Page 2

Blake had risen to his feet.

“You ever think of leaving?”

“Leaving what, sir?”

“The SEALs?”

That time, the answer was easy. The question was the equivalent of asking if he’d ever thought of not breathing.

“Never,” he’d replied, and quickly added “sir.”

“You ever hear of STUD?”

Tanner assured him that he had. What he didn’t say was that they’d all heard of it, the guys in the teams. STUD was an acronym for something called Special Tactical Units Division, an elite task force of handpicked SEALs.

Assuming, of course, STUD actually existed.

There was little solid data on STUD, but then, nobody assumed there would be. Uncle Sam still knew how to keep some secrets.

That this mild-looking captain was asking if he’d ever heard of STUD was either the start of a joke or affirmation that the outfit was real.

Half an hour later, Tanner had the answer. STUD was real, and he was being invited to join it.

“It’s strictly your choice, Lieutenant Akecheta,” Blake had said, “and I want to make it understood that I can’t offer any guarantees you’ll make it through our Induction Phase. Clear?”

Tanner, tall a

t six foot two, had stood just a little taller. Failure was not an Akecheta option any more than it was a STUD option.

“Clear, sir,” he’d said.

That day had been the start of the best years of his life. He still loved the SEALs, but what he felt for STUD went even deeper—the sense of belonging, of doing something vital for his country, of following in the path of his ancestors…

“Shit!”

The pain in his calf was sudden and sharp. He stumbled, recovered, leaned down and punched his fist against the scar tissue as if to beat it back.

He was not going to let the pain take him down. He’d been hurt before: a peppering of shrapnel in his shoulder in Iraq, a slash across his belly from a knife-wielding piece of crap on the Syrian-Turkish border. But each time, he’d made a quick recovery.

The wound to his leg was different. He’d taken a high-impact slug one dark night in a mountain village in Afghanistan. Luck and a tourniquet had kept him from bleeding out. He’d sure as hell been luckier than Kenny Briscoe, whose legs had been blown off.

He’d kept telling himself how lucky he’d been all through the flight back to base, through the embarrassment of being awarded a medal for having gotten Briscoe out when all he’d been doing was what any of the others would have done. He’d told himself how lucky he’d been through the three surgeries, the months of rehab…

Through the offer of a desk job.

That had damn near been an insult. Warriors were not meant for desk jobs, and a warrior was what he’d been born to be.

His very name, Akecheta, meant warrior in Sioux, and he’d taken a warrior’s approach to healing. He’d set goals that went beyond those set by his physiatrist, used pain as a way to improve his endurance. He’d had half a dozen meetings with Blake to discuss his progress. At the last one, he’d asked for just a little more time to build himself back to the man he’d been before that night in Afghanistan.

The captain had scowled, scratched his jaw, run his fingers through his thinning hair. Then he’d said yeah, okay, Tanner could have two more months.

“We don’t want to lose you, Lieutenant, but if you’re not one hundred percent, you’re a risk for every man on your team.”

Tanner understood that.

His team deserved the best.

Now, one of those months was gone. He’d worked relentlessly, pushing himself to run, to do pushups, to do ocean swims out beyond the breakers where the sea turned deep and cold. His leg had responded well. It worked the way it was supposed to work.