already heard what happened to McLean.”
“Damn shame.” O’Neil paused, suppressing the emotion boiling in his gut that he was too damn tired to deal with now. “We saw stuff that, frankly, I never thought I’d see with the Skulls.”
“I’m planning to debrief here in two hours.”
“You have time now, sir? I don’t want to wait until then.”
Smith looked back at the desks where the other officers were. “I can make time, of course.”
O’Neil told him everything. From the way the Skulls had seemed to leave the area alone when they had made infil to the beasts that had acted like humans after the ambush to the way the Skulls had hit their positions with a vengeance, in a seemingly concerted effort.
Smith nodded along until O’Neil finished. “You know I don’t ever want to doubt what you tell me you see in the field. I believe you believe what you saw, but I want to make absolutely certain before I run up the ladder with this: you really, truly saw Skulls using weapons?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And these weren’t just some people pretending to be Skulls?”
“No, sir. These were beasts using weapons.”
“It just doesn’t fit with anything the scientists have told us,” Smith said. “You’ve heard it yourself. Those Skulls’ brains look like cottage cheese. They aren’t intelligent beings.”
“I understand the skepticism, but I saw what I saw. Everyone in Alpha saw it, too.”
“Delta? Charlie?”
O’Neil shook his head. “Too much fog when they were moving into overwatch. I don’t know if they ever got a look at the monsters we faced.”
“I see.” Smith scratched at his chin.
“I’m telling you, sir. I’m not making things up.”
“First thing that’s going to happen when I tell this story is someone behind a desk tells me you all are traumatized because of McLean.”
O’Neil knew Smith wasn’t trying to antagonize him, but he couldn’t help the heat rushing to his cheeks. “You know that damn well isn’t true. I’ve been through the shit more times than I can count. I can handle myself. My team can handle themselves. This isn’t some group hallucination.”
“I appreciate that,” Smith said. “Like I said, I’ll run this up the chain. This is a first for us. I have to say, I just don’t want to believe it. It could literally change everything we know about the Skulls. Any idea why these monsters were different than all the ones we’ve been fighting back at home?”
O’Neil shook his head. “We brought back one of the beasts I’m talking about with a drum of whatever the Russians loaded up in that convoy. The eggheads can pick that shit apart all they want. Maybe they’ll find out what makes those things tick.”
“Understood,” Smith said. “Good thinking bringing one back. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”
O’Neil certainly hoped so. He trusted Smith. But he just didn’t know what would happen to all this information once it left Smith’s hand. The guy was an advocate for them, but even he couldn’t keep all the wheels of the military bureaucracy moving in the right direction by himself. The worst thing that could happen was that this might be forgotten or written off when it reached the intel analysts. That they would dismiss it like Smith had warned as a one-time event and later, these armed Skulls, would come to bite them all in the ass.
“Anything else you need from me?” Smith asked.
“Loeb was asking about a sat phone to call the ladies back home.”
Smith glanced back at the desk again. “I’m afraid I don’t have everything we need to set up shop here yet. We’ve only got the one right now, and I can’t be having guys making personal calls on it. I have to keep it open.”
“I understand, sir,” O’Neil said.
“Maybe after we debrief with the others, the rest of our gear will arrive. For now, rest up. You’re going to need it.”
O’Neil tucked into a sleeping bag in the bedroom he was sharing with the rest of his team. Rain continued to tap against the window and roof in a soft rhythm. The almost peaceful ambience it imbued belied the horrors beyond the fortified walls of this hamlet in the English countryside.
Already Tate’s snores carried through the room. Van tossed around in his cot. Loeb was quiet, but O’Neil figured the guy probably hadn’t passed out yet. While Loeb hadn’t made too much of a fuss, O’Neil could tell he’d been disappointed by the inability to reach his wife and girls.
Somehow, he was the one person on the teams O’Neil knew who could make a family work. Most of the guys he served with had been through their litany of pissed-off girlfriends and divorces, lost friendships and strained connections with siblings.
Truth was, they had all joined the SEALs because they had felt a higher purpose. A call to duty that most back home had never answered so strongly, no matter how patriotic they claimed to be.
Often, they were given a choice between their careers in the SEALs and their families back at home. They could never say no to the SEALs, to the mission, but they could say no to their families. Missed birthdays, skipped Christmases, and a thousand other moments that could not be replaced all got pushed to the back of the SEALs’ minds when the good old US of A came calling.
Every time they donned the uniform and took a bird straight into the shit, the families were reminded they always came second. Yet somehow Loeb avoided becoming another statistic, another broken family because of the sacrifices he made every day for his country.