Seal Team Six Hunt the Wolf(17)

He planned for his current team to climb approximately 10,000 feet beyond that, without supplemental oxygen. But they would be taking the ascent in stages.

The plane twisted violently right, seconds before it touched down.

“Hold on!”

Crocker, Akil, and Davis and Mancini, a row behind them, bounced in their seats and were tossed from side to side. A dark-skinned Tibetan-looking woman seated across the aisle leaned forward and threw up on her red flats.

Crocker passed her a headband that he kept in his backpack to clean herself with. She didn’t want to take it.

“Go ahead. You need it more than I do,” he said in English.

She nodded and replied: “Shukran.” (Thank you.)

“Aafwaan.” (You’re welcome.)

Outside the little concrete terminal, Crocker breathed the thin air tinged with the smell of burning charcoal, then caught his reflection in the building’s plate-glass window.

The modern world wasn’t an easy place for a warrior with a conscience to find his way.

A girl had been killed and Zaman had escaped.

As the assault leader of ST-6/Blue, Tom Crocker carried a large responsibility on his shoulders—not just for his team, but for the millions of Americans it was their job to protect. Lou Donaldson was right. Zaman probably was planning more attacks against Americans.

Crocker badly wanted another shot at him. But he literally had to climb a mountain first.

Crocker had faced many extreme physical challenges in his decades as a SEAL: jungle ops in the Amazon, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru, Honduras, Bolivia, and Panama; air assaults in Grenada and Afghanistan; grueling mountain runs in Ethiopia and Korea; desert gunfights in the Middle East; and undercover ops in Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia.

Terrorists generally didn’t have much to lose. Many of them had experienced day-to-day combat, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, and the pangs of starvation. That’s why he always pushed his men to strengthen and further develop their combat mind-set. They needed to believe they could take on the most perilous, difficult enemy, and prevail.

As he waited with the others for their gear to be unloaded from the belly of the jet, Crocker’s mind doubled back.

How did one fully serve one’s country, which he believed in most cases projected good in the world, when duty to country sometimes involved inflicting violence and death on the innocent?

Physical danger he could handle, but the pull of conscience and the need to answer to civil society—the sheep—was more difficult.

That’s why the little girl’s death continued to gnaw at him.

Some warriors found relief in gambling, womanizing, or drinking. Others put their feet up and, beer in hand, numbed their brains with TV. He preferred to be outdoors, climbing, running, skiing, hiking, biking, kayaking, always physically challenging himself.

For one thing, he had huge reserves of energy. Secondly, as a kid growing up in New England, he’d spent weekends and vacations in the wilderness camping with his brother, sisters, and parents. That’s where he’d learned to appreciate and respect the power, beauty, and majesty of nature.

Nature made no judgments, and represented truth. Growth and destruction. Death and rebirth.

The pride he felt in being a small part of it had pushed him to develop his body. A skinny teenager, Crocker had spent many sweaty all-nighters in his father’s garage, lifting weights to Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, the Stones. He became a fanatic. Some nights he’d work out until an hour or two before his mother got him and his siblings up and ready for school.

He sat remembering those days. The simplicity of knowing what was expected of him; the loving warmth of his family.

“Legs” by ZZ Top just happened to be playing on the cassette player of the multicolored Nissan cab. An old Ford Taurus followed them, carrying Akil and the rest of their gear.

He panicked for a moment, thinking they’d lost Ritchie, then recalled that he was back in Islamabad with the attractive nurse, waiting for his leg to heal.

The gray-haired driver negotiated potholes as the sweet smell of barbecued lamb wafted through the cracked and taped side window.

“Jesus, that smells good,” Mancini remarked.

“Sure does,” Crocker echoed.

Davis, his stomach still halfway up his throat from the landing, looked at the two men and shook his head. “You guys got to be kidding.”

The joke was that Mancini had a stomach like a cement mixer. He could eat anything.

Mancini: “Boss, you think we can stop and try some of that lamb kebab?”

“We’ll eat at the hotel.”

“Doubt if the grub there will taste half as good as that. The stuff they sell on the streets is always better.”