Way of the Warrior (Troubleshooters #17.5)(111)
It was essential, always, to have salt-free soda crackers at hand. And the sympathetic words, I know you feel exhausted/nauseous/awful/homicidal. I’m so sorry, baby. How can I help? were also good to keep near the tip of one’s baby-making tongue.
But both crackers and placating words—along with other gifts like takeout for dinner or voluntarily vacuuming the house or folding the laundry—were impossible to provide from the other side of the vast Pacific Ocean.
Right now, Izzy and Danny and Jenk were sitting in the airport in Manila, moments from being given the go to participate in the takedown of a commercial cargo vessel that had been hijacked by pirates from a tiny, neighboring island nation.
Alleged pirates. Rumblings from the intel community had made Izzy rather certain that the nameless tiny island nation’s current ass-hat dictator was only calling them pirates, and claiming that the cargo ship had been hijacked so as to bring down the full wrath of the U.S. Navy onto their heads. Other rumblings implied that said pirates were, in fact, representatives from the opposition party, meeting illegally to discuss an impending election that would move the country toward democracy.
Another quirky thing about this sitch was that the SEALs hadn’t been briefed for this mission in some covert ready room at the nearby U.S. military base. In fact, they’d barely been briefed at all.
Instead, Izzy’s team of SEALs, led by the very stern and scary looking Lt. Commander Jazz Jacquette, had trooped through Manila’s commercial airport in full battle gear—sans only their weaponry. Which, had they’d been wearing, would’ve been rattling loudly—sabers and HKs alike. The only thing missing from their ultra-dramatic public display of force had been a neon sign flashing red, white, and blue, reading U.S. Navy SEALs, while it pointed directly at them in all their military tough-guy glory.
Izzy was pretty damn certain that his SEAL Team wasn’t going anywhere—that that go command wasn’t coming—at least not today. He and his SEAL brothers were, instead, an exclamation point on whatever diplomacy was happening. They were the unspoken or else in a message about democracy that was no doubt being delivered to Dictator Ass-Hat.
It wouldn’t surprise him one bit if they marched through the airport a few more times before the stand-down order came through, sometime after midnight tonight.
HoboMofo, who was sitting beside Izzy, was thinking the same thing. “I missed Bree’s meet-my-dad day at school for this?”
The fact that a SEAL who’d been given the most awesome nickname of not just Mofo, but HoboMofo was the single dad of a girl in the fifth grade, was pretty mind-bending. Izzy didn’t know ’Fo all that well, but if he’d been playing a round of Two Truths and a Lie with the other SEAL, and the three statements about the guy had been (1) Wrestles lions for fun; (2) Born on the dark side of the moon; and (3) Lives with his mom and his ten-year-old ballet-dancing daughter named Brianna… Well, Izzy would’ve picked number three as the blatant, flat-out, had-to-be lie.
Mofo, or Mohf for even shorter, could be best described by someone saying, Picture the scariest serial killer you can imagine, with a build like a no-neck monster with hams for hands, give him dead, soulless eyes, a buzz cut that makes his blond hair look oddly colorless and even gray, and then make him twice as huge-large and terrifying… Bingo!
The SEAL even had the requisite bodies-buried-in-the-back-forty Louisiana bayou drawl.
It was kinda fun imagining him in a “World’s Best Daddy” apron, cooking pancakes with mouse ears and dancing with his kid to the soundtrack from The Little Mermaid. Unda dah sea… Yeah, that worked for Izzy in a dangerously perfect way. But he swallowed his laughter, because Mohf was clearly bumming at missing his daughter’s whatever-it-was at school.
“Didn’t I hear you tell Jenkie that Lopez was gonna fill in for you?” Izzy asked. Their teammate, Jay Lopez, had been Left Behind for this current op, after f*cking up his knee during a HAHO training jump. He was still hobbling around on crutches, wearing one of those really stupid knee braces that made it so you couldn’t bend your leg. But he’d hobble his way into little Brianna’s class and flash his perfect smile, and give his super-special G-rated I am a Navy SEAL talk.
Most of the little boys and some of the girls in the class would want to grow up to be him. The rest would want to marry him.
Izzy tried to imagine Mohf speaking publicly, even to a bunch of kids, and got a searing vision of sweat pouring off the big man as he attempted to explain the duties of an E-7 SEAL without mentioning the importance of delivering double pops to a terrorist’s head to absof*ckinglutely make sure they were not just dead, but motherf*cking dead.
Yeah.
But whatever Mohf was thinking, it wasn’t Thank you Jesus and Jay Lopez, for saving me from that travesty. In fact, at the mention of Lopez’s name, Mohf shook his head and laughed the way a man might laugh when finding out that his house’s sewage line had backed up into the bathtub.
“Yeah,” Mohf said, shooting Izzy a decidedly dark look. “Great. That was actually Jenkin’s idea. Lopez. Fuck.”
Lopez. Fuck. The words didn’t make all that much sense. On top of being charismatic and handsome, Lopez was, like HoboMofo, a hospital corpsman—the Navy’s version of a medic. He was hands down the nicest guy Izzy had ever met, not just in the Teams, but in the entire U.S. Navy. He was sincerely, honestly kind. His name, Jay, was even short for Jesus.