Camille Dumaine
was dragging her feet as she walked from the beach at the Coronado
Navy SEAL training compound, her almost-thirty-year-old
bones feeling every jarring
step of her just completed six-mile
jog in heavy boots
on wet sand under a bright, ninety-degree
California sun. Fun, fun, fun!
Didn’t help that she was sweating like a pig or
that one of the swabbies in the newbie class
had barfed all over her during “sugar
cookies,” an exercise designed
to punish. Also didn’t help
that
she heard a male voice call out, “Yo,
Camo! The CO wants to
see
you.”
It was Trond
Sigurdsson, whose Navy SEAL nickname was
Easy. All SEALs got
appropriate, and
not-so-appropriate,
nicknames when
they
first entered BUD/S training, Basic
Underwater Demolition SEAL. Goose, Whiz, Stud, Dog,
K–4,
Geek, Spidey, Zombie, F.U.,
JAM, Slick.
Trond, or Easy, was a mite lazy,
known to always look for the easy way.
Same nicknaming was
true
of the elite WEALS, Women on Earth,
Air, Land, and
Sea,
the sister unit to the SEALs,
of which Camille was
a charter member, two years of
training and five
years on duty now. Thus Camille’s nickname of
Camo, which wasn’t a play on
her name, or not totally, but was
based her
ability to
camouflage herself,
no matter
the setting. Being invisible
in a crowd could be invaluable
for
a special forces operative,
male or female,
she’d
learned on more
than one occasion. It
was
one of the prime reasons she’d been recruited to begin with.
A chameleon,
that’s
what she would put on her résumé,
if she had one. Who
knew, growing up in New Orleans’s upscale
Garden District, that being
of average height and weight,
with plain brown hair and eyes,
and just a touch of
Creole coloring in her
skin,
would be such an asset? Certainly not
her, and definitely not her
father and
mother, Dr.
Emile Dumaine and Dr. Jeannette Dumaine,
world-renowned professors
of Southern studies at
Tulane University and authors
of numerous books on the subject, or her overachieving brother,
Alain Dumaine, who was a NASA rocket scientist—(No kidding! There really are rocket scientists.)—currently teaching at Princeton University. But
she had learned
early on that, with the aid of makeup, clothing, a wig, even something as
simple as posture or hand gestures, she could change herself
into whatever she wanted to be. (Honest, Mother, I wasn’t in the French
Quarter after midnight. You heard
the police description
of those underage kids, “drunk as
skunks.” And
they thought one was me?
Blond, six foot tall, boobs out to here.
Ha, ha, ha.)
“I need
to shower first,” she told Easy.
“I
think Mac means now. They’ve been holding off the meeting ’til you got back from
your run.” He sniffed the air
and took a step back, even as
he spoke, and then
grinned. Easy knew
well and good
that SEALs
and WEALS had to
work just as hard, physically,
after
they’d
earned their trident pins, to keep
in shape. Smelling ripe was
not so unusual. “The more you sweat
in training,
the less you bleed
in battle” was a familiar
mantra. “Just make sure you
stand downwind,” Trond suggested.
A
meeting? He mentioned a meeting? She
went immediately alert. Rumors had
been circulating for weeks about
a new mission. One that
involved taking down those African scumbags who
had been kidnapping
young girls for sex slaves. Boko
Haram, or whatever terrorist-du-jour group felt compelled
to perform atrocities
for some self-professed
higher good. Camille felt passionately about what
was being done to these innocent
children in the name
of religion,
and she wanted in on this
mission. Partly she was infuriated by a women’s
rights
issue, but it was also her
history as a Creole that fueled her
fire. Camille’s great-grandmother
many
times removed—her namesake, actually—had been
“sold” at one of the famous pre–Civil War Quadroon Balls
when she was only fifteen.
She
watched as another man joined Easy. The similarities, and
the differences, between
the two men were immediately apparent. Both were very tall,
probably six foot four,
lean,
and well muscled, but whereas
Easy’s
attire—athletic shorts, drab green SEAL T-shirt and baseball
cap, socks and boondockers—said military to the bone,
this guy wore a golf
shirt tucked into
khaki pants with a belt sporting
an odd buckle
in the shape of wings, designer
loafers without socks,
and a spiffy gold watch. Whereas Easy looked
as if he was about
to work the O-course,
the other man carried an over-the-shoulder, high-end, leather laptop case,
more
suited to Simi Valley. The
most dramatic difference was between Easy’s dark
high-and-tight haircut,
and the new guy’s light brown hair
spritzed into deliberate disarray. The pale blue
eyes they both shared were the gravy on this
feast
for the eyes.
Camille wasn’t
drawn to overendowed men, especially ones
who were so
vain
they
moussed their hair in the morning,
especially since she worked in testosterone central where muscles
were the norm, but holy moly! This
man,
probably no more
than thirty,
was the epitome of sex on the hoof.
She licked her
lips and forced herself to calm down. I look like hell, she
reminded herself.
On a good day, this
superior male specimen wouldn’t
give me a passing glance.
After three
failed
near-marriages, I do not
need another complication. Wash your
mind, girl. While I’m at it,
I better check to
make sure I’m
not drooling. “Your
brother, I presume?” she said to
Easy.
“How
could you tell?” Easy said
with a laugh. “Camo, this
is my brother Harek
Sigurdsson.
Harek”—he nodded
his head in her direction—“this
is Camille
Dumaine, the female
Navy SEAL I told you about.”
