“Are you talking about the nightmares?” He’d had to shake her awake from one of them.
She nodded.
“Maybe it’s just guilt or something.”
She shrugged. “Mayhap. But I am beginning to think there was some method to this madness of my time travel.” And it is a madness in itself that I am accepting the concept of time travel.
“And that would be?”
“Perchance the gods sent me here to learn modern fighting techniques so that I can gather an army and go back to fight against evil…in particular, the evil perpetuated by my father and his followers.”
Zachary was oddly quiet.
She turned in her seat to look at him. “What?”
“I don’t want you to go away.”
A thrill of pleasure coursed through her at his words.
By the light of the dashing board, she could see his face grow grim. “I don’t want you to go away…yet,” he amended.
She had to smile at that halfhearted amended statement of his feelings for her. “Dost think I could? Go back, I mean?”
“I have no idea.”
“Something is happening to me. Something even stranger than the time travel. I sense being tugged back.”
He flashed a quick glance of alarm. “It was just a dream. You can’t just go back,” he insisted.
She shrugged. “You and Torolf’s men went back.”
“That was an accident.”
“Are you sure about that?”
He arched his brows at her.
“Mayhap, where there is a need for a hero, the gods—or your One-God—send warriors hither and yon to fight the good battles.”
“You think I’m a hero, huh?”
She could tell he was trying to change the subject. “Would you go back with me?” she asked softly.
He drew back, taking his hand away.
She had surprised herself, not having planned to ask such a question. Not even sure she wanted to go back herself.
“Absolutely not! Are you crazy?” He must have realized how he sounded, because he immediately tried to take her hand again, which she would not allow. “I can’t risk going away, not with Sammy’s situation.”
She stared at him, unblinking.
“No way! I wouldn’t try to go back in time with Sammy, either, if that’s what you’re thinking. Even if I could. He’s in enough danger here without me putting him in the middle of some Dark Age uncivilization.”
He pulled up in front of the women’s sleeping quarters. When she tried to open the door, he pressed a lever that locked her in. She turned her face away from him, not wanting him to see her tears. Tears, for the love of Loki! She was not a weeping woman, or ne’er had been till she met him.
“Don’t go away angry,” he urged, trying to pull her into his arms. “You’re going to hate me enough during the upcoming WEALS rotations. At least let us keep this special bond we seem to have separate from the military crap.”
“You mean sex?”
“Well, yeah, you must admit we’re incredible together.”
“And that is everything to you?”
“Don’t put words in my mouth,” he snapped, then immediately regretted his words, tugging on her arm to pull her closer. “Come on, give me a good-bye kiss. I don’t want you angry with me, not after what we’ve shared these past two days.”
She knew better than to allow his embrace, knowing the effect he had on her. In a trice, she would be in his lap, rubbing their nether parts raw. “I am not angry. Just disappointed.”
“I enjoyed being with you, Britta.” He used a forefinger to trace circles on the back of her neck. “I care about you.”
Minutes later she was tiptoeing into the chamber she shared with the three other women, who were thankfully sleeping. She knew she’d hurt Zachary when she declined his kiss and pushed out of his arms. She knew she was being unreasonable in expecting him to grant her such a great favor, putting his son at risk. She knew he’d just given her the best two days of her life, and for that alone he deserved a token of her thanks. But she was in a contrary mood. And she was very worried about what might be happening back in her own time.
It took her a long time to fall asleep.
It was just past dawn when she and the other women throughout the sleeping quarters, not just their room, were awakened by a loud ruckus. First a shrill, loud, long blast of a whistle. Men—the instructors, it turned out—were banging on the doors and yelling into objects held up to their mouths that magnified their voices. Weapons were firing out in the hall, and flares of light were going off.
“Fall out! Fall out!” one person screamed. “Out of your racks!”
“On your feet! On your feet!” someone else yelled.
“Get up, you lazy maggots,” the instructor known as F.U. hollered through the now-open doorway.
