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to talk about, so they might as well talk about this, yanno?
    Sure.
    The SEALs from Team Sixteen had been tossed into wait mode as their flight back to the States was yet again delayed. The euphoria of completing a successful covert rescue had worn down. The debriefings were finally over and most of the reports had been written and filed.
    Most.
    But not Cosmo Richter’s.
    He was sitting at Mikey Muldoon’s desk, hiding behind the workstation divider and staring at the cursor flashing on the laptop’s screen, cursing the day he’d taken the chief’s exam.
    God damn, but he hated written reports.
    “Is which story true?” Collins asked Vlachic, his voice carrying in quite clearly from the hall.
    Cosmo stopped pretending to write and listened instead. Because, Christ, was there more than one story about him now?
    “
The
story,” Vlachic said, a hint of impatience in his voice. “I’m not an idiot, sir. The recruited-from-Rikers-Island rumor is just that—a stupid rumor.”
    Ah, of course. Collins had been thinking about the Rikers Island thing.
    As far as rumors went, that one actually bothered Cosmo. It was a smudge on the honor of the Teams. It had the potential to make people—naive people, sure—believe that the SEALs were no better than hired killers or thugs.
    “Civilians might believe it,” the new guy continued, “but we both know an ex-con is never going to get into the SEAL Teams.”
    Vlachic had all the makings of an excellent spec ops warrior, despite the fact that he was proving to be dead-ass average when it came to asking about The Story.
    Sooner or later, everyone asked.
Is that story about big, scary-looking Cosmo Richter really true?
    Most of them asked somewhere between one and forty-two hours after first going out on a real-world op with him.
    And sure enough, twenty-four and a half hours ago they’d delivered the rescued hostages—Cosmo still thought of them as “My Three Nuns”—into the arms of the waiting doctors here at the air base.
    But even though everyone asked about the story, no one had ever asked Cosmo directly. And most of them waited to ask at a time when they were certain he wouldn’t overhear.
    Although, granted, neither Vlachic nor Ensign Joel Collins would’ve expected to find Cosmo here, deep in Officer Country, hiding out in this little cubbyhole of a half an office that had been temporarily assigned to Lieutenant Muldoon.
    “According to the official report, no, it’s not true,” Collins told Vlachic now. They’d stopped right outside this door. Unbelievable. “Chief Richter was barely mentioned.”
    “Yeah, well, with all due respect, sir, what’s a report going to say?” Vlachic pointed out.
    Cosmo tried not to listen as the team’s two newest members argued about what would or would not be acceptable information for an official report. And whether or not there was another version—this one top secret—that included the exact details of what had gone down that day all those years ago. And whether Lieutenant Commander Lewis Koehl, the newly appointed CO of SEAL Team Sixteen, had seen a copy of that second report. Oh, and if such a report existed, did it contain Cosmo Richter’s real first name, because no one seemed to know what that was.
    He stared at his computer screen. Where the hell was he? He reread the last thing he’d written in his report about the rescue of the nuns.
    0507. Hostages found, IDed, and freed from barred cell. Sole guard removed before alarm raised.
    0510. Headed for roof. Intel reports correct—zero children in this entire facility. Two guards encountered, resistance minimal, surprise 100 percent—ruse on street working well. Guards eliminated before alarm raised.
    He was repeating himself. His college comp professor had always been on Cosmo’s ass, chastising him for repeating himself.
    God
damn,
he hated report writing.
    “What
I
heard, sir,” Vlachic said, and Cosmo used the excuse of checking out The Story’s latest