The SEAL's Best Man (Special Ops: Homefront Book 2) (3 page)

Almost.

UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

This is a By Name Request (BNR) for LT
JACK FALCONE, USN, to fill 1A-SOJTF-0037-02 starting no later than 21 JUNE. Report
to Development Group Commander upon arrival. Excerpt of tasker as follows:

DEVGRU CDR requires LT FALCONE, an ASW
Warfare Expert, to support the SPECIAL OPERATIONS JOINT TASK FORCE – NAVAL
SPECIAL WARFARE GROUP ONE, SEAL TEAM TEN, LITTLE CREEK, VA for a period of
TWENTY-FOUR (24) MONTHS. USNA will fill the requirement listed below in the
tasking summary sheet. USNA will ensure the MBR …

Jack’s eyes drifted as he sat motionless in
front of his monitor.

E-mail seemed a damned impersonal way to
uproot a person for the next two years. But such was the life in the military.

Little Creek wasn’t far from Annapolis. Just
a half day’s drive if the traffic was good. But he couldn’t imagine he’d be
ashore long. And being on twenty-four hour alert with the SEALs would mean
there wouldn’t be many weekend trips to Annapolis or anywhere.

Leaning back in his chair, he glanced out
the window. The sun was lower in the sky, casting a yellow glow on the historic
buildings that filled the campus of the U.S. Naval Academy. Like a postcard,
the dome of the Chapel loomed in the distance, just as it had since 1908.

There was a timeless quality to this
place. A snapshot today would strongly resemble the ones he and his parents
took when they first toured the Academy fifteen years ago. Even the uniforms had
barely changed.

God, he was going to miss this place. His
surroundings had calmed him, beckoning him to an earlier, easier time in his
life. A time when he didn’t wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night
wondering, “What if?”

What if he wasn’t strong enough? Quick
enough? What if his hands weren’t as deft and his mind wasn’t as sharp as they
usually were?

What if next time, people died because he
wasn’t good enough?

Landing this teaching position was
something of a reward for his service on his last mission, a favor called in by
his former Commanding Officer. But he wasn’t ready to leave. Not this time. There
were still things that needed to be done in Annapolis, but the Navy wouldn’t
care that he had unfinished business here. Keeping the nation safe somehow
eclipsed Jack’s need to have a little more time with Maeve.

Maeve
. He shut his eyes, and could almost feel her again, her
gentle weight in his arms as her eyes gazed up at him through those thick, long
lashes, when he had swept her into his arms. He had only meant it as a
joke—the way they always joked about things—and was fully prepared
to get smacked by one of those designer bags she was always carrying.

He wasn’t expecting the blush that crept
up her neck to her cheeks, or her quickened heartbeat. For a woman who had been
telling him she wanted nothing more than friendship from him, her knees had certainly
turned to Jell-O when he held her in his arms.

What could he do about it now, with only
six weeks left in Annapolis?

The creak of the door behind him didn’t
pull his eyes away from the window. “So, do you know about this?” he asked,
tossing his head in the direction of his monitor.

Mick stood behind him and glanced at
Jack’s open email. “Might have heard something. Pretty flattering actually. You
were a by-name request for the job. You impressed the hell out of them on that
NATO mission.”

“Isn’t it like the Navy to reward good
work with more work?”

“You’re the best man for the job,” Mick
countered.

“Best man,” Jack scoffed. “You mean I’m
the
only
man for the job. Most nuclear physics guys would snap in two
when they hit the water. They can’t keep up with SEALs.”

“You had an easy enough time on your last
mission. Two SEALs came home alive only because you knew how to handle an HK416
better than any physics nerd I’ve ever known.”

Jack frowned.

Mick sat, stretching his legs in front of
him, and glanced at his friend. “You know, they’ll be giving you an award for
that one.”

“What?”

“That stunt you pulled in the Baltic.”

A dull throbbing building in his head,
Jack pressed his fingers to his temples. He didn’t like thinking about it. Thank
God the mission had been black ops because if it had ever hit the press, his
poor mother would have had a heart attack learning that her only son had just disabled
a nuclear submarine while under heavy small arms fire.

He had come to Annapolis to shake the
memories. It wasn’t the fear of dying that kept him awake. It was the fear of
failing.

Mick was different. He glanced at the
officemate who had quickly become one of his closest friends these past years. Mick
was a SEAL to the core, part of the team. Jack wasn’t one of them. As an
augmentee, he was called because he was needed by them. There was always something
that needed to be done that none of them could do by themselves. There were no
teammates who could back him up. No contingency plans.

If Jack had failed his last mission, a
group of terrorists would have ended their day in control of a nuclear submarine.

Failure was not an option for Jack
Falcone.

Jack leaned back from his computer,
crawling out of the memory that he felt himself falling into. An award? Wasn’t
it reward enough to have just survived? “Yeah, maybe I’ll get something in a
decade or two, knowing how long the paperwork takes on those things.”

“And, uh, if you were to get an award,
I’d probably be the one to set up the ceremony.”

Jack eyed Mick suspiciously, a quiet
curse escaping him. “You know something, don’t you?”

Mick shrugged. “If I did, I might be
asking you who you’d like to invite.”

Resting his forehead on his hand, Jack
gripped his head, the ache behind his eyes growing. He hated all the secrecy
the Navy employed to surprise officers with awards—never telling them
what the award was till they were standing in front of an audience of peers.

He loathed the pomp and circumstance over
something that was just part of doing his job. If they were going to dole out
an award to him for something that happened so long ago, why not just hand it
to him over pizza and a beer?

Sighing heavily, he finally raised his
head from his hands. “Can I convince you to make the ceremony as small as
possible?”

Mick turned to him with a grin. “Hell no.
You know the Chain of Command loves to make a big deal of these things. It
inspires the mids.”

