The Edge of Trust: Team Edge (42 page)

Blood is atonement.

More pain.  Again and again.  Over and over.  When he screamed, she beat him harder.  When he cried, she called him names.  When he begged, she punished him longer.  Sometimes he wondered if she was going to kill him.  Most of the time he wished she would.

The nightmares always ended the same way.  With the unthinkable.  The unspeakable. 

His mother would strip, run her breasts across the abased welts, kiss him.  Tell him what a good, good boy he was.  And then she’d take him into her mouth and shame him even more. 

Night after night, the monster came, stealing the illusory protection of childhood away from him.

Oh yes, the monster in Sidney’s closet was real.

<><><>

Sidney bought his first computer on his fifteenth birthday.  By the time he was seventeen he owned two more, and could hack into almost any system in the world.  He wrote his own programs, blazed through firewalls, strolled through doors that were closed to millions, coded his own execution commands into the intercellular matrix of the Pentagon, and dreamed about ruling the galaxy.

He was a wizard.  A sorcerer of magic. 

A God.

He could render an entire operating system useless with the stroke of a key, a wave of a wand. 

He could also end a life.

Diane Waltham’s father should never have told him to get lost.  Shouldn’t have sneered at him or looked at him like he was less than zero, a non-person
who’d never be good enough to date his precious daughter.
 
Like he was a bug on the bottom of Waltham’s shiny black loafer.

Fuck that.

He was God.

A week later Sidney proved it. 

First he deleted old man Waltham’s bank account.  Twenty thousand in savings, poof, gone.  Twelve hundred in checking, nope, not anymore.  Credit cards?  Maxed out and over ninety days late.  Mortgage payment?  Five months behind.  Foreclosure imminent.  And that nice cushy accounting job?  Well, bummer for him when a sudden audit showed that the asshole had been skimming into an offshore bank account.

Boo-hoo, mother fucker.  Life over.

<><><>

Sidney’s eighteenth birthday was only three weeks away, he was almost a man, and inside he harbored a man’s rage.  A rage contained, suppressed for nearly a lifetime.  His preacher father was a pussy, his mother a whore.

She came to him as she always did, smelling of roses, nearly nude, with a bible in one hand and a belt in the other.  On this night, however, things would be different. 

Blood is life.

The first lash of the belt never touched his skin.

He became tall.  He became real.  He became the son of his mother. 

He loosed his rage, setting it upon the woman he’d once loved.  The woman he now despised. 

He bashed her skull in with a hammer until her brains spilled onto the floor, and as he watched her bleed, still reeling in the spiral of rage, he got his first legitimate erection. 

As he picked up the bible and started reading, he stroked himself.

Blood is atonement.

The monster in the closet was dead.

<><><>

Sidney never went to prison for killing his mother.  Instead, he spent three years in a state mental hospital pumped full of Thorazine.  Within the first six months, he became poor, sad Sidney whose mother had hideously abused him and, Holy Jesus, who wouldn’t crack, even kill, under that kind of mistreatment.  So poor, sad Sidney with the Thorazine shuffle, behaved, learned, and played the system.

The system was easy.  Passing his meds off was even easier.

His favorite place within the cold, sterile, keep-the-psychos-calm yellow walls, became the library.  The old saying about knowledge being power became his salvation.  And glory be, the patients’ library even had a computer they let poor, sad Sidney use.  After all, what harm could a chemically lobotomized man do? 

If they only knew.  By the second year of his stay, Sidney was spending most of his time writing codes again, hacking, becoming stronger and smarter, until one day he simply ceased to exist.

On a cloudless summer day, Sidney Matthews shuffled off the hospital grounds, and yes, the staff may have known him, but without records of his birth, his life, his stay, he simply disappeared off the face of the earth, never to be seen again. 

Chapter One

Friday, April 7
^th
  5:57 a.m.

Lieutenant Commander Jake Kincaid heard the
thwap
of rotors before the chopper swooped into view.  Shading his eyes, he scanned the horizon.  The early morning sun glimmered over the Persian Gulf, glinting treacherously off the Blackhawk helicopter as it came in hot and hungry for the tactical extraction of the eight men on the beach.  Whirling blades kicked up sand as the chopper waited impatiently for EDGE Team Two to reach it and board.

