True Devotion Read online

  Praise for Dee Henderson and True Devotion

  “Dee Henderson has done a splendid job mixing romance with the fast-paced action of a Navy SEAL platoon.”

  Steve Watkins, former Navy SEAL

  “Action, adventure, and romance! True Devotion has everything a reader could want!”

  Angela Hunt, New York Times best-selling author

  “[Dee Henderson] has created a truly stunning tale of love and devotion to God, country, and to those left behind when the missions are done.”

  Compuserve Reviews

  “A wonderful story with real and entertaining characters. Ms. Henderson’s gift with words makes this book impossible to put down.”

  Writer’s Club Romance Group on AOL

  “True Devotion is the first in a new series called Uncommon Heroes and is definitely a must read for all lovers of suspense and military heroes!”

  Romance Communications Online

  “Dee Henderson and True Devotion earn my first platinum medal for excellence.”

  Bridges magazine

  “Dee Henderson delivers an uncommonly good story with grace and style.”

  Romancejournal.com

  Readers’ Praise

  “I served in the U.S. Navy during Desert Storm, and your book is one of the best books I have read in a long time! Can’t wait for the next Uncommon Heroes book!” —M. M.

  “My husband is in the Air Force, so it is nice to read military stories that are based in reality!” —R. G.

  “I have just finished reading your book True Devotion. I thought it was one of the best Christian romance adventure books I have ever read. I look forward to reading more of your books.” —Royale

  “I couldn’t put down True Devotion. I’ve read it twice already, and I have only had it a week. My husband was in the Navy for six years, and this book just touched my heart. I can’t wait for the next one.” —M. K.

  * * *

  Visit Tyndale’s exciting Web site at www.tyndale.com

  TYNDALE and Tyndale’s quill logo are registered trademarks of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

  True Devotion

  Copyright © 2000, 2002 by Dee Henderson. All rights reserved.

  Previously published in 2000, 2002 by Multnomah Publishers, Inc., under ISBN 1-57673-886-8

  Cover photograph of man © by Brian MacDonald. All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph of woman © by ImageShop/JupiterImages. All rights reserved.

  Illustration of Seal © 2001 by Dawson 3D, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Scripture quotations are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1952 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  ISBN–13: 978-1-4143-1062-6

  ISBN–10: 1-4143-1062-5

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  Glossary

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Author’s Note

  This story is dedicated to the military heroes

  of my immediate family:

  my Grandfather Johnson

  who rests at Arlington National Cemetery,

  my Grandfather Hammer

  decorated for campaigns through France,

  my uncles who served in the Army and Navy,

  and my brother

  who served in the Air Force.

  I’m proud of you.

  * * *

  Preface

  Navy SEAL Team Nine is a fictional entity with a few differences from an actual SEAL Team. A real Team would not deploy with the geographic diversity as shown in this story, nor would they serve together for such an extended period of time. These changes were made to accommodate a work of fiction. I have, however, endeavored to be accurate in both the terminology and tactics of an actual SEAL Team. To that end, former Navy SEAL Steve Watkins did me the honor of reviewing this manuscript. All remaining errors are mine.

  Glossary

  AOIC: Assistant Officer In Charge.

  Attack board: Underwater guidance board used for long swims. The board has a bubble compass and a depth gauge on it.

  AWACS: Airborne Warning And Control System. Special aircraft with powerful radars to scan for planes at any altitude. Controls air-to-air engagements with enemy forces.

  broken arrow: Any accident with nuclear weapons or nuclear material lost, shot down, crashed, stolen, or hijacked.

  BUD/S: Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL. The name for the initial six-month training program at the facility in Coronado, California, which all men hoping to be SEALs must pass.

  C-130: Cargo plane.

  Chocolate Mountain: Land training center for SEALs in the California desert.

  Draegar LAR V: Rebreather units that suppress bubbles under water.

  GPS: Global Positioning System. Satellite guidance around earth used to precisely pinpoint aircraft, ships, vehicles, and ground troops.

  HELO: Helicopter.

  L-T: Lieutenant.

  MP: Military Police.

  NAB: U.S. Naval Amphibious Base, Coronado, California.

  NATO Phonetic Alphabet: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliet, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu.

  NEST: Nuclear Energy Search Team. Nonmilitary unit that reports at once to any spill, problem, or Broken Arrow to determine the extent of the radiation problem.

  newbies: A new man in an established military unit.

  NVGs: Night Vision Goggles give good night vision in the dark with a greenish view.

  SEAL: One of the elite branches of the U.S. Special Forces operating from the sea, air, or land.

  snaked: Slang for stepping through stuff you don’t want to identify.

  sneak and peek: Slang for stealthy reconnaissance.

  tango(s): Terrorist.

  TRIDENT: SEALs emblem. An eagle with talons clutching a Revolutionary War pistol, and Neptune’s trident superimposed on the Navy’s traditional anchor.

  XO: Executive Officer.

  God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

  Psalm 46:1

  One

  * * *

  They were going to drown.

  Kelly Jacobs could already see the headline on the front page of the weekly Coronado Eagle newspaper: “Riptide Kills Teen and Lifeguard.” The cold water had her by the throat. Six minutes had passed since she’d last seen the boy bobbing in the swells, and they were being pulled out to sea at a horrifying clip.

