In the lobby their credentials were checked by a pair of security officers wearing plain gray uniforms. Once they were vetted they walked down a hall, passing empty offices and double doors leading to a warehouse full of Conex shipping containers, until they arrived at an elevator with a key card access lock. One of the men tapped his key on the reader and the doors opened.
The car took them down, past B1 where a team of analysts and communications specialists worked, and past B2, which was divided into a large storage area and a larger underground firing range with six shooting lanes.
They stopped at B3, and the door opened to a short, bright hallway. Two more security officers stood there waiting, as they had been alerted by the cameras that picked the men up when they were still out front in the driveway. The officers wore M4 carbines on their chests and Beretta pistols on their hips, but they were affable guys who recognized one of the three visitors and treated him as if he were a visiting head of state.
“Good morning, Mr. Hanley,” the guard who looked over the IDs said.
“Morning.” Matt Hanley did not introduce the two men with him or address the guards by name. Instead he handed over his badge and submitted to a wanding from the other guard. Seconds later all three visitors passed through a door. On the other side was a small room with a camera looking down on it, and yet another door, this one with a state-of-the art electromechanical locking system.
Hanley and the two others waited silently while the door behind them clicked shut.
—
On the other side of the electromechanically locked door, half a dozen men were spread around a comfortable team room the size of a tennis court. A projection screen TV took up a portion of one wall; a soft and worn sectional sofa was pulled apart and scattered around in front of it. Aluminum picnic tables with built-in benches were arrayed by a kitchen area, and high shelves of tactical gear and luggage jutted out from the wall to the left of the door. A row of three wooden workbenches covered with guns, tools, and cleaning supplies spanned half the length of the back wall.
The smell of gun oil, sweat, and spicy taco sauce filled the team room.
Unlike all the security personnel in the gray uniforms outside this room, the six men here were decked out in a haphazard mishmash of civilian clothing. Two wore flip-flops and shorts, two others workout gear, and two more jeans and sweatshirts. One of the men in flip-flops was shirtless with a wet towel wrapped comically around his head in a manner reminiscent of Carmen Miranda.
On an aluminum table near the steel door that led to the anteroom, a bank of tiny camera monitors gave the men a view to the outside world, but the closest man to the monitors wasn’t paying attention to the screens right now. Instead, Keith Morgan sat at the table and looked into a small mirror on a stand, doing his best to adjust a contact lens. Next to him a bean burrito sat untouched on a wax paper wrapper.
Though he faced a wall he spoke loud enough to be heard by everyone in the room. “It’s that grit and shit from Mogadishu. It’s not the contact lens, the contact is fine. I think my fucking eye is jacked.” He groaned as he took out the contact and looked closely at his bloodshot eye in the mirror. “I don’t need this bullshit, I’m supposed to go see Springsteen tomorrow night at RFK.”
Behind him on a piece of the sectional sofa that had been dragged away from the TV area, Paul Lynch sat with a canvas backpack in his lap and a thick sewing needle in his hand. He was working to repair a torn strap on the pack. None of the men in the room had been paying much attention to Morgan’s play-by-play about how his eye was bothering him, but Lynch heard the last part. Without looking up he said, “If you’ve got a combat injury you can get Zack to put you in for a Distinguished Intelligence Cross. You can pin that shit on your shirt for the concert and pick yourself up some cougar tail.” He chuckled to himself as he finished a stitch. “Cougars love wounded dudes.”
In front of the TV, Dino Redus held his Xbox controller on his lap. He worked the buttons and levers frantically while he stared at the big screen in front of him. Despite his frenzy, his Medal of Honor match wasn’t going his way, so he turned his attention to the conversation behind him and laughed at Lynch’s comment. “Five, if Zack gives you a medal for getting sand in your eye, I should get a damn ticker tape parade for that time I got shot in Islamabad.”
“It’s not sand!” Morgan shouted back as he popped his contact back in. Then he blinked a few times and looked again in the mirror. After a moment he said, “Okay, maybe it was sand. I’m good to go.” He reached for his burrito.