KBL by John Weisman Read Free Book Online

truths that all SEALs know: first, that the suckiest job at DEVGRU or any SEAL team was a bucket-load better than anything else the Navy had to offer. And the second? One of Troy’s BUD/S instructors had said it best. It was during Hell Week, the evening of the second day. They hadn’t had any sleep yet. He’d had them rolling around in the cold surf—it was late February—then in the sand. Back and forth.
    They were called whistle drills. First whistle, you hit the surf. Second whistle, you hit the beach. Third whistle, you crawled through the soft sand toward the instructors. Hit the water. Hit the beach. Roll and crawl. It went on for more than an hour. By the time the punishment ended, Troy’s soggy, sand-infiltrated camo fatigues weighed thirty pounds and his legs, back, shoulders, and chest were scraped raw. His ankles were bloody from the chaffing sand in his boots. He was sliding past the edge of hypothermia, shivering so hard he almost couldn’t stand up.
    That was when he saw the next stage of Hell Week torture. Each six-trainee boat crew got its own telephone pole. First, they did twenty-five sit-ups, the telephone pole clutched to their chests. Then the pole got hoisted onto their shoulders. And was carried. For a mile. On the beach. In the wet sand. In the dark.
    After less than a hundred yards, with his muscles burning, splinters digging into his shoulder, and half a dozen missteps when he thought his ankle was going to snap in two, Troy seriously, genuinely thought he was going to die.
    That was the whole idea of Hell Week. Even though he couldn’t enunciate it at that point, Troy understood instinctively that it wasn’t the gazelles who would survive Hell Week, or the buffed-out weightlifters, or the me-first high school or college quarterbacks. It was the grunts—he hoped he was one of them—who just . . . kept . . . going. The grunts who drove through the pain and the hurt and the cold and helped their swim buddies make it through, too. The ones who never, ever gave up.
    So Troy fought through the pain and the splinters and the swollen ankles. And the cold, the all-consuming, mind-numbing, totally penetrating cold. Cold he’d never come close to experiencing before. And at the end of that long, excruciating mile, when the instructors finally allowed them to drop the telephone poles and collapse, that was when Troy discovered the truth about life as a SEAL.
    “Tomorrow,” the surfer-tan instructor had barked through his megaphone at the miserable trainees as they lay beyond exhaustion on the cold sand. “Tomorrow I’ll have you tadpoles doing shit that’ll make you think tonight was frickin’ fun.”
    “Oh, yeah,” he shouted, backpedaling on the beach barefoot, a big fat Cuban Cohiba Siglo VI in his right hand. “Big frickin’ F-U-N! ”
    The instructor had almost tripped over himself he was laughing so hard. “Tomorrow, you’ll learn the only easy day . . . was frickin’ yes-ter-d-a-a-y!! ”

5

    U.S. Consulate-General, Lahore, Pakistan
December 23, 2010, 1000 Hours Local Time
    Ty Weaver dropped his cell phone into the secure locker outside the door of the consulate’s Regional Security Office, where the facility’s Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility, or SCIF, was located. He punched the cipher into the keypad and, careful not to disturb the plastic holly wreath, pulled the door open.
    Weaver, thirty-six, was listed by the consulate as a technical and security consultant who owned Kronos International, an Orlando, Florida, security company. In point of fact, Kronos was a CIA front, and Weaver, who had spent seven years as an operator at Delta Force, the Army’s Tier One hostage rescue and counterterrorist unit based at Fort Bragg, was currently a GS-14 working for the Ground Branch of CIA’s Special Activity Division (SAD), the Agency’s paramilitary arm.
    He’d joined CIA in 2007, shortly after he’d served on a joint CIA-Delta mission in northwest