Free Here With Me by Heidi McLaughlin Page A

I feel like I’m left with no choice. The prize at the end of the tunnel, whether I win or not, is worth it.
    “Had you ever felt this way about a mission previously?”
    I shake my head. “Not even when we were in Afghanistan. We’re elite. We’ve trained for everything possible. We may get nervous or excited, but it’s not like we’re jumping out of our skin. Jumping out of planes, walking through water and dense forest, it’s second nature. This mission should’ve been easy compared to seeking shelter from a sand storm and being fired at by the Taliban.”
    I opt to sit on the couch instead of returning to the chair. Hopefully I can relax a little more now that the floodgates are open. I’m still mentally battling with the fact that someone has made a mistake. Mistakes cost people their lives and simply can’t be made. Everything we do is checked and double-checked. We’re efficient, perfectionists. At least I am.
    “Some of my questions about while you were gone may seem out of the ordinary. I don’t pretend to understand what it is that you do, and as I’ve stated, I’m here to help you and Ryley come to some sort of conclusion. The more we talk, the more it seems that there was a communication breakdown. Again,” she says raising her hands. “I’m not in the service, I don’t know. I’m simply making a guess on how four highly trained Navy SEALs disappeared, to have their families mourn their loss, only for you to return completely unaware that anything was amiss.”
    “You and me both,” I mumble. She’s right. Now that I sit here, too much of the past six years isn’t adding up. If this is an error, it’s a grave one, and someone had to know we’d return unless we weren’t supposed to return. My time in Cuba is fresh. The memories are there. I have no doubt that McCoy, River or Raskin can recall every order, every maneuver we made to secure not only the child in question, but the many that we found when we arrived.
    “When we found the missing child, we stumbled upon something bigger. We extracted the child and met at our rendezvous point. That was planned. What wasn’t planned was the directive to go back to the site and…” I trail off, uncertain of what words could describe what we were told. I shrug and continue, “Secure the location. We were told that another unit was deploying immediately. We didn’t think anything of it, until we got back to where the child was being held and everyone was gone.”
    The doc flips the page of her notepad and continues to write. I want to get up and take it from her hand and make sure she’s not writing down something she shouldn’t be. I know I have to trust that what she’s writing is going to help Ryley and me, but with everything that has happened, it’s hard for me to trust anything right now. It makes me wonder what’s going through her mind.
    “What happened next?”
    “We started searching for clues as to the whereabouts of the missing, which took us deeper into the jungle. We lost our communications for a bit, but assumed command was aware of that. It was probably weeks, if not a month before we finally reached an elevation where we could use our Sat phone, but the orders were the same. Find the package and retrieve it. We reiterated that the package had been delivered, but the communications back were that it hadn’t and to find it.”
    “At any time were you able to communicate with Ryley?”
    My head shakes back and forth, my lips forming into a thin line. “Without sounding heartless, no I didn’t. I’m there to do a job. I’m there to protect you and her from people who are trying to do our country harm. I’m not thinking about calling her to check in. I’m thinking about keeping my men alive. We’re on a mission with a goal in sight. We stayed hidden, kept tracking the people we were looking for and checked in every few days with command.”
    “Did anyone ever come for you?”
    “Yes, they brought us supplies, a