Sealed with a promise

  An Imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.' Naperville, Illinois

  Copyright © 2009 by Mary Margret Daughtridge

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Daughtridge, Mary Margret. SEALed with a promise / Mary Margret Daughtridge.

  p. cm. 1. United States. Navy. SEALs-Fiction. 2. Women college teachers- Fiction. 3. Illegitimacy-Fiction. 4. Revenge-Fiction. I. Title. PS3604.A92S435 2009 813’.6-dc22

  Printed and bound in the United States of America QW 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Chief Petty Officer Caleb “Do-Lord” Dulaude always said if he ever saw Teague Calhoun again, he’d kill him. Do-Lord huffed a mirthless chuckle and shook his head. Wouldn’t you know fate would test his resolve when he had an M-14 rifle in his hand?

  In less than five minutes, Calhoun, a United States Senator with his escort of security contractors, would come through the brass doors of the best hotel in Kandahar.

  All SEALs respected Murphy’s Law the way they did the law of gravity. According to Murphy anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and at the worst possible moment. Murphy must have worked overtime to arrange this. The third floor room of a bombed out school, where Do-Lord and his spotter waited, offered the perfect vantage point for a sniper targeting anyone exiting the hotel-one reason Do-Lord’s commanding officer, Jax Graham, had made sure
his
team commanded it. Jax was positioned in a window across the plaza. Other SEALs were scattered among the pedestrians who thronged the barricaded street.

  The only problem was that Do-Lord’s role was to protect Calhoun from assassination-not do the job himself. The black plastic barrel grip of his sniper rifle was slick with sweat again. Do-Lord wiped it, then rubbed his Kevlar-gloved hands, trigger finger removed, on the pants of his desert camouflage BDUs.

  “Hot up here,” whispered Warren, his spotter, though no one in the plaza three stories below could have heard a normal voice. They were making no effort to hide, but still Warren clung to the shadows as he checked distances with his range finder. He gave Do-Lord a measuring glance. “You okay?”

  Guilt, as unusual as it was unwelcome, stabbed Do-Lord. He should be thinking of nothing but the task and how to meld his actions into seamless teamwork with the others.

  From the day he was eighteen he had wanted nothing more than to be one of these men, these SEALs, the warrior elite of the world. These extraordinary men had all the strength, cunning, and mastery of weapons a boyhood spent on the dirty fringes of society had taught him to respect. He had come to them tough. He had already known how to push himself past being wet, cold, hungry, and exhausted. And he had come streetsmart. From the time he was ten, he had simply done what he had to, neither cringing from necessity, nor looking back with regret. To be one of them, he had ruthlessly eliminated his past, and his essential pragmatism had stood him in good stead.

  The past he had locked away had stayed away. He had become a SEAL and a good one. In the process, almost against his will, he had acquired concepts like honor, accountability, trust, and pride. As the years had gone by, he had felt that the man he was had less and less in common with the boy he had been.

  Now it was as if the single-minded closing of the doors to his past had never happened. He pulsed with old anger. Anger he thought gone, forgotten, meaningless.

  And guilt that he could contemplate abandoning his training tore at his gut like ground glass.

  If he told Warren a tenth of what was going on, he would be removed from duty instantly. Without taking his eyes from the dusty, rubble-strewn plaza, Do-Lord lifted his thumb in assent.

  No matter what he did when Calhoun appeared, he was going to have a hard time living with himself.

  Well, at least he wasn’t bored anymore.

  Lately, it was harder and harder to keep his mind on track.

  He was just tired, he told himself. Jax had called him a super-computer this morning, and he felt like one: a laptop that had been running off batteries far too long, and was close to shutting down. He was ready for deployment in this sere, harsh, beautiful country to be over. He didn’t get lonely and homesick as some of his buddies did. The Teams were his home, his fellow SEALs his family. So it stood to reason that when he was sick of a deployment, what he would feel would be boredom. Sometimes when they were on patrol in the mountains, he imagined the grey and tan and ochre landscape of sharp crags and black shadows was the moon. But when he tried to imagine what aliens hid in the shadows, he cut off his mind’s attempts to escape. Anybody who didn’t stay in the here and now focused on what was real could find themselves dead in a heartbeat.

  At oh- dark-thirty this morning Do-Lord had stumbled into the briefing room, where Jax already sat clicking through pages on his laptop. He should have felt a little kick of anticipation, a rising of the blood. Jax wouldn’t have sent a yeoman to waken him for any routine matter. But whatever was going down, he had little enthusiasm for.