“Go, go, go!” It was Cage—rather, Instructor LeBlanc—joining in the yell-fest.
Thus far, none of them had entered the sleeping chamber, just opened the doors, presumably respecting the privacy of the women. At first, that was.
“Oh, great!” Terri whispered. “Do they have to use those bullhorns? I have the hangover from hell.”
“I just hope those aren’t live rounds they’re firing from those machine guns,” Donita remarked, even as she jumped out of her sleeping pallet and stood at attention, like the other ladies.
“Nah. They’re blanks,” said Marie. “And firecrackers.”
“You are the sorriest group of pretend warriors I have ever had the misfortune to meet,” Commander MacLean said, storming into the room. So much for privacy! He needed no bullhorn to increase the volume of his voice. It was ear-splittingly loud on its own.
Disoriented, Britta was having trouble rising to her feet like the other women. Her brain told her to follow what the others did; her aching body had other ideas.
“Petty Officer Asado, either ring out or get your lazy butt in gear,” the commander yelled, right in her face. For a brief second, Britta thought about saying that she would tell Madrene on him, but that would mean she expected special treatment, which she did not.
Instructor F.U. looked at her in passing. Then his head snapped back to look at her more closely. “What the hell have you been doing, Asado?”
There was a brief lull in the yelling and noise as everyone, including the women, turned to look at her, then smile. She was wearing the finger sleeping shert that covered her with a modicum of modesty, so she had no idea why they were all gawking.
“Way to go, girl!” Terri whispered behind her hand.
“Guess she knows what an orgasm is now,” Donita added in a low enough voice the men couldn’t hear.
“Ya look lak ya been wrestlin’ a gator, chère,” Marie added.
Obviously, what she’d been doing the past two days was evident in her appearance.
The commander just shook his head, as if she was a hopeless case. Or more likely that opinion was directed at Zachary.
Master Chieftain F.U. was not about to remain silent, though. “Well, well, well. Someone in this room got laid this weekend. And laid. And laid. And laid. Dare we ask who the lucky fellow was, Asado? Or was it a woman?”
“What a jerk!” Terri murmured.
“Enough of that, Uxley,” the commander said, motioning for the chieftain to leave the room. But to Terri, the commander said, “Did I hear someone complain? Was that you, Evans? Did you dare to complain? Drop and give me twenty and make it quick.”
Terri dropped to the floor and began doing pushing-ups.
Master Chieftain Simms, the black-skinned instructor, shoved his way into the little room, too, passing F.U. on the way out. While he shouted, he was firing his weapon at the ceiling. They could barely hear him say, “Are you giving me a look, Ms. Leone? Are you giving me a look? I think a little cargo net, carrying a fifty-pound backpack, might be just the thing.”
Donita glared at him, and Master Chieftain Simms grinned at her, flashing whit
e teeth against his dark skin.
“I’ll give you ladies three minutes to dress and get yourselves down on the beach for some surf appreciation,” Commander MacLean said, glancing at the timing bracelet at his wrist.
They were already rustling into their exercising clothes when the box on the wall started to crackle.
“Attention, attention!” she heard a familiar voice announce. It was Zachary. “Welcome to week two of WEALS. It will be my pleasure to show you a little torture, Navy SEAL style.”
Zachary had warned her that he would be one of her tormentors in the next weeks. She just hadn’t realized it would happen so quickly.
This is the way the big boys play, honey…
The grinder had been made to resemble a war zone, designed to scare the spit out of the newbies and force some of the weaker ones to quit.
The predawn darkness was illuminated in an eerie fashion by flames blasting out of M60 machine gun muzzles. Red and green smoke created by M18 grenades. Noise of bombs bursting blared out of the speakers. While at first glance, it might all seem like a cruel Halloween fright-night tableau, it was in fact a replica of what they might face in battle. If they couldn’t handle the shock here, they sure as hell couldn’t survive on a live op.
