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  Petey glanced back over at Mope and said, “Better figure it out, Mope, or it’ll be just one more thing for your dad to be disappointed in you about.”

  Matt saw a pronounced scowl pass over Mope’s face as he started trying that much harder to fix the scope on the rifle.

  Petey pointed down in the bag and told Baya, “Gimme that one, it’s my turn to rip off a piece of Tinkerbell’s ass now. God knows what I’ll catch from that ass, but I want a piece.”

  Matt slapped his butt a few times for Petey’s benefit. “I knew you’d come around. They all do sooner or later.”

  Chapter 14 – The Bond

  Mope said, “Man, you gotta learn not to jerk up like that. How many times will you need to hit your head to learn?”

  It took a moment for Matt to shake the sleep off and realize where he was. He finally said foggily, “Dunno.” The top of his head was throbbing where he had banged it.

  He had been dreaming again about being in the empty room. It started to worry him that maybe he was going to have this dream every time he fell asleep. But, for some reason, it didn’t feel like a nightmare, which struck Matt as being a little odd. He would dream he was in the room, alone, but the door would be open. He could sometimes hear a faint whisper, but not like there was someone outside the room waiting to hurt him. If anything, he felt like there was no one there. But he never was quite willing to leave the room. In one way, having the dream bothered him, but then again, since it wasn’t scary and didn’t feel like a nightmare, he felt like the side-effects of his abduction could be much worse.

  “Most people only hit their head once,” said Mope.

  “I’m not most people, I guess.”

  Mope was squatting down next to Matt’s rack, a serious expression on his face. Matt wondered if he ever smiled.

  He asked Mope, “Is something wrong?”

  “Nah, nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to have a chance to have a talk with you today. Plus there’s something else cool we can go do this morning.”

  Matt knew what he probably wanted to talk about, but he wasn’t above being bribed. “What kind of cool thing?”

  Mope said, “You’ll see. I’ve got something to go do for a little bit. Go ahead and get your shower and I’ll meet you in the mess hall. But if I’m not there right away, go ahead and eat since you need to be done in thirty minutes. I ate a while ago.”

  “Ugh, thirty minutes? I don’t move that fast in the morning.”

  “Thirty minutes, Matt. You don’t want to miss it. Get moving, sleeping beauty!”

