Sitting next to Redus on the couch, Ritchie Phelps spit tobacco juice into a plastic Gatorade bottle and adjusted the ice packs he’d strapped to both his knees with ACE bandages. Once he felt like he had them on the worst part of the swelling in his joints, he reached up and removed the towel from his head, then he shook out his freshly washed hair. “I’m the most busted-up dude on the team. If Five gets a medal and Three gets a parade, they need a marble statue of my ass right there by the bubble at Langley.”

Across the room, sitting at one of the picnic tables and typing on a laptop with a pen sticking out of his mouth, Zack Hightower shook his head in disgust and pulled out the pen. “You guys are the whiniest little bitches I’ve ever had under my command. Why can’t you all be more like Six? Just do your job and stop griping about every little fucking scratch.”

Keith Morgan was Sierra Five to Zack Hightower’s Sierra One, but this was an extremely informal unit, so he had no problem talking back to his team leader. “Zack, the only reason Six doesn’t complain about anything is because Six is fucking psycho.” He had moved on from his worries about his eye, and now he took a big bite out of his burrito. With a full mouth he said, “Ain’t that right, Six?”

Court Gentry sat at one of the workbenches on the back wall, hunched over a pistol he was buffing with an oil rag. He wore threadbare blue jeans, the sweatshirt of a college he had not attended, and a ball cap with the logo of a baseball team he knew nothing about.

Without missing a beat or looking up, Court replied, “Certifiable.”

The room transitioned back to silence, other than the Medal of Honor match, as everyone returned to their individual projects.

This was an uncharacteristically lazy morning for the men of the Goon Squad. Hightower ran a tight ship on the Golf Sierra Unit, the informal banter notwithstanding. But he was showing mercy on his team today considering everything they’d endured over the past week. All six operators of the task force, Zack Hightower included, had been in Somalia since Sunday on a particularly dangerous and austere operation. They’d completed their job yesterday morning and then climbed aboard a company Gulfstream, flew for fourteen hours, and only landed at the airport here in Norfolk at one a.m. As soon as they deplaned they loaded their gear in a van and climbed into an SUV, and then they returned along with their equipment to the team room in the TDI building. They spent a couple of hours cleaning and refitting their kit in case they had another in extremis callout, then they crashed in their bunks for a few hours.