SEAL Team 13 (SEAL Team 13 series) Read Online Free Page B

“Very well. Go see your Mr. Masters.”
    “Sir?”
    “It’s your idea, Karson. Run with it.”

    SUITELAND, MARYLAND
OFFICE OF NAVAL INTELLIGENCE
    “Problems?”
    The question had probably been an attempt at levity, but Samuel Karson growled unintelligibly at the speaker as he slumped in the chair behind his desk, staring at the far wall.
    “I take it that it went well, then.”
    His eyes rolled over to where his secretary was standing, stabbing at her with all the lethal energy he could muster. Immune as always, she just smiled pleasantly and handed him his correspondence and phone messages.
    “You’d better clear my schedule for the next week at least, Jane,” he said with a weary sigh. “And book me a flight to Montana.”
    Jane gave him a strange look, but didn’t comment beyond giving him a simple nod as she made a note on her pad. “Anything else?”
    “Bring me everything we have on former Lieutenant Harold Masters from the Teams,” he said. “And I mean everything. Not the edited file I already have.”
    “I’ll get on it.”
    “Thank you. That’ll be all.”
    The woman slid silently from his office, vanishing into the outer rooms to do what she did so well, and Karson found himself wondering what he’d gotten himself into. He’d wanted Masters to be consulted, of course, but he hadn’t expected to be assigned to do it himself. He was both too junior for the scope he suspected this project might take, and too senior for the immediate job that needed to be done.
    Not that it mattered, not now that the president himself had asked him to do it.
    There were things in the files that he hadn’t mentioned at the meeting, things about Hawk Masters that worried him. The man had been one of the bright stars of the navy before the Fitzgerald incident, a rising star by all accounts, the sort of man who had the physical stamina to survive BUD/S, the US Navy’s SEAL training course, and the mental chops to do just about anything in the world that he wanted.
    After the incident, though, he seemed to have suffered a breakdown as far as Karson could tell. The man had dived into occultism and mystic nonsense like he was looking for religion. If that was what he’d been seeking, though, he didn’t seem to have found it. Karson was wondering what it would be like to meet the man face to face for the first time.
    A navy sailor who’d seen too much? A broken soul, like many of the other “survivors” of similar incidents, including several from the Fitzgerald itself? Or something else entirely?
    Admiral Sam Karson was betting on something else.

    WASHINGTON, DC, AREA
PRIVATE HOME
    “Enter.”
    The door opened slowly; the old wood was heavier than it looked, but the hinges were equal to their task, and the person beyond had to wait for the gap to be large enough to grant him access. He stepped in carefully, eyes moving around the room with no small amount of fear.
    He had been here before, and it rarely worked out well in his opinion.
    It was an opinion that he kept to himself, however, along with any other words that may have come to mind.
    “Welcome, Brother. I assume you bring me news?”
    He nodded, taking off his navy cap and slipping it under his arm. “I do, Matriarch.”
    “Well then, tell me what you know,” the old woman ordered him from where she sat by a slowly burning fire.
    He tried to ignore the heat as best he could. It was Washington, DC, for the Line’s sake, and while it wasn’t summer anymore the heat was still oppressive. Outwardly, all the admiral of the US Navy did was bow slightly before opening his mouth.
    “The government continues to try and make sense of the attacks.”
    “A futile gesture,” the old woman said, shaking her head slightly. “You can’t understand what you can’t see. And you can’t see what you don’t believe.”
    “The president has given Admiral Karson a directive to recruit a man by the name of Masters. He was a survivor of an attack ten years