  Matt called out to Mope as he left, “You’d better not be turning into Petey!”

  ~~~~~

  Matt and Mope, plus a few other Marines and sailors, stood on the deck of the huge elevator lift as it slowly raised them from the hangar deck of the USS Iwo Jima up to the flight deck.

  Mope had taken Matt through the ship’s hangar deck, surprising him again by the sheer size of it, given that the hangar deck ran almost its full length, and served as the hangar space for the helicopters, planes, and other equipment. He explained that the planes were vertical liftoff aircraft – mostly Harriers, plus some Ospreys. He took Matt over to the big elevator on the exterior of the ship that was used to lift aircraft from the hangar deck up to the flight deck and said they were going up top for the FOD walk. Matt gave him a blank stare and Mope explained that they stopped all flight ops periodically and got personnel to go topside to look for any stray debris, or foreign object debris, on the flight deck. Mope said it was just a good excuse to get out in the open air a little bit.

  As the elevator neared the flight deck, Matt asked “Were those actual missiles I saw down there?”

  “Yeah, they are. Navy ships tend to carry a few of those around. They come in handy sometimes.”

  “Actual missiles? Like explosives? As in bombs?”

  Mope nodded. “Yeah, real live bombs. I guess it’s probably good I didn’t show you what was in the duffel bag Petey carried into the ready room last night.”

  “Why?” asked Matt, “What was in it?”

  “A bunch of fragmentation grenades. Well, that and a lot of ammo for the rifles.”

  “Yeah, I think I am glad I didn’t know,” remarked Matt.

  It was a beautiful morning, with the sun already up over the horizon, and the water an impossibly sparkling blue. Matt and Mope stepped off the deck of the elevator and onto the flight deck proper. Matt was shocked at how large the space was when he was down on it, as opposed to viewing it from up high in the Vulture’s Row.

  A crowd of personnel had already gathered to help with the FOD walk, but Mope headed past them towards the very end of the flight deck with Matt right next to him. But the closer he and Matt got to it, the slower Matt walked until he refused to go any further, about ten feet away.

  “I don’t think I want to get that close to the edge. There’s nothing keeping me from falling off.”

  Mope said, “You’re not going to fall off. You’ll get a kick out of seeing how high up over the water we are here.”

  “Uh uh!” said Matt, shaking his head. Even the thought of looking over the edge of the ship to the water below when there was no railing made him dizzy.

  Mope said, “Ok, chicken little, let’s go over here instead. There’s a railing on the starboard side behind the island.”

  They walked over to the part of the ship that rose up above the flight deck, where the two of them had been up in Vulture’s Row the day before. Behind that, along the edge of the deck, was a railing that Matt was only slightly more willing to get close to.

  Matt looked over the edge of the railing and immediately felt queasy at how high up they were. He felt much better when he didn’t look directly down at the water far below slipping along the hull of the ship.

  He had to admit, the breeze and the morning air felt great, though, and just being outside again was very welcome.

  Mope put his boot up on the lower rung and leaned on the railing. “You seemed to settle in pretty good with the guys last night.”

  Matt nodded in agreement. He had actually wound up having a really good time with them, at dinner and after.

  “Petey really likes you, by the way,” said Mope. “He was pretty skeptical of you at first, but once you started pushing back, all that changed.”

  Matt said, “The guy kind of freaks me out. He comes across so intimidating, well all of you are that, but Petey even more so because he’s kind of antagonistic.”

  Mope nodded. “Oh, yeah. And he has that semi-permanent pissed-off look on his ugly mug. The funny thing is, Petey comes across antagonistic and like he doesn’t give a shit about anyone. But once he’s on your side, he’s really on your side. He’s one of the most loyal people I know.”

  Matt immediately noticed the rare smile creep across Mope’s face as he added, “Just don’t get into a wrestling match with him. He’s deadly when it comes to hand to hand combat, and ridiculously fast. Probably better than anybody else on SEAL Team 8 at hand-to-hand.”

  They stood at the railing in silence for a moment before Mope started to shift the conversation and said, “I hope…”

  Matt took a deep breath and immediately interrupted him. “Was all that, last night… was all that just to get me to help you guys? I need to know, Mope. Was it all just put on?”

  Mope looked Matt squarely in the eye. “It’s important to you that it be real, isn’t it?”

  Matt just watched Mope, waiting on an answer to his question.

  Mope said, “I give you my word as a SEAL, Matt. Nothing about last night was arranged or put on to convince you of anything. The guys like you. You’re an easy guy to like. We don’t wind up in this situation often, where we get to know someone that we’ve helped out of a bad spot. We all wish we could, actually, but it’s the nature of what we do that we can’t. Normally, we would have already left long before now and someone like you would never know our names, or even see us. But this time, given the opportunity we h