  “What’s up?” He rubbed his freshly shaven cheeks, trying to wake up. After months of letting his beard grow, the better to blend in where most men were bearded, the smooth skin felt strange. “Something tells me you’re not trying to get a leg up on your post-deployment paperwork.”

  Jax looked as if he’d never gone to bed. He shook his head in disgust. “Since we ship home tomorrow, the powers that be have decided we don’t have anything to do.”

  “Meaning we’ve drawn a job nobody else wants.”

  “You’ve got it. We’re tasked to provide perimeter security for a visiting congressman,” Jax paused, and sifted through a pile of faxes. “Here.” He passed Do-Lord a bio with photograph. “Senator Calhoun of North Carolina. Intel has credible reports a terrorist cell plans an assassination attempt.”

  Cold sweat broke out on the small of Do-Lord’s back. He took the bio and sank into one of the rolling chairs that surrounded the table without waiting for permission. Jax and he had never stood on ceremony when alone, and Do-Lord wasn’t sure his legs would hold him.

  “Do you know him?” Jax’s gray eyes narrowed. “You’ve got a funny look on your face.”

  Jax was his best friend as well as his CO. Antiauthoritarian to the bone, Do-Lord wouldn’t have made it through BUD/S, the basic SEAL training, without Jax’s help. For one crazy moment Do-Lord contemplated telling Jax everything.

  But a childhood of confiding in no one, of making his life look
normal
so Social Services wouldn’t be called, had built a wall that couldn’t be scaled-not in the few moments before the others arrived. Do-Lord forced his face into his trademark easygoing smile. “Know who he is, of course.”

  Everybody knew who the senator was. He was on several of the most influential senate committees, including the defense budget. He was known for his ability to grab headlines. Political pundits speculated that he was already running for president even though the election was a couple of years away. And now Do-Lord had to plan how his team would protect the bastard.

  “I know that super-computer brain of yours has already figured out why I wanted you to get here first. Here are satellite photos of the square,” Jax went on. “Work out placements for Warren, Barry, and the rest. We have to trust your ability to visualize. There’s no time to run a rehearsal. As soon as the guys get up, we’ll brief, and then there’s just enough time to get into position. I want you on sniper,” he added.

  All SEALs were expert marksmen, but even among them, Do-Lord was an acknowledged top gun. Do-Lord had known Jax would want him for sniper from the first words out of his mouth. And yet when Jax confirmed his hypothesis, for the second time Do-Lord almost spoke up to tell his friend why he couldn’t see Teague Calhoun with a gun in his hand.

  But he didn’t.

  Jax looked exhausted. Not just from one night of missed sleep. He was tired, as they all were with their deployment almost at an end, but in addition, he’d flown home ten days ago when the death of his ex-wife left his four-year-old son Tyler motherless. He’d attended the funeral, made arrangements for Tyler to live with his grandmother temporarily, and come back-all in four days. He didn’t have to. Deployment could have been over for him. But as long as they were in harm’s way, Jax couldn’t abandon his platoon. Looking after his men meant everything to Jax. They could always depend on him.

  How could Do-Lord tell Jax not to depend on
him
this time? Keeping the unit ready to operate at all times was a chief’s job. There wasn’t anybody else Jax could call on. Jason Hew was almost as good a shot, but he had an eye infection. By noon the plaza would throng with people. No random or missed shots could be allowed to put innocent people in danger.

  How could he tell the man he trusted with his life, “Don’t trust
me
”? Jax needed him to pull his weight, not turn himself into an emotional liability.

  Do- Lord knew where his duty as a SEAL lay. To forge a bunch of alpha males into a unit that would act as a team at all times. BUD/S instructors drove home the lesson again and again. Where one failed, all would pay. But for the first time in years, the anger threatened to find its way to the surface. He wanted to do something not in the team’s best interests.

  The dilemma made him feel ripped in two, but as Samuel Johnson said about hanging, it wonderfully concentrated the mind. He wasn’t bored anymore.

  He waited in the hot wind that whistled through the blank windows of what had once been a school. He waited like the sniper he was, ready for the moment when the target would appear. No sirree. He was not bored.

  “Showtime,” Jax’s voice, dead level calm, spoke softly in Do-Lord’s earpiece. “They’ll be at the door in two minutes. If Intel’s sources are good, there’s a tango in this crowd planning assassination. He won’t care who else he kills. Nobody go to sleep on me. We’ll have twenty seconds to get it right.”

  Do- Lord swept the plaza with his gaze. There was Gonzo on the east side of the square, and Davy, their hospital corpsman behind the twisted, burned-out car that looked like a sculptor’s nightmare. Jax had made sure his men held all the best sniper positions, but the terrorist, if there was one, was probably hiding in plain sight.