Page 1

One
SIX MONTHS AGO
You go to the edge of nowhere in a little fishing town in Alaska called Grizzly Harbor. Then you sit in a dive bar called the Fairweather until they find you.
Blue Hendricks must have heard it a hundred times from his brothers in special operations during the usual discussions about what they’d do with their lives if they survived whatever hell they’d found themselves in that day. It was everybody’s favorite legend during a long night in a foxhole.
He threw some cash on the scarred, chipped bar counter that hadn’t seen a polish in a lifetime or three, and faced the fact that he shouldn’t have listened to all those stories. He certainly shouldn’t have believed them. The Fairweather was just another dive bar, if farther away from everything than others, and no one wascoming to save him from facing his uncertain future without the navy.
He really should have known better.
Blue didn’t understand what had driven him to come all the way to this nowhere town next door to a frigid glacier or two. It was barely on a map and sat practically crushed beneath a snowcapped mountain.
Not that he was in a place to judge, as he was barely a man.
Now that he was no longer a SEAL, a reality he hadn’t had enough time to digest yet, he wasn’t even the well-tuned machine he’d prided himself on being all these years.
But he wasn’t nearly drunk enough to engage with the mess he carried around and had been pretending wasn’t there for years now. Not drunk enough and definitely not dumb enough to start that game of internal sudden death when he’d been a civilian for less than seventy-two hours, and most of that time he’d spent hauling his ass to the middle of nowhere in search of a stupid legend.
The trouble with that was obvious on numerous levels. The first and foremost being that he was now stuck in the middle of nowhere like a complete dumbass, because the ferry from Juneau stopped here only twice a week in the endless winter months, and that was weather dependent.
The shady, ramshackle Fairweather called itself a bar and grill and seemed to lean more to the bar side of that equation, propped up on stilts above the dark water of the sound that brooded out there in the late February gloom. Blue had seen a decent-looking burger or two and some fries that looked like a heart attack on a plate—his favorite—but he’d decided to drink his dinner instead. It looked like most of the people in here had done the same. The bar itself wasn’t much more than a collection of ratty pool tables, woebegone locals in varying shades of camo-colored clothes, as if a moose hunt might break out at any moment, and what had to be the most extensive collection of off-color bumper stickers ever assembled. As wallpaper.
There wasn’t a single legendary thing about this place.
Which meant Blue was going to have to figure out his life all on his own.
He ran through his options as if he were prepping for a mission. His hometown, outside Chicago, was out. Blue had left that place in a hurry when he was seventeen and had never looked back. Or gone back. At all. He had a Harley stashed in storage in another part of what the folks here in Alaska called the Lower 48, but he would never call himself a biker. And he didn’t want to change that, unlike some of the men he knew who had left the service and gone deep into that life. The same way he didn’t see something like the CrossFit Games in his future. Much as he enjoyed keeping his body in what passed for top physical condition, he didn’t want to make it his whole life. He liked riding his motorcycle and he liked working out, but not enough to lose himself in either one of those things like it was a new religion.
The truth was, he was still hung up on the old one.
Which was why he was here, staring down at a long pour of whiskey and wondering why the hell he hadn’t taken one of the security jobs he’d been offered. They were everywhere. Los Angeles. Chicago. New York. Slickcorporate outfits looking for men with Blue’s set of skills and experience. Some were even run by former SEALs, just like him. SEALs took care of their own, which meant Blue knew he could find a place if he needed one, but he wasn’t ready to be taken care of just yet. He might have retired, and Lord knew he had aches and pains and scars, inside and out, that his seventeen-year-old, newly enlisted self couldn’t possibly have imagined. And it made him feel a hell of a lot older than he was, because he knew what he’d been capable of at his peak—but none of that mattered.
He wasn’t done.
The kind of work he’d done as a SEAL required a pinpoint accuracy he didn’t quite have anymore. He’d accepted that. Part of training to be consistently excellent meant always knowing his limitations. And with young guys coming up all the time, there was no sense holding on when he knew he couldn’t deliver the way he wanted to. He refused to let his teammates and his country down, and Blue might have been carrying a mess or two around inside him, but he wasn’t that narcissistic. If he wasn’t giving two hundred percent at the highest level of peak physical performance, he was holding his teammates back. That was unacceptable.
He was done with his beloved SEALs. But he wasn’t ready to resign himself to a life of playing bodyguard for rich old men and their snot-nosed kids. And he’d believed in what he’d done for the last twenty years, so mercenary work held about as much appeal to him as rolling up to the bikers he’d seen at bars all over these United States and pretending he respected men whobrayed about freedom while spitting on everything he’d put his life on the line to defend.
Pass.
The good news was, Blue’s version of a scaled-back level of physical performance, not good enough for the kind of SEAL missions he’d been a part of, made him look like a god in comparison with a regular person. He could still meet all the BUD/S training standards at competitive levels, thank you. He could still kick just about any ass he encountered, for that matter, and could probably defuse the situation before it got there—even out here in an Alaskan bar that seemed chock-full of the kind of men who wrestled bears for fun on a slow winter’s night. He might have been walking among regular people again, but he wasn’t quite a civilian.
The truth was, Blue didn’t have the slightest idea how to be a civilian and didn’t really want to learn.
Which was why he was here, running down legends he should have known better than to imagine could be real.
When he was done with this wild-goose chase into the snowy Alaskan wilderness and had finished surrendering his dignity and self-respect to an urban legend, Blue thought now, he could always kick it up a notch and go deep into theX-Filesthing. Head down to the misty forests in Washington and Oregon and look for a Sasquatch, maybe. Go look for UFOs in Roswell. Hunt down the goddamned tooth fairy, while he was at it. All sounded far more likely to be real than a mysterious special ops unit operating out of a fishing village stuck up on stilts in the Alaskan Panhandle, accessible only by boat or plane or summertime cruise ship.
Maybe he’d even chant names into a mirror at midnight with a candle, like in that old ghost story, to see if something appeared. At least that would provide him with some entertainment.
Blue knocked back what was left of his whiskey and turned to go, figuring he’d find a room in one of the handful of lodges and inns on this mountainous little island and maybe rethink those bodyguard offers after all. Why not trail around after doughy businessmen and self-obsessed celebrities? A lot of guys did it. He was sure he’d adapt eventually.
He’d been a SEAL for twenty years. He was good at adapting. It had been his job. His calling. His entire life.
But when he slid off the barstool and turned to go, automatically checking the exits and any potential problems with a single swift glance, a man walked in.
And Blue froze, because he recognized him.