Not all the trainees were shocked or amused. He heard one of them remark, “Men and their silly war games!” That one would be spouting a different tune come nightfall, if she hadn’t already rung out, Zach guessed.
Another one said, “It’s gonna take more than firecrackers and a Freddy Krueger SEAL to scare me off.”
He mouthed to Cage, “Me, Freddy Krueger?”
Cage laughed. “Nah, you too pretty. Mus’ be F.U. she’s talkin ’bout.”
First thing up for the women was a quick tour of the O-course…also known as the Oh-My-God obstacle course. Quick being a relative term. There were more than a dozen different obstacles here that had to be climbed, crawled, lifted, or shoved, all to use every muscle in the body. The cargo net, the Tower, a tire sequence, the Weaver, and lots of other good stuff. Everything was timed, though those times were reduced for the WEALS. Some SEAL trainees not-so-lovingly dubbed this the “Kiddie Playground from Hell.”
And it wasn’t just trainees who used this course. Well-seasoned SEALs were required to run the evolution before any live op. An oft-quoted saying around the compound was: “The more SEALs sweat in peacetime, the less they bleed in war.”
An hour later, and the women were being marched down to the beach by the commander and by F.U., and a half dozen other instructors, for a quick, cold dunking, a roll in the sand, and a five-mile run along the shore. Just for a wake-up call. The instructor-to-trainee ratio would be high during the next week or two to ensure safety during exercises that could be unsafe.
Most of them didn’t like inflicting pain on the trainees but knew there was a reason for the torment to come. F.U. yelling into a bullhorn, on the other hand, just enjoyed it.
Even the cold water, irritating sand, and energy-draining runs might seem like wasted exercises, but they also replicated battle scenarios where comfort was the last thing a warrior might have. Just how long could an operator stand in water or remain immobile when being driven crazy by the itch of a sand rash? And the constant running, well, everyone knew it developed stamina and leg muscles.
Zach walked at the tail end, talking to Cage, Sly, JAM, Geek, and Max, who had agreed to help him with WEALS till they got called up to a live op. Which might be any minute.
“Way to go, dude!” Cage said to him.
“Huh?”
Glancing around in the dawn light, he saw that all the guys were grinning at him.
“What?”
“Cher, you look lak ya been pulled through the sex keyhole, backward,” Cage said, giving him a good-buddy jab in the upper arm. “In the bayou, we calls it the sex flush.”
He tried to pretend ignorance but felt his face heat.
“The boy can still blush!” JAM hooted with laughter.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he tried to say.
“Man, have you looked in the mirror today?” Max asked. “Your lips are swollen, like you got a freakin’ collagen injection.”
“More like a tonsil hockey injection,” Cage interjected. “Talk about!”
“You got a bite mark on your neck,” Max continued. “In fact, I could swear that’s a bite mark on your inner thigh.”
He glanced down. There was nothing there beneath his shorts, but it was too late. He’d revealed the possibility that there might have been.
“Actually,” Geek began, “there really is such a thing as a sex flush. During sex, blood rushes to the genitals and all the other body extremities, including the face. The flush, which mostly resembles a measles-type rash, usually goes away after orgasm. Except if a person has an excessive number of orgasms in a short period of time. Some people even take niacin or vitamin B3 a half hour before sex to increase the blood flow to the skin and mucous membranes. There was even a guy in China who—” Geek stopped midsentence, noticing that everyone was staring at him. The boy did astonish them sometimes with his font of knowledge. “I’m just sayin’,” he concluded with his own blush.
“Open your mouth and show me your mucus,” JAM requested of Zach with fake seriousness.
“Bite me!”
“I’d say you already had way too much of that,” JAM shot right back.
“So how’s the love glove comin’?” Cage asked Geek.
“It’s a penile glove. Sheesh!” Geek corrected, then realized that Cage was just ribbing him. “Great. The website is up, and Julie had five thousand hits the first hour. They can’t make the product fast enough to fill orders.”
