Goodrich had been on the runty side through the seventh grade, athletic, but shorter than everyone else in his class, even the girls. Mostly knees and elbows, he endured a certain amount of bullying. He wanted to join the military and thought being a pilot would be good for someone who was vertically challenged — then he grew four inches the summer after eighth grade. He towered over everyone else in his class his junior year, and had reached six-foot-six by the time he was a senior — a little tall to squeeze into a fighter. He stopped growing a hair short of six-eight his sophomore year at Virginia Military Institute. His mother wasn’t completely on board with VMI. She was a surgeon and wanted him to be a surgeon, or at least an engineer. He compromised and went to a military school that taught engineering. She’d blanched when he’d decided to pursue amateur boxing, warning him that repeated blows to the head didn’t pair well with his calculus and physics studies. She was, of course, correct, but Goodrich found that his wingspan was long enough that he hit other engineering students in the head far more often than he got hit himself.
People tended to think of VMI as a bunch of shaved-headed Rats standing over steam vents in wool greatcoats getting hazed by upperclassmen. There was some of that, but Goodrich relished the visceral aspects of military discipline, the barking, the esprit de corps — the boxing. He’d always been a fighter, and knew he wanted to do it for a living. The Marine Corps allowed just that — and FAST allowed him to focus his fight.
Captain Greg Goodrich was highly educated, well read, and well spoken — but he could also be very, very uncivilized when circumstances called for it.
As was often the case, on this mission, Captain Goodrich’s Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Team worked directly for the admiral. FAST Marines trained for unforeseen contingencies, short-notice deployments, force protection of U.S. interests, and anti-terrorism around the globe. They went into threatened embassies, protected nukes, did whatever the Fleet told them to do — anytime, anyplace.
This time, they were guarding a long-range anti-ship missile given to the Navy by Lockheed Martin for the purposes of today’s test. The weapon itself was worth a cool three million dollars, but it was the sensitive artificial intelligence guidance technology inside that made it valuable enough to have FAST standing by to retrieve it should something go awry at launch.
Captain Goodrich’s Marines were young for special operators — mainly corporals and non-rates in their early twenties, but there were only about five hundred in the Marine Corps at any one time. The competition was fierce, and FAST got to be picky about who they chose. A lot of Marines thought they wanted to do FAST, until they found out about the PRP. The personnel reliability program — the Big Brother — like security check where you basically signed over your right to privacy for the privilege of guarding the nation’s nukes. A polygraph was required for the top-secret clearance needed to handle nukes, and virtually any infraction was disqualifying. Any hint of domestic violence, a single DUI, certain foreign contacts, too much porn — all were disqualifying.
Becoming a member of a Marine FAST Company wasn’t easy, but, so far at least, it was the best job Captain Goodrich had had.
Launch would be from one of the F-35s, two hours from now, in the evening, when there were no known Russian or Chinese satellites snooping overhead. The admiral was on the bridge, going over contingencies, and probably on the horn with someone higher up the chain than him at the Pentagon. The reps from the defense company were sweating bullets that their three-million-dollar baby performed as advertised and blew the hell out of the decommissioned Navy ship rigged to look like a Chinese destroyer, forty nautical miles to the south.
Goodrich touched a button clipped to the center of his load-bearing vest. “Ski, Ski, Goodrich,” he said, speaking in a normal voice.
Staff Sergeant Sciezenski’s voice came back loud and clear, inside Goodrich’s head rather than in his ear. “Go ahead, Captain.”
“Sitrep?”
“Ten minutes, sir,” the squad leader said.
“Roger that.”
