Chapter 40

So, we spent the rest of January 1986, and the better part of February, setting things up. The main delay was to get a Comrade Resnokov his Soviet passport. Linc, it seemed, had a guy who knew a guy who could do all that. I watched through Linc’s eyes. It was fascinating. And expensive. Linc was spending money like a Russian sailor on leave.

Comrade Resnokov was going to be Linc, naturally. I had no idea if he could actually speak Russian, but he could speak English with a Russian accent.

Doing this required a trip to NYC. There he met a younger version of himself, whom he called David. They hugged on meeting.

Linc said, “I haven’t seen you since you went into Hell Week.” Without looking at the menu, he ordered a porterhouse steak at the quietest restaurant in New York. It was, to all intents and purposes, a private club.

“Yeah,” said David. “Hell Week. That was the longest six months of my life. Followed by the longest ten years of my life.” He motioned that he wanted a porterhouse, too.

Who was this David guy? I slipped into his mind. He was thirty-one years old, a former SEAL. Oh, yes. Did I forget to mention that he was David Lincoln, Maynard Lincoln’s son?

I’d known Linc for almost a decade. I never heard that he had a son. In all the time I’d spent in his mind, I never stumbled across ‘David Lincoln, son.’ I never heard a whisper of any woman who had given him a son. That knowledge must have been kept in a lockbox inside a vault in a corner of his mind that he never went to.

“So,” Linc said, “why are you getting out of the unit at an early age?”

“I thought I’d try wearing dry clothes for a couple of years.”

Dry clothes? I dipped back into his mind. Wet clothes or ‘getting wet’ was what the instructors during Hell Week put the trainees through as a motivational technique. And then they’d find the coldest place to park trainees to ‘motivate’ them. The nicest place was the nearest swimming pool, moderately uncomfortable after several hours of treading water in full clothes. Sometimes it was five hundred yards out in the Pacific. The Pacific could be very cold. You didn’t want to get wet, if you could avoid it.

“Got something lined up yet?” Linc didn’t say much, even less with a son that he barely knew.

“Why? You got something to throw at me?” David asked.

“Maybe. I’m in the private security business since I left the Corps. Got a steady job with a small research company.” Linc wasn’t saying much. “I’ve got a mission for them to do something. I can use a tough S.O.B. to just watch my back.”

David’s mind raced through several scenes where he and his team were shooting at people who were shooting back. Just providing security.

Linc continued, “If that works out and we can work together, there may be something longer term. I’m twenty-three years older than you. Do the math. At my age, I don’t want to do this much longer.”

“What is ‘this?’ I’ve been taking orders for a long time. I don’t figure on doing that much anymore,” David countered.

“Well, unless you just won the lottery, you’re gonna have to take orders from somebody,” Linc explained. “The woman I work for is on a mission from her Gods. No mistake. I didn’t believe it, but she gets messages from one or all of them. I know it’s hard to believe but it’s true. Most of the tasks she gives me are simple ones – some good, some not so good.” He trailed off.

“Why d’ya catch me up now?”

“‘Cause I knew you weren’t gonna re-up. I’ve kept track y’know.” His mind was a crash course of memory snips: a message that his kid graduated from prep school, then Annapolis, follow-ups from this or that Naval officer about David’s time in the SEALs. “One, you don’t have anything better to do. Two, I need backup for a current mission. And, three, I think you’ll like working for her.”

“Tell me about the good missions and the not so good ones,” said the young man.

“Okay. Good: she rescued a hooker, sent her to law school and paid her a stipend for five years to let her get her feet under her. Not so good: as payment for doing all that, she got the hooker to sexually enslave a young man who she is going to use for something later.

“Good: she has set up a company to build something that is going to change the world and make several Indian tribes much more prosperous. Good and Not so good: the U.S. Government has targeted her for elimination. You up for taking on the U.S. Army?”

“Hell, it’s only the Army,” David laughed. “What do you mean ‘elimination?’”

Linc got serious. “What did your last employer mean when it used that term?”

They brought out the porterhouse steak, a serving of broccoli, and a loaded baked potato for each of them. David thought for a long time. He noted that: 1) they served only cold water with the meal, 2) his dad covered the check with a platinum credit card that had only ‘AX’ on it, and 3) the proprietor came over and said “I’ll send the bill.” He hadn’t seen a platinum card like the one his father tossed out, ever.