Navy Seal

Let’s get one thing straight before we start. I am a SEAL.

Navy SEAL. Capital S, capital E, capital A, capital L. Sea, Air, and Land. SEAL Team Six, the best of the best, the guys they send when everybody else has already been sent and it didn’t work.

I am also a seal. Lowercase. Northern elephant seal, to be exact.

Yes. I’ve heard the joke. I’ve heard it ten thousand times. I’ve heard it from admirals, from senators, from a guy who sold me a hot dog in Norfolk. Every single one of them thought they were the first person to ever think of it. You are not the first person to ever think of it. Please don’t say it.

I’m nine feet tall. I weigh four thousand four hundred pounds, give or take a burrito. I’ve got a chest like a beer truck, arms thicker than your waist, legs like two tree stumps, and about eight inches of blubber wrapped around all of it like a sleeping bag. Two big black eyes. A mouth full of teeth. And a nose. Oh, the nose. If you’ve never seen a bull elephant seal, picture a short, floppy elephant trunk hanging off the front of a bulldozer that does push-ups. That’s me. That’s my face. I didn’t pick it.

And right now, at 2:15 on a Saturday afternoon in Pismo Beach, California, I’m wearing a pair of plastic tusks, a Hawaiian shirt the size of a bedsheet, and a name tag that says MISTER WHISKERS.

Because today I’m a walrus.

“Mister Whiskers!” screamed forty-one six-year-olds. “MISTER WHISKERS! MISTER WHISKERS!”

“That’s me,” I said, and my voice came out like a garbage disposal eating a fork. “Who’s ready for some ocean magic?”

I had a hangover so bad I could hear my own blood, and the Hawaiian shirt was riding up somewhere a Hawaiian shirt should never go.

The birthday boy was named Tyler. Tyler was turning six. Tyler had a bowl cut and a juice box and the cold, dead eyes of a little CEO.

“You’re not a real walrus,” Tyler said.

“Real as it gets, buddy.”

“Walruses have real tusks. Yours are taped on.”

“They fell off. In a fight. With a shark.”

His mom shot me a look from the patio. Her name was Brenda. Brenda had paid me three hundred bucks to be magical for two hours. In the first twenty minutes, I had knocked over the cake table with my butt, fallen asleep in the ball pit, and eaten all the goldfish from the goody bags.

In my defense, they were in little plastic bags. Like snacks. Who puts fish in little bags at a party for a seal?

Brenda had not accepted my defense. Three of the kids were still crying about it.

Let me back up and tell you who I am, since you’re going to be stuck with me for a while.

My name is Chief Petty Officer Reginald Bullhorn, United States Navy, retired. My friends call me Reggie. My enemies call me a lot of things, most of them about my weight. And the Navy, God bless it, gave me the call sign Flipper. Because some genius in a briefing room thought that was the funniest thing anybody ever said.

It is not funny. It’s lazy. I’ve been asking them to change it for eighteen years.

How a seal ends up in the Navy is a long story. I’ll get to it. What matters is I did eighteen years on SEAL Team Six. The only actual seal on SEAL Team Six. Every other guy on the team was a human being. I was good. I was really, really good.

And then I wasn’t.

But we’re not talking about that yet. It’s chapter one. Let me have my dignity for, like, ten more pages.

“Mister Whiskers, do a magic trick!” yelled a little girl in a princess dress.

“Sure thing, sweetheart.”

I reached into a fold of fat under my chin, where I keep my flask. It’s a big flask, custom made. It holds about as much as a gas can. It was full of Old Crow bourbon, and it was the only friend I had at this party.

I turned around so the kids couldn’t see and took a long pull.

Here’s the thing about being a seal who drinks. I weigh two tons. One beer does nothing to me. Six beers does nothing to me. To feel anything at all, I need about a bathtub of booze. Which means my bar tab is bigger than most people’s rent, and my liver looks like a catcher’s mitt that got left out in the rain.

“Abracadabra,” I said, turning back around. I pulled a quarter out from behind the princess’s ear. Actually, I dropped the quarter, because my fingers are not built for quarters. It rolled across the patio and fell into the swimming pool.

“That’s not magic,” said Tyler.

“Tyler,” I said, “I’m going to tell you something important, and I want you to listen. Life is mostly not magic. Life is mostly dropping your quarter and watching it sink to the bottom forever. The sooner you learn that, the happier you’ll be.”

Tyler started crying. Brenda stood up from the patio.

Great. Real great, Reggie.

That’s when I heard it.

Engines.

Not one engine. Three. Big ones. Heavy SUVs, coming up the hill toward the cul-de-sac, way too fast for a neighborhood with this many plastic flamingos.