“Amazing!” Zach said, not because the concept was so outlandish. Hell, they had everything on the Internet, even…well, everything. The amazing thing was that Geek was involved. He was beginning to think that Geek’s naive-and-inexperienced persona was a big scam.
“Back to Big Mama,” Cage said to Zach. “How ya gonna separate WEALS from yer love life, cher?”
“I don’t know, but I have to. I can’t treat Britta any differently than the others.”
“Oooh, boy! This oughta be good,” JAM remarked. “Pretty Boy restraining his libido!”
Did everyone really think he had that little control over his sex life?
Probably.
They must think his dick was on autopilot every minute of the day. For the first time in his life, he was embarrassed by his reputation.
He and his guys put the bell on the back of a pickup truck and drove it to the grinder so that it would be visible and readily available to the women who were ready to quit. Then they pulled out the heavy kapok life vests, which had been around since Moses was a kid…or at least before World War II. The vests kept even an unconscious person floating in turbulent waters. They also pulled out the women’s personal helmet liners, preparing for the next rotation. Two dozen helmet liners of already rung-out trainees were arranged beside the bell…a graveyard of sorts.
Every class of Navy SEALs painted their helmet liners with the class number on the front and back, along with their last names. Green for first phase, blue for second phase, and red for third phase. These ladies had made their own personal statement by painting theirs pink with #1 on front and back.
After that, they lugged out the heavy IBSs. Inflatable Boats, Small, were among the most hated training tools in all SEAL training. They weighed several hundred pounds even without being packed with equipment, and they had to be carried on the heads or extended arms of the trainees at almost all times. This rotation alone should result in a dozen women ringing the bell.
“Listen up, ladies,” Zach told the group when they came back. “This is your new best friend. Inflatable Boat, Small. Better known as IBS. Or ‘that frickin’ boat.’ From now on, you will carry it almost everywhere, even to the chow hall, mostly on top of your heads, six persons to a boat, three on each side. Now, some of
our SEALs have been known to develop permanent bald spots from their IBS experiences.” He waited till their protests died down and till they watched two women walk over, take off their helmets, place them in the line, then ring the bell. “But we are going to make a concession to your female sensibilities.” Some of the women made disparaging remarks about the likelihood of that, which he chose to ignore. “So, you may wear one of these pretty little bathing caps.” He twirled a red, butt-ugly, thick rubber cap on a forefinger up in the air. Or you can wear your helmet liners all the time, which could be uncomfortable. Or you can risk baldness. Your choice.” They all took the caps, muttering as they did so.
“Another thing,” Commander MacLean interjected. “I’ve been hearing way too much muttering. Next mutter I hear, and the whole group of you will be punished. One for all and all for one.”
Donita Leone, once a famous Olympic swimmer, made the mistake of muttering, “Sadistic bastard.”
Simms, who seemed to have an attraction for his black “sister,” stepped forward gleefully, motioning with a forefinger for her to follow him back to the grinder. “How do you feel about Helen Kellers?” everyone heard him say. Helen Keller was a politically incorrect name for an exercise in which half sit-ups were done holding the back off the ground at a forty-five-degree angle and hands cupping the ears. A leg was lifted a few inches off the ground, then a knee brought up till the leg was ninety degrees to the hip. Only then was the elbow of the opposite arm brought over to touch the knee. Over and over. Alternating sides. Supreme balance, muscle control, and stomach muscles of steel were required to do them properly, which most people didn’t. Instead, they flailed around like…well, Helen Keller. Donita was doing a pretty good imitation now of the famous deaf lady immortalized in that movie with Patty Duke.
“Let’s start with surf appreciation,” Zach ordered the others. “Into the water, ladies. Pronto.” When they had waded into the surf, shivering despite the temperature, which wasn’t all that cold today, about seventy degrees already, he yelled out, “Line up and lock arms. All fifty of you. Now, march into the surf zone and sit down. You heard me. Sit the hell down.” Instantly the icy waves came crashing over them.