“Ready?” Arnie van Damm said, giving her a start as he came out of his office at a half-gallop, heading for the Oval.
“I am,” she said.
“You look like someone just stomped your big toe. You okay?”
“Not really,” Chadwick said. “I’m kind of in the belly of the beast here.”
Van Damm gave her a wary side-eye. “And from my point of view, you’re giving the beast a bad case of heartburn. If it were up to me…” He stopped, took a deep breath. “But it’s not up to me. Come on. We don’t want to keep the President waiting.”
Chavez spent the last two hours of their flight leading a gear check — sometimes referred to by the rest of the team as a “pocket dump” or a “show me yours I’ll show you mine.” The nature of their work and the places they did it made their loadout extremely fluid. Talking about everyday carry, or EDC, was all the rage these days. Everyone from accountants to war-fighters who were integrating back into civilian life took to various EDC forums on social media, posting neatly knolled professional-quality photos of their assorted blades, flashlights, firearms, and other pocket litter. Chavez talked smack about it sometimes, but he’d been known to spend more time than he should have scrolling on his phone to check out what other operators thought was important. Patsy called it “gun porn.” It was a mystery to her why anyone would need to carry two knives. An odd sentiment, considering who her father was.
Chavez had tried to explain once, years before, over Thanksgiving dinner with his in-laws and other close family. He’d pointed out that just as surgeon Patsy required assorted scalpels and other medical instruments, he needed different kinds of blades for different types of work. JP, maybe six or seven years old at the time, sitting on the piano bench by his cousin, asked his daddy what kind of work the big Benchmade automatic folder in his pocket was for. Patsy and the other women at the table had glared, but without missing a beat, Clark, the boy’s grandfather, had drawn his own Benchmade auto-folder, sliced a ginormous drumstick off the turkey carcass in front of him, and passed it to the delighted boy. It was enough explanation for JP, and Clark expertly steered the conversation to baseball.
Good times.
Everyone on the team carried at least one blade. Most of them had moved away from the more tactical-looking black knives to knives with wooden or Micarta scales. Ryan carried a wood-handled Benchmade called a Crooked River. It looked like a folding hunting knife, arguably not as sexy as a black knife, but the razor-sharp blade performed the same function. Knife fighting was a misunderstood tactic, anyway. Knives that were small enough to put in a pocket made for barely adequate defensive weapons — if they could even be accessed in time. Violent attacks were most often like car wrecks, out-of-nowhere surprises, ambushes, that left the victim stunned and staggering — or dead — before he or she knew what hit them. Sure, there were times when a push dagger would come in handy if some thug had you up against a wall or down on the ground, or a karambit if you were going kinetic and quiet. But mano-a-mano knife fights where opponents squared off with blades were practically nonexistent.
Knives as
Flashlights, butane lighters, and SWAT-T tourniquets rounded out the pocket litter everyone had in common. Each of them carried enough stash-cash to bug out on their own if the need arose, along with an open credit card that was akin to a fire extinguisher behind a glass door — used only in case of emergency. Gone were the days when an operator could trade a high-end watch for a ticket out of a hot spot — though Chavez had a sneaking suspicion that a good many of those stories were just rationalizations Special Ops guys used to get their wives to let them buy a Rolex Submariner or Breitling Emergency.
Caruso carried his FBI badge. Midas and Jack Junior each toted their favorite set of lock picks. Ding was partial to a small Leica monocular. Clark, who was old-school, always had a handkerchief, grousing all the time that they’d gone out of style. The small square of white cloth could be used for first aid, as a makeshift head cover in the sun, or, among other things, a hand towel — anything but a surrender flag.
Some years back, a Russian thug had given John Clark’s gun hand a severe beating with the business end of a hammer. Talented surgeons, months of painful physical therapy, and a gut full of grit had allowed him to start shooting again, but the nerves and tendons would never be what they once were. He’d carried a double-action SIG Sauer P220 for a number of years, but the crisp single action of the 1911 Wilson Combat .45 was much less painful for him to keep up the practice he needed to shoot well.