Jack shook his head, reaching for his iPhone.
“In that case, I’m texting you the number of my mom. She’ll know what family to
invite. And then just keep the civilians to as few as possible. Lacey, Maeve,
Bess. Maybe the guys from the gym. My department. Your call.”

“How about a toast to missing Shipmates
after? Maybe at O’Toole’s?”

“Good idea. Besides, I’ll need a drink
after. Just keep it casual, okay?”

Mick snorted, obviously hell bent on a
ceremony of dress whites. “Family, close friends. Toast after. That’s all the
input you’re allowed, Lieutenant. They don’t get to pin many big awards on
around here. You know they’ll turn it into a circus.”

Jack’s eyes wandered back to the open
email on his monitor. “So, any ideas why the SEALs need a nuke augmentee again?
It can’t be good.”

The question, unanswered, hovered thick
and suffocating in the air. Classified information was on a need-to-know basis.
Just because Mick had clearance didn’t mean he’d have any clue what Team 10 was
up to.

“You should be happy. It’s a slam dunk
for your career. You’ve never been one to shy away from PCSing.”

“It’s different this time.”

Mick’s mouth hitched up in a half grin. “Yeah.
And speaking of Maeve, I saw her sitting on the steps in front of Rickover Hall
on my way here. Are you two meeting up tonight?”

Jack glanced at his watch. She was early.
That was a first. “What’s that supposed to mean—speaking of Maeve?”

Mick pushed his chair out and let his
feet rest on the desk. “I’m just sayin’—”

“Maeve has nothing to do with why I don’t
want to leave Annapolis.” Jack snatched up his latest addition to the framed
family photos on his desk and thrust it in Mick’s direction. “I’ve got a nephew
due in two months. I was hoping to actually be around this time.”

Covering his mouth, Mick faked a cough
uttering “
Bullshit
” from behind his hand.

Jack turned away and clicked the email
shut. “Maeve has nothing to do with it,” he repeated, his mind wandering back
to the moment when he saw her at O’Toole’s two years ago.

It had been a hell of a coincidence,
learning that Mick’s future fiancée was best friends with the woman Jack had
lost his heart to the weekend he graduated from the Academy.

He had given her his number, and was too
damn full of himself back then to imagine she wouldn’t call him.

Yet she hadn’t called.

For a guy with a 160 IQ, how could he
have been so stupid to let her slip from his radar? Dumber still, to have let
her convince him that she just wanted to be friends for the past couple years.

No woman who just wanted to be friends
sizzled under his slightest touch. There was something else holding her back. And
now he only had six weeks to figure it out.

He pushed his chair back from his desk
and gathered his notes for next week’s classes. He enjoyed teaching
physics—working out the puzzles of the universe with formulas that came
so easily to him. But right now, he’d prefer spending time figuring out the
puzzle that was Maeve.

Mick turned his chair. “So, are you meeting
her, or is she just hanging out there to hit on unsuspecting Sailors?”

“Knowing Maeve, it’s a little of both.” Jack
grinned as he logged off his computer. “We’re meeting tonight to start
addressing the invitations, but she’ll probably have the phone number of a few
Lieutenants before I get down there.”

“Invitations?”

Jack stood up. “Was wondering if that
would fly over your head or not. Yeah, invitations.
Your
invitations. I
picked them up at the printer today.” He reached for a box on the windowsill.

“How the hell did you get them this
quickly?”

“The woman who works at the printer just
off the Circle has a thing for Navy guys and put our order in front of the
queue.”

“I’m not going to ask what you had to do
to pull this off, then.”

“Nothing. She’s about seventy and was
married to a Chief Petty Officer who served in the Gulf of Tonkin during Vietnam.”
Jack watched Mick lightly trace the embossed letters on the card. “Makes it
official, doesn’t it? Hope you weren’t thinking of changing your mind.”

“Never.” Still eyeing the red lettering,
he cocked his head. “But the date’s wrong, Jack.”

“What?” Jack snatched the card, his blood
curdling. How could that have happened? He had proofed it so many times that the
printer must have thought he was OCD.

Mick laughed. “Kidding, man. They’re
perfect.”

“You son of a bitch. I’ll get you back
for that.”

“I have no doubt you will.” Mick gently
placed the invitation back in the box. “Want Lacey and me to drop by tonight after
we get done interviewing photographers? We’re only meeting with two. Everyone
else we called was booked solid for June. Shouldn’t be too late.”

“Nah. Bess is meeting us at my place at six
after her last class. We’ll have it done in no time.”

Mick affectionately punched Jack on the
shoulder. “Thanks again for doing all this. It means a lot to Lacey. And me.”

“No problem.” Jack grabbed the box and
tucked it in a football-hold. “I better get down to Maeve before she leaves
with some other guy.”

He had six weeks to convince her to be
his. It wouldn’t help his plan to have her distracted by some other Sailor who marched
out of Rickover Hall.

Failure was not an option for Jack
Falcone.

***

A pair of seagulls dove into the water,
one emerging with a small fish in its beak, just as a flurry of Midshipmen
burst through a set of glass doors headed to another class.

She wasn’t used to arriving someplace so
early, but had no idea how much faster she could walk in flats till today. May
as well take advantage of the time and start surfing the web for a job. Between
the backdrop of the Severn and the heavy dose of testosterone that permeated
through the air, she couldn’t have found a more invigorating place to launch a job
search, even though the setting was distracting as hell.

Mids poured out of Nimitz Hall. They were
so young—plebes, maybe. Skinny and less confident in their stride than
their older classmates. It was amazing the transformation that took place here
at the Naval Academy in four years. She wondered what Jack looked like when he
first arrived here. Certainly not like the young ensign she had a fling with
the weekend of his graduation. And definitely not the man he had become today.