Chapter One
Don’t raise more demons than you can lay down.
—Old English proverb
TWO WEEKS later, U.S. Navy Chief Warrant Officer Tom Crocker and three of his SEAL Team Six teammates, all dressed as civilians, were flying at 32,000 feet over Mount Erciyes in central Turkey when the Emirates Airlines Boeing 777 they were in hit an air pocket. Akil (full name Akil Okasha El-Daly, aka Akil Daly), who was standing in the aisle, lost his balance and landed in Crocker’s lap.
“Do I look like Santa Claus?” Crocker asked.
“Sorry, boss,” the handsome Egyptian American said, smiling, trying to pull himself up.
Crocker, the assault leader of Blue Team of U.S. Navy SEAL Team Six, aka the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group—the premier antiterrorism arm of the U.S. military—lifted the 220-pound former marine sergeant up and set him back in the aisle like he was a little boy.
Then he pulled off his earphones. Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” seeped into the drone of the engines. The forty-two-year-old team leader had recently discovered that fifties jazz put him in a mellow groove. Something about the 5/4 rhythm and the cool precision of the melody. Gentle, economical, restrained.
“You’re one strong mother,” Akil said, looking down at the manila folder on the middle seat. “Don’t you ever take a break?” Pushing back his bristly black hair, smoothing the sky blue Nike polo over his muscular torso.
Take a break from what? Crocker wanted to ask. Working out? Studying? Preparing for the mission? Listening to music? Trying to relax?
Crocker didn’t answer. Akil held on to Crocker’s headrest and leaned over, flashing his pearly whites like he was performing for the other passengers. “You pumped?”
A fifteen-year veteran of the Navy SEALs and dozens of top-secret ops to Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and other hot spots around the world, Crocker was too disciplined to talk about a mission with foreigners within earshot. So he said, “You’re referring to the climb, right?”
“That’s right, boss,” Akil answered. “The climb.”
The climb was the team’s cover. Hours after the U.S. embassy bombing in Rabat, CIA officers had picked up the trail of the man who ran away from the pickup before it exploded in front of the gate. They learned that his name was Mohammed Saddiq and he had managed to survive, even though the blast had blown him off his feet and forward, leaving lacerations and cuts from the back of his head to his ankles. Bleeding through his clothes and feverish, Saddiq had managed to board a flight to Rome. CIA operatives found him in the Italian city two days after the bombing, hiding in an airport bathroom.
Crocker looked up at Akil and said, “It’s a training climb to give you guys a feel for what it’s gonna be like when we really do attempt to summit K2.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Piece of cake.”
“We’ll see.” In addition to being the assault leader of Blue Team, Crocker was ST-6’s lead climber. SEAL stands for Sea, Air, and Land, and Crocker was determined to prepare the men on his team for any contingency, including dealing with the most treacherous terrain on the planet.
Previously, he had led his men on ascents of Denali, Mount Whitney, and winter ascents on Grand Teton and Mount Washington (the latter featured unimaginably bad weather, with gusts up to 230 miles an hour). Physical challenges were his bread and butter, his manna. He lived for them.
Leering, Akil said, “I hear Edyta might be there.”
Edyta Potocka. Early forties. Legendary climber. Third woman to summit Mount Everest. “Yeah. What about her?”
She and Crocker had spent a night together eighteen years before in a tent in the Himalayas. This was before he’d married his current wife. Neither had bathed for days. He remembered it as an odd mixture of wrestling and sex, with no words spoken. Seeking warmth and relief in each other’s bodies as frigid winds roared outside.
“Hot, huh?”
“Kind of attractive in a gritty Eastern European way.”
“I’m looking forward to meeting her.”
“I bet you are.” Crocker stroked his strong chin. He knew that anything with a pair of tits under the age of sixty was prey to the single Omar Sharif look-alike, who consistently claimed to have bedded over three hundred women.
Akil lowered his voice like he was passing a secret. “You read the file on AZ?”
Crocker nodded, picked the folder off the middle seat, and pushed it into the backpack on the floor in front of him. He’d practically committed all twenty-some pages to memory. Crimes ranging from bombings, to torture, to kidnapping and murder.
“What’d you think?”