Free Huston, James W. -2003- Secret Justice (com v4.0)(html) by Secret Justice (com v4.0) Page A

planning, and hadn’t missed a beat. It even looked like the same people.
     
     
    Lieutenant Murphy dozed in the office just off the main treatment room of the sick bay on the second deck of the
Belleau Wood
. There was a rap on the door.
    “Dr. Murphy, I think you’d better come look at our patient.”
    Murphy looked up at the woman whose voice he didn’t recognize. It was a corpsman who had joined the ship the week before. “Huh?” he said as he tried to shake the cobwebs from his head. It was the tone of the corpsman’s voice that alarmed him, a tone of urgency. “What is it?”
    “His vitals are off the charts. His temperature is a hundred and six, his breathing is extremely labored, and, frankly, I think he’s about to code on us.”
    Murphy raced to the bedside of their lone patient. He was clearly struggling. He was flushed and seemed to be sagging into the bed. Murphy looked at the corpsman. “Get Dr. Satterly down here right away.” The corpsman ran out of the sick bay heading for the office to dial Satterly.
    Murphy leaned toward the patient. “Mazmin!” he said loudly. “Mazmin, pull out of it!” Mazmin didn’t respond. His eyes were rolled up very high. Murphy could feel the heat of his skin without even touching it. He turned to another corpsman. “Get me some more ice packs. We may be nearing the end here.”
     
     
    Rat turned his old Porsche 911 convertible into the underground garage at his Washington office, where he maintained his company, International Security Consultants, Inc. It allowed him and his team to operate anywhere and do whatever they wanted with complete deniability from whatever arm of the government was using their services at the moment. Officially he was still active duty Navy; a lieutenant in Dev Group, or DEVGRU as it was known in the Navy, when it was spoken of at all, usually with a quiet tone and a glance over the shoulder. But Rat was also with the CIA and carried other IDs that no one could refute or challenge because they were completely authentic. He was whatever he needed to be.
    The meeting was scheduled for 0630, the same time Rat liked to start everything in the day. He liked to get meetings and discussions out of the way early to allow time for more important things. By the time he got to the conference room—a room certified for discussing top-secret intelligence—the rest of the team was already in place. Six of the eleven were former members of Dev Group. The other five were SAS members who had been placed in Rat’s group prior to Sudan, one of whom was new. Nubs’s replacement.
    He was ten minutes early, as were they. They knew what happened to those who were late. Rat said if you couldn’t be on time for a stupid meeting in Washington, he had no confidence you could be on time for something important. He had thrown one man off the team for being five minutes late. The others had been speechless. They regarded Rat as friendly, fair, and even thought he had a good sense of humor. But when it came to operations, the preparation for which began long before the actual event, he was incredibly intense and serious. It was at least part of what accounted for his success and reputation. Nothing got in the way of results.
    “Morning,” Rat said as he tossed his thin leather briefcase on the conference room table.
    “Morning,” they replied. The atmosphere was one of self-congratulation. Most smiled and drank from paper coffee cups.
    “Everyone read the report?”
    They all nodded.
    “Jacobs has the draft, but he’s waiting for the final. This is it. I know this is putting the cart before the horse, but Jacobs is in a hurry. So comments?”
    Robby smiled. His dreadlocks hung down beside his dark black face. It was a wig he wore. He had closely cut hair, but when he wore his dreads he looked completely authentic. He could incorporate numerous accents if needed. “I noticed there’s no mention of our Jordanian friend wanting to slot the guy we