I smelled them before I saw them. Hot brakes, gun oil, and the kind of cologne that only comes in a bottle shaped like an eagle. Government. Three black Suburbans pulled up in front of Brenda’s house, and men in sunglasses got out and stood there doing that thing where they try to look at everything at once.

And out of the middle Suburban stepped the last person on Earth I wanted to see.

Captain Janet Pruitt, United States Navy, was fifty-eight years old, five foot two, and about as soft as a cinder block. She had short gray hair and a face that had never smiled at me, not once, in eighteen years. She’d been my boss since I was a pup. She was the one who’d looked at me across a table five years ago and said, You’re done, Reggie, and she’d been right.

She walked across the lawn, stepped over a sippy cup, and looked, for a long time, at my plastic tusks.

“Chief,” she said.

“Captain.”

“You look like hell.”

“I’m a walrus now. It’s a whole thing.”

“We need to talk.” Her nose twitched. “Are you drunk at a six-year-old’s birthday party?”

“Define drunk.”

“Walk with me,” Pruitt said.

“No.”

“Reggie.”

“Janet.”

Her jaw got tight. Nobody calls her Janet. I’m pretty sure her own mother called her Captain.

“Five minutes,” she said.

I sighed and stomped across the grass after her to the side of the house, by the garbage cans, which felt right.

“You know the name Oleg Varnavin,” she said.

Something cold went down my spine. Yeah. I knew the name.

“He’s dead,” I said.

“He’s not dead.”

“I bit his face, Janet. I felt it.”

“You bit off half his face and took his left eye. He lived. He wears a patch now. He’s richer than ever.” She pulled out her phone and held it up. “He sent this to the White House at six o’clock this morning.”

On the screen was a man sitting in a big leather chair in front of a wall covered in animal heads. Lion. Elephant. Polar bear. He was in his sixties, tall and thin, with slicked-back silver hair and a black eyepatch. Under the eyepatch, a long ugly scar ran down his cheek in a jagged half circle.

A bite mark. My bite mark.

“Hello, America,” said Oleg Varnavin. He had a deep, smooth voice, like a guy selling luxury cars in a commercial. “As you know, I am the owner of VarnaChem, the largest chemical company in the world. You buy my fertilizer. You buy my bug spray. You spray my air freshener in your bathrooms. VarnaFresh. Kills ninety-nine point nine percent of everything.”

He smiled. His teeth were very white. “For three years, I have been shipping cans into your country. Millions of them. And hidden among them are some that are… special. Inside them is something my scientists call Grey Bloom. You will not enjoy Grey Bloom. Nobody does.”

“I have three demands. One. Lift every sanction on my country and my company. Two. Fifty billion American dollars. And three.” He touched his eyepatch. “There is a soldier of yours. A seal. You call him Flipper. I want his head. Here, on my wall.” He pointed to an empty spot between a tiger and a moose. “I have saved a place. It is a very big place.”

“You have until Thanksgiving,” Varnavin said. “Then I begin opening cans.”

The video ended. I stared at that empty spot on the wall for a long time.

“So,” Pruitt said. “We need you.”

“You need the Team. You need the FBI. You don’t need a drunk seal in a walrus costume.”

“He asked for you by name.”

“He asked for my head. Which, for the record, I’m still using.”

She stepped closer. “You were the best operator I ever had,” she said quietly.

“Were,” I said. “Past tense. You were there. You know what happened. You know who didn’t come home because of me.”

She didn’t say anything. Neither did I. The name sat there between us like a third person.

Pip.

“I’m out,” I said. “I’m retired. I’m a walrus now. Go find somebody else.”

I turned and stomped back toward the party. My hands were shaking. I told myself it was the hangover, and then I fixed the hangover the way I always do.

I took another swig from the flask and walked back over to the bouncy castle, which sat right next to the swimming pool.

“Okay,” I said. “Who wants to see Mister Whiskers balance a ball on his nose?”

That’s when I heard the helicopter.

It came in low over the ocean, black, no markings. Not one of ours. The kind of helicopter you buy from somebody who doesn’t ask what it’s for.

Pruitt’s men were already shouting, already drawing their pistols.

“Everybody inside!” I roared. “NOW! Into the garage! GO GO GO!”

I’ve never seen forty-one kids move that fast. Brenda grabbed two of them under her arms like footballs and ran. The garage door slammed down.

All but one kid.

Tyler was standing at the edge of the pool, frozen, holding his juice box, staring up at the helicopter with his mouth open.

The side door of the chopper slid open. A man leaned out with a long green tube on his shoulder.

He pointed it at the bouncy castle. At me. At Tyler, standing right in front of me.

I spat out my plastic tusks. I threw down the flask.

The rocket fired with a sound like the sky tearing open, a white streak of smoke coming straight at us.

And I launched all four thousand four hundred pounds of me across that patio, straight at the kid.