For the last ten minutes, Jake and his men had been hunkered down in a dirt alley behind an abandoned diner in a long line of gutted buildings sandwiched between a thirty foot cliff and a wide strip of beach.     

The sheer idiocy of this pickup scenario made Jake’s palms sweat.  Thanks to some Com guy’s Head Up Ass FUBAR, their 0300 primary pickup had been blown to hell.  Even though, according to intel, the situation on the ground was now supposedly secure, it was
broad daylight
for God’s sake, which left the chopper and his men way too vulnerable to enemy fire.  Crap, any lunatic with a gun could see them.

The pilot’s voice came over Jake’s headset.  “EDGE Two, this is Falcon six-eight.  State your position.  Over.”

Jake checked his GPS, keyed up his mike, and replied with their lat/long, then said, “Approximately zero-two-eight-zero meters south.  End building.  Over.”

“Copy.  I have a visual, over.”

Jake looked around for a second helo and didn’t see one.  “Falcon six-eight, you got an escort?”

“Neg.  No escort.  I say again, no escort.  Over.”

The pilot sounded young.  Really young.  Young generally meant little to no combat flight experience.  Since this wasn’t a freakin’ training op in the Everglades, Jake wasn’t happy that he was handing his team over to what sounded like a kid, or the fact that his regular pilot hadn’t shown.  “Where’s Falcon six-four?  Over.”

“Appendicitis, sir.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake.  You at least got a gunner?” 

“Gunner’s down.  I say again, no gunner.  Over.”

What the hell?  Covert extractions in a secure territory didn’t generally require much more than a helo and a pilot, but still.  Since the sun was now bright and blazing, this extraction wasn’t exactly covert anymore.  So, no escort, no spotter, no gunner.  No way.  Jake thought better about telling the pilot to kiss his ass and instead replied, “Abort, Falcon six-eight.  Abort, abort.”

“Negative, EDGE Two.  CO’s orders.  I’m running low on fuel here.  Exit is secure.  I say again, exit is secure.  Please move it, sir.  Acknowledge.”

Jake puffed out a breath and looked at his men, knowing they’d heard the entire exchange over their own headsets.  Even though this was his team and he was the one in charge, and therefore responsible, he respected his men and wanted their vote.  He got a nod from each man.  Okay then.  Decision made, he nodded back and spoke into his mike, “Affirm.  On our way.  Out.”

He watched the pilot pick a hover reference, toggle the stick and wait. 

Time to go.

He gave the signal and his men left the cover of the building to move forward down the beach.  Less than three hundred meters to freedom, and eventually, a cold beer.

Like Night Shield and Grey Dawn, EDGE didn’t officially exist.  Missions were never recorded, never documented, and if an operation went wrong, the U.S. government would deny their very existence.  Political credo 101: take the credit, deflect the blame.   

All a part of SPECWAR.  Black ops.  And so deeply buried only a handful of men in the Pentagon had even the slightest awareness of it. 

As a Navy SEAL Jake did as his country asked.  With EDGE, he did everything they didn’t ask, but wanted, and then some.  Pretty much anything and everything no one else either provided or sanctioned. 

Both jobs boiled down to freedom and liberty.

But there was no freedom, and certainly no liberty, in the Arab nation Jake’s team was about to leave.  They’d just finished a nice little counterterrorist maneuver that was going to save several hundred innocent lives, and at the same time neutralize a rebel force of thousands. 

Hoooboy
, those were gonna be some mighty pissed off revolutionaries.  Pissed, and now, thanks to his team, impotent.   

Mission accomplished.

Jake wiped the sweat off his face with the back of his sleeve.  He was finally going home.  After being on assignment since Jesus was an Ensign, and spending way too long in this particular sandbox, he felt restless and antsy--a sure sign it was time he headed back to his nice little beach house in San Diego.

And back to Jessi.

Grimy with sweat and sand, Shane Bentley, the team’s sniper who could blow a hole through a dime from nearly a mile away, Jake’s closest friend, and Jessi’s older brother by one year, called over his shoulder, “Hey, L.C., you think the pilot’s outta diapers yet?  Safe or not, this rendezvous is a little screwy.”

Shane was an expert at providing helicopter aviation support when missions included attack, assault, and recon.  If
he
thought this situation was screwy, then it most certainly was.

Jake scrubbed a hand over his face.