ave, we’ve been ordered to stay put.”

  “The guys appreciated hearing you thank them directly, too,” continued Mope. “Hell, it even got Petey to shut his yap for a minute, and we’re all grateful for that, any way we can get it. I appreciated what you said, too, by the way. A lot.”

  Mope set his jaw firmly, and Matt could tell he was thinking intensely about something. He watched Mope, and for the first time noticed the scar over his right eye, cutting a little more than an inch through his eyebrow.

  “We, uh… we don’t often… I, mmm… never mind,” said Mope, scratching at his nose a little.

  Matt asked, “Mope, do you mind if I ask you a question?”

  “Anything.”

  “Does it bother you being gay and being a SEAL? I mean, the bond between you guys has to be really deep. Like you said, faith and trust are fundamentally important. Life and death important. Does hiding who you are bother you?”

  Mope thought about it a little bit. “I’m a SEAL, Matt. And I’m gay. But the two things don’t really have much to do with one another. As a SEAL, training and real missions are treated the same. We give the same discipline, focus, and complete dedication on both. The bond that needs to exist between me and Petey, Baya and Desantos, or the rest of the platoon, or the rest of my SEAL team, would be the same whether I was straight or gay. Actually, that bond is deeper than gay or straight. It’s survival. I would give my life, without hesitation, to protect or save any other member of my SEAL team, just as they would do for me. Do I think that they’d care if they knew about me? Probably not. But is it worth risking that bond over? No. Especially when it’s not relevant.”

  Matt said, “But still, don’t you feel like you’re hiding from them, especially since being gay is an important part?”

  Mope frowned for a moment. “I look at it this way… I’m not hiding anything from them that really matters. As a person, I may be gay, and that may be an intrinsic part of me as a person. But as a SEAL, it’s just irrelevant. I may have become a SEAL for the wrong reason seven years ago, Matt, but I’m good at it. And I love doing it, and I’m really proud of it. It may seem sappy to some people, but it’s an honor and a privilege to serve my country and my team in a way that very few others can. But being a SEAL means a lot of personal sacrifices, and one of those sacrifices, for me, is the personal choice to leave the gay aspect of myself out of it entirely and to focus on the things that I consider to be far more important.”

  Mope reflected, then added wryly, “Besides, I suck at being gay. I’m a really good SEAL, but I stink at being gay.”

  Matt laughed out loud. “What do you mean?”

  Mope let a tiny smile escape. “What Desantos said last night was true. Being a SEAL makes having a relationship pretty difficult. SEALs can and do have relationships, even get married, but it’s really tough. So I’ve already got that working against me. Next,” said Mope, thumping his ear with his forefinger, “C’mon… look at these ears sticking out from my head. My dad always said I looked like a taxi driving around with the doors wide open. And my nose looks like a twisty mountain road. I’m not exactly the pretty boy in the bar. And then, if I can manage to get someone’s attention, I don’t know how to talk to them. I mean, I’m not a total loser, but it’s hard to relate. And I can’t talk much about me, so guys find it hard to relate to me.”

  Matt felt there were so many things wrong with what Mope had said that he didn’t know where to start. Sure, Mope didn’t have the pretty, magazine-cover model looks that someone like Brian might have, but that definitely didn’t mean he wasn’t good looking. He was built like a rock-solid wrestler, and his face was naturally masculine. Frankly, Matt believed that if guys were put off by his appearance, it was far more likely because they were intimidated by him than finding him unattractive. And if guys didn’t feel comfortable approaching him because of that, then it was their loss.

  Rather than start arguing all this with Mope right then, though, Matt asked, “So, do you never get to be with guys?”

  “No, I do. I manage to get the occasional date here and there, or I’ll just trick out with someone, but other than the physical sex part, it’s rarely been very satisfying. Sometimes, the guys think I’m an idiot for being gay and in the military at all, which I personally find insulting. I fucking hate when guys are like that. Some guys want to bitch at me about US foreign policy, like I’m the one making those decisions somehow. Others just want me to have sex with them while I’m wearing the sailor uniform. It’s not encouraging when that’s the majority of the experiences I’ve had.”

  “You’ve never had an actual boyfriend, then? Maybe before you became a SEAL?”

