Weston Ochse - SEAL Team 666

Even now, after more than twenty years, the pain still lingered. Yes, he knew pain. They’d been traveling companions for a long time.

He felt his lids growing heavy as this and a hundred more thoughts tumbled off cliffs in his mind. By his mark, it had been sixteen hours since he’d slept. Three for training, four to travel to San Francisco, four to conduct the operation, four to return to base, two to brief and be introduced to the Mosh Pit, and a half hour to change, shower, and get over here. Now, nearing eleven, he was sitting in his girlfriend’s office while she was out working.…

His eyes slammed closed as his body shut down. His dreams immediately took on an underwater quality. He smelled the sweatshop. Sweat, not only from labor but the vinegar-tinged sweat of fear. A vile stench insinuated itself into everything. Coffee burned somewhere on the bottom of a pot. The scents of Chinese food, old and rotting from the kitchen next door.

Images of women with lips sewn together swam through his mind, merging with his boat crew from Class 290 and the beaching drills.

The orange-skinned homunculus ran roughshod through his childhood, jerking memories of both good and bad into a twisted braid of his life with its long orange arms.

Then suddenly his mind was a flat plane covered with television sets. Not the new flatscreens, but the old boxes, flipping vertically, blizzards of interference making the scenes almost unintelligible. One by one they snapped into focus, revealing a scene of a little boy, dancing like a maniac, barefooted atop a Manila trash dump. Every television displayed the same image. Then somewhere a radio crackled, Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon” sung by a Filipino with a tenor voice, stumbling over the words, barely intelligible if Walker hadn’t heard it in a hundred thousand other dreams.

He awoke with a start and almost leaped out of his chair.

But he was held in place by Jen’s strong arms. She’d been smiling, but when she saw the fear on his face she quickly grew concerned.

“Another one?”

Walker sat back. He breathed heavily and wiped sweat from his forehead. “Yeah.”

“Didn’t you talk to someone about them?”

“I was too busy, Jen. They don’t care about your bad dreams and bogeymen in SEAL training.”

She removed her hands and stood up straight. She waited a moment for him to say something. When he didn’t, she crossed her arms.

Walker knew he’d been short with her. He couldn’t help it. That fucking dream of the dump, or a version of it, came far too often.

She turned and walked behind the desk, putting the two and a half feet of pressed wood between them. He could reach across and grab her, but each second that passed sent her a mile farther away.

He jerked through the last tendrils of his nightmare and slid quickly around the desk and grabbed her. Her arms were still crossed and she had a frown on her lips, but he could tell it wasn’t full on.

“Sorry,” he whispered, offering her a smile. “It was the trash pile again.”

Her blue eyes dilated. “Where they found you?”

He nodded. “Tommy told me it means I need closure.”

She rolled her eyes. “Tommy? You’re going to listen to your old Navy buddy? The one who has three Filipino wives in three different ports?”

Walker grinned. He knew her feelings for Tommy. He’d never said such a thing, but anytime he invoked Tommy’s name she became so exasperated she forgot what she was really mad about.

“He doesn’t have three wives. He has four now. He married a delightful young Thai girl he found wandering around the streets of Patpong.”

Her eyes widened, then narrowed, and then she punched him in the chest. “Now you’re messing with me.”

He stole a kiss, silencing her.

“Forgiven?”

“For being an ass? Yes.”

He kissed her again.

“Who do you think I am, sailor?” she asked slyly.

“I think you’re my girl and it’s been a long time.”

“And what do you propose?” She glanced at her desk and laughed. “Here?”

Walker raised his eyebrows suggestively and grinned like a kid about to open his Christmas presents.

But just as she opened her mouth to say something, another phone rang. He didn’t recognize the ring. Hell, he didn’t even have a phone, but he was pretty sure it was coming from his jacket pocket. He reluctantly let her go, reached in, and found a cell phone. He flipped it open and put it to his ear. “Uh, hello?”

“Walker, where the hell are you?” came Holmes’s voice.

“I’m—”

“Never mind. Just get your ass back. We’re wheels up in sixty mikes.” Then the connection went dead.

Walker closed the phone slowly.

“I was going to tell you,” Jen said, putting her arms around his neck. “We’re the ones who found your ship.”

He stared at her. “How?”

“I told you that we support you guys. Billings requested immediate analytical and a targeting package. We’re normally here for NAVSPECWARCOM emergencies. When there’s no time to go through official Special Operations Command channels, we’re your support.”

“That’s where you were when you left?”

“Yeah, took us about an hour.”

“How long was I out?”

“About an hour.” She grinned.

Walker shook his head and laughed sourly.

“What?”

“Damn Holmes. Even my girl is jumping to his commands.”

“Hey! That’s not fair.”

“Nah, it’s okay. We got some kind of threat and need to find out what it is.” He spared a longing glance at the desk. “Next time for sure.”

She kissed him deeply and let him go.

Macau was plus fifteen hours from Coronado’s Pacific time. By the time they reached their target, it’d be 0100 hours the following day, local time.

Macau was an Asian anachronism, originally developed by the Portuguese as a foothold on Asian trading in 1635. The first treaty allowed the Portuguese sole right to anchor ships and conduct trade, but it didn’t allow them the rights to stay onshore. The Dutch East India Company, who saw themselves as the emperors of sea and trade, already had rights to the Cape of Good Hope, the Strait of Magellan, and the Strait of Malacca, and had repeatedly tried to wrest this important foothold from the Portuguese; they failed in all attempts. Macau became the premier place for the transport of Chinese slaves to Portugal and the locus for what would eventually start the Opium Wars. In the Treaty of Amity and Commerce, signed in 1887, the Qing Dynasty ceded to Portugal perpetual rights to occupy and govern Macau in exchange for Portuguese cooperation with Hong Kong to smuggle and tax Indian opium for increased profits all around. The island nation survived World War II and Japanese occupation, but it couldn’t survive Portugal’s own internal political machinations. So when local Portuguese rule was overthrown in 1974, Portugal decided it was time to relinquish all overseas holdings, thus putting in motion the end of a nearly five-hundred-year relationship with Macau. In 1999, formal sovereignty switched to Mainland China, but Macau’s identity as the Las Vegas of Asia continued with the construction of more casinos.

The island, which had subsequently been connected to the mainland by a silt-laden sandbar and landfills, was located sixty kilometers southwest of Hong Kong. Its flat terrain was broken only by a series of central hills, the tallest rising to six hundred feet. Their target ship was moored on an older section of the outer harbor along the newly reinvented Macau Fisherman’s Wharf. Built as a theme park, it included a forty-meter-tall erupting volcano, a replica of a Middle Eastern fort, a Roman-themed shopping center, an outdoor coliseum, Vasco de Gama Waterworld, and associated shops, restaurants, casinos, and offices.