“Yeah, boss, what’s he mean his gunner’s down?  It’s not like he just left a hot spot.  Did he?  Crap, we gotta be at least fifteen klicks from any kind of problem area.  Intel said we
are
secure, right?” 

That was from Hutch, the team’s point man and one of the deadliest guys Jake knew.  An ex-Green Beret, Jake had seen Hutch take out six fully armed targets in less than a minute using nothing but his two hands and a nifty little knife he liked to call
Chewy
.  He was an expert in unconventional warfare and specialized recon.

“That’s the intel I got, yeah.  One thing’s for sure, the admiral damn well wouldn’t pull this kind of crazy stunt.  Someone’s ass is gonna be lunch.”  Every man moving down this beach knew that in combat the term
secure
was relative.  For now there was nothing else to do but suck it up and move on.  Jake shifted his backpack and kept jogging at a good clip.  “At least we’re finally getting outta here.  Stay alert.” 

After nineteen sweltering days in the desert, they were all ready for some much needed R and R.  Exit secure, he and his team angled their way across the hard-packed sand to the hovering chopper.  Just a couple more minutes and they’d all get their down time. 

Jake scanned the area, saw nothing other than sand, dunes, and thin grass to his right, just below a short cliff.  Water to his left.  Chopper now straight ahead.  Even with the area supposedly safe, he couldn’t quite relax, couldn’t get into the spirit of a mission well done.
 

Jarred Wesley, also known as Wolf, jogged up next to Jake.  “I could’ve flown with appendicitis.  Jingo’s a pussy.”

Mac Jingo flew Falcon six-four.  He was the second best pilot Jake knew.  Wolf was the first.  An ex-Army Ranger and former research professor of military strategy, Wolf was a brilliant and daring helicopter pilot.  But that was mostly because Wolf was bat-shit crazy.

“Make sure you tell him that when he’s outta the hospital.”

“And you can bet your ass I would’ve had an escort and a door gunner.  This whole situation’s scrambled.”

Chase Patterson, a preacher’s kid from Atlanta, and the team’s explosives expert, snorted.    Taciturn and mysterious, Chase had a steel backbone and thrived on adrenaline and raw determination.   “Wolf, you jerk, you’d fly with two broken legs, appendicitis, and hot hemorrhoids.  Not everyone’s as insane as you are.”

Ryan Monolito, whose forte was psychological warfare, hefted his M-240 higher on his shoulder and added, “Wolf doesn’t know better.  His version of the three R’s is Rita, Rhonda, and Rose.  All redheads.”  Ever vigilant, Lito scanned right, left, forward. 

Jake followed his gaze.  Everything was still.

L.A. born and bred and a former Delta Force weapons specialist, Doug Jenkins jogged past, gaze watchful, and tossed over his shoulder, “Eat my dust, assholes.  This pickup stinks.”

“Keep moving, ladies.  Eyes open.  Mama’s waiting.”  Nick Farrell, former PJ and Air Force medic, caught up and went past.  “It’s definitely time for a seven day cruise to nowhere.”

A week’s worth of sleep.  Seven glorious days of nothing.  “I hear ya,” Jake said, and glanced around, still on guard, still alert, still moving at a fast jog.  He saw the same water, sand, a few rocks, same thin grass.  Nothing out of the ordinary.  Even so, he was tense.  Maybe the heat was getting to him.  The climate here was notoriously unpleasant and today was no exception. 

Just as the eight men were twenty meters from rescue, Jake caught a flash of light over his right shoulder.  His mouth went dry.

A hollow boom shook the earth. 

The concussion staggered them sideways. 

Sand exploded, pelting them with heat.

RPG
.  Fifteen meters to their left. 

Time stopped for a split second.  Fear vanished as adrenaline flooded the eight men.   

Jake yelled, “Go, go, go!” and blitzed into a dead run.  “Hutch, you’re up!” 

As the primary lead to cover, Hutch didn’t need to be told twice.  He scurried up the ladder and onto the helo like his ass was on fire.  The blades from the chopper were kicking up a minor sandstorm, and after manning a heavy assault weapon, he took the gunner’s position in the door of the helo and started firing four thousand rounds per minute at every berm--over and through the sand and the rocks and the thin grass.  Anywhere and everywhere someone who wanted them dead might be hiding.

Jenkins went next.  Then Nick.

Wolf, Chase, and Lito scrambled up at warp speed.