  “I did, but it was brief. About five years ago… this was after I’d been a SEAL for a couple of years… I met this guy at a bar and we started going out. He was just a regular guy type, and I really liked that. But I couldn’t tell him what I did, other than just to say I was in the Navy. And then I’d have to go off for periods of time. Sometimes it was training and I could tell him where it was, but if it was a mission, I couldn’t say anything. Half the time, I couldn’t even tell him when I’d be back. He had this suspicious and jealous side that started showing itself and assumed I was sleeping around on him everywhere I went. I guess I don’t blame him. I just couldn’t tell him the things that would help him understand. We broke up after trying to make it work for about four or five months. The second half of that time got pretty painful, but the first half was good, and I liked it… I liked having someone.”

  “No one before that, though?”

  Mope shrugged. “Nah, he was pretty much the only one. Up until exactly one week before I went into SEAL training, when I was twenty-three, I had no idea I even might be gay. I dated girls through high school and college without a second thought, and I thought all that was fine. But then the week before BUD/S training started, I got wasted drunk. Totally trashed. I wound up waking up next to a person that I didn’t know. All I remembered was that it had been really great. Better than anything before. Imagine my surprise when I realized that the person next to me was a guy. I kind of freaked out about it. Then I went into BUD/S and had to push all that out of my mind. Well, for the most part, at least. BUD/S training is pretty excruciating, by the way, but in the occasional moments I had to myself, I thought about it and realized the truth. And I accepted it. I came out of BUD/S training a fundamentally different person than I was when I went in, in more ways than one.”

  They both were silent for a long while, each lost in their own thoughts. After listening to his story, Matt could not think of a single person he admired more than Mope.

  These men didn’t have to open the door that they found him behind. They already had what they had come to that building for. They had Eric Stillman and his laptop. They didn’t need to add any risk by opening another door that they had no knowledge of what was behind it. But they did. And on top of what they already had to get back to the ship, they took him, too. They carried his unconscious body a half a mile through country they weren’t supposed to be in to get him to safety.

  Matt took a few deep breaths. Something inside him felt different, and his absolute conviction from the prior morning, to get home as fast as possible and away from all this, had done a one hundred and eighty degree turn. If Mope was bullshitting about the things he had said about faith and trust, then he was the best liar in the world. But Matt didn’t think he was lying. In the span of a day, he had come to see Mope as one of the most principled people he knew. And now Matt felt himself about to take a leap of faith based on this, even as the thought of taking that leap of faith scared the bejeezus out of him. Almost more frightening, Matt realized that the leap of faith in front of him wasn’t just in these men, it was a leap of faith in himself, too.

  It would be so easy to walk away from this, to take the easy road out. But everything that had happened to him had been so extraordinary, these people he found himself with for even a few days were so extraordinary, that d
eep down he knew it would be a terrible thing to turn his back on them. It would be terrible to turn his back on the change he was feeling down inside of himself. He felt like he would perhaps regret what he was about to say, but he knew he’d surely regret not saying it far more. He looked up into the clear sky of the sunlit morning off the coast of Syria, forcing himself to find a kind of resolve he had never needed before.

  Mope finally prompted him, “So, what’re you thinking about, Matt?”

  Matt looked Mope in the eye with an odd mix of resignation and resolve. He took a deep breath. “I’m in, Mope,” he said. “I don’t know what you want me to do, but I’m in.”

  Mope nodded. He said, “You’ll do good and it’ll be fine. You are the mission, Matt. Don’t forget that.”

  Chapter 15 – Creed

  Petey, Desantos, and Baya sat on the floor of the hangar deck while Mope squatted in his preferred crouching position. Together, they discussed aspects of the mission – strategies, failure points, contingencies, weapons choices, and so on. Matt, having heard the plan, sat with them but could only manage to stare at the floor in front of him.

  Earlier that morning with Mope, he had signed on, so the mission was officially a go for the following night. Randall had joined them in a staging area on the hangar deck now reserved for them and reviewed key aspects of what the mission was to be. Randall had spent time with them, talked them through the “snag-n-bag” as they all referred to it, and had left to take care of his own preparations. Now, with that initial briefing over, the reality of what Matt was being asked to do began to hit him. And it was hitting him hard. Matt stared at the floor, wondering if he was really ready for this after all, no matter how good his intentions.

  Matt wasn’t even really listening to the SEALs, but Mope, who was right next to him, at some point put his hand on Matt’s back to get his attention. He leaned over and whispered into Matt’s ear, “Remember what I said about you being this mission, Matt. Listen carefully to what you’re about to hear…”