SEAL Team Six Hunt the Scorpion(4)

A wise man named Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen; few in pursuit of the goal.” Crocker had committed those words to memory. They were his mantra. Don’t worry about the fuckups and bumps in the road, focus on your goal.

The goal was to protect his countrymen from people who wanted to destroy their way of life, take away their freedoms, shred the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

That wasn’t going to happen as long as Tom Crocker was alive. No way. He hadn’t earned his reputation as Chief Warrant Officer Manslaughter for nothing. People oohed and aahed over high-tech drones, listening systems, heat imaging. But when real nasty, difficult shit needed getting done, it was sheepdogs like him and his men who had to step in to protect the sheep from the wolves.

Crocker followed the LSO down steep metal steps and through a tight corridor that led to the captain’s quarters. Photos of the ship’s namesake, Congressman Carl Vinson—the only man to serve more than fifty years in the U.S. House of Representatives—lined the walls. Another bald-headed, sharp-eyed man in a suit. All Crocker wanted when he grew old was a shack in the woods, his wife—hopefully—and a means of securing food and water.

The LSO stopped and opened the door to a state-of-the-art conference room. The captain—an energetic man with a lantern jaw and short-cropped gray hair—stood and squeezed Crocker’s hand.

“Welcome aboard, Warrant. Glad you could make it.”

“It’s good to be back, sir.”

“Take a seat and we’ll drop the disco ball.”

Crocker, still dressed in his desert cammies, barely got out a question—“Sir, what’s going on?”—before the lights dimmed and a panel of four large color LED monitors descended from the ceiling and lit up. On one of them he recognized the gaunt face of his CO back at SEAL headquarters in Virginia, which caused him to sit up at attention. Instinctively, he started to wonder what he had done wrong.

“Crocker, is that you?” His CO, Captain Alan Sutter, was squinting through wire-rimmed glasses.

“Affirmative, sir.” Crocker focused on the bump where the captain’s nose had been smashed during Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada, 1983, when his chute had failed to open and he crashed into a tree. Lost a mouthful of teeth, too.

“Can you hear me?”

“See and hear you clear as day, sir.” His CO was damn lucky to be alive. So was he.

“Good.”

“How are things back at headquarters?”

His CO didn’t answer, cutting the small talk. “A critical situation has come up. Somewhat of a strategic emergency. Demands a swift response.”

“My men and I are ready, sir, to do whatever’s needed.”

“We need someone we can trust with a very difficult scenario who’s deployed in the area,” Sutter continued.

Crocker was going to say “Difficult is my call sign,” but bravado didn’t go over well in SEAL teams. Operators were expected to be humble, do their jobs, and limit the chest pounding.

“I appreciate that, sir,” Crocker said instead, fighting through his exhaustion. He wasn’t twenty years old anymore but in his midforties. And even though he was in incredible shape, his body needed time to recover.

He could probably forget about resting tonight.

From the video monitor, his CO continued: “Involves a pirated cargo ship off the Somali coast.”

The word “pirated” intrigued Crocker. He’d heard stories of local gangs stopping cargo ships and even supertankers off the coast of East Africa and the Malacca Straits in Indonesia.

An aide slipped a pad and pencil in front of him, and Crocker took notes as his CO and two officers from the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center related the ship’s position and various details, including info gleaned from the vessel’s emergency signal and satellite surveillance.

Crocker was wondering why a cargo ship of Australian registry was getting so much attention when his CO mentioned that it was transporting “sensitive nuclear material” from Melbourne to Marseille.

Among Crocker’s various duties, he happened to be the WMD officer at SEAL Team Six. “You referring to yellowcake, sir, or something else?” he asked. Yellowcake was uranium ore concentrate. Once it was enriched in a process that involved turning it into a gas called uranium hexafluoride, it could be used to fuel nuclear bombs.

“The exact nature of the material is classified. It’s not dangerous in its current state. But it’s important. Very goddamn important.”

“I understand, sir.”

“The White House wants this handled immediately.”