  She h
ad a lifetime of experience in the Pacific waters off San Diego, numerous rescues, but nothing like this. The water in early May, warmer than usual from La Niña, was still only sixty-seven degrees, cold enough to induce hypothermia. The swells dropped her four feet down in the troughs. If she didn’t find the boy soon she wouldn’t have the ability to get them back to shore. And this was a big ocean for a search party to cover in the dark—to her left the sun had already set and the twilight was fading fast.

  The riptide created by the conflux of ocean currents and the outgoing tide had formed late in the day with an explosive suddenness. When conditions changed, the riptide would fade as abruptly as it had formed, but whether it lasted a few hours or a day would not matter in the end. It was already on the verge of becoming deadly.

  The fear of what was coming overwhelmed her. This fight to reach the boy was turning into a personal life-and-death struggle. The salt water burned her throat and sent her gasping as another wave caught her in midbreath. To give up the attempted rescue to save herself, to let the boy drown— It had been years since she had cared about something this much. She wasn’t going to give up, and she wasn’t going to fail.

  Kelly strained to find a way to work with the waves rather than against them. The boy was out here, somewhere near, and she was going to reach him. She thought about her husband as she fought the cold of the sea. Nick, did you die because you drowned? The Navy had never told her.

  She would have said it was impossible for her husband, a Navy SEAL, to drown. With all his training, with all his confidence and courage, she had dismissed it as even a consideration, but she was suddenly not sure anymore and the thought was agonizing.

  Three years ago she had said good-bye to her husband at the gates of the U.S. Naval Amphibious Base, half a mile down Highway 75 from their home in the Coronado Shores subdivision. It was a typical good-bye—loving but rushed. Nick had been slipping away from her ever since his pager went off forty minutes before, his attention already on the upcoming mission.

  She stole one last hug, burying her face against his uniform, wishing he wasn’t leaving but unwilling to put that wish into words. She never wanted to hold him back or give him reason to hesitate. She loved him and she would keep everything on the home front together and ready for his return. Nick lifted Kelly off her feet for his kiss good-bye and then strode with purpose through security to join the other members of SEAL Team Nine gathering to hear why they had been paged to assemble at 8 p.m.

  A confident man, her husband, serving in one of the elite branches of the U.S. special forces—a Navy SEAL: from sea, air, or land, they would get the job done. Fluent in three languages, a competent backup medic, he was accustomed to being sent to deal with crises around the world where force had to be brought to bear rapidly. They called him Eagle because he saw everything. A useful trait since he walked point for one of the two squads in Golf Platoon.

  Kelly dropped him off at the base and returned home, knowing neither where he was going nor how long he would be gone. She trusted his confidence in himself, in the men around him, in their training. They were the best and the best didn’t fail.

  There had been no welcome home.

  A training accident. That was what the Navy officially said as it buried her husband with full military honors and handed her the folded flag.

  She knew they were lying. A training accident didn’t bring her husband home in a sealed coffin and bring Nick’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Joe Baker, home nursing a bullet wound through his shoulder. She never tried to break the understood code of silence to learn the truth. They were SEALs, and she had been a SEAL’s wife. The truth was classified.

  She nearly dropped the flag when they handed it to her. She had not been able to see her husband; the coffin remained sealed. They handed her the flag he had fought to defend, folded neat and tight with no red showing. It had been prepared by the men in uniform with a solemness of ritual that would allow no slackness in the fabric or imperfection in a fold. They gave her his flag because they could not give her back the man; they gave her his flag to stand in his place. Their salute honored the man, the flag his service, the taps his passing. And it hit her in that instant, the fact Nick was gone for good.

  Looking into the eyes of the hurting men of SEAL Team Nine as the funeral concluded, looking into the solemn eyes of men who grieved with her, she was assured that her husband had done his job and not let them down. They were not able to share it in words, but they all shared that truth in their expressions. She clung to the fact Nick died doing what he loved. Under her own grief she was grateful for that.

  And yet the pain that had come in the passing days and months ripped deeper than anything she had ever felt. Her life had changed forever. She missed Nick more than words could express. The men of SEAL Team Nine had replaced him because his was a profession that required another to stand in the gap of one fallen. They went on while they always remembered. But no one could replace him for her.

  The medallion she wore, Nick’s eagle, slapped against her in the waves. She reached for it with one hand, grabbing hold, grateful now she had secured the chain so she could wear it in the water. It had traveled with Nick through five years of missions. Now it was her closest reminder of him.

  “People drown because they panic.”

  She clung to the words Nick had so often said. During SEAL training the instructors tied his hands and feet and dropped him into the deep end of the pool for thirty minutes doing various tasks—the drown-proof test. Nick knew what he was talking about. He just hadn’t told her how hard it was not to panic.

  Relax. Do your job.

  Nick would wonder why she was panicking when she’d been trained for hard tasks such as this. She put her energy into judging the swells, riding them up to scan the surrounding water. The boy had been south of her the last time she had seen him.

  There!

  She surged toward him with a hard crawl, willing to use the last of her energy, knowing this might be her last chance before darkness fell.

  The teenager had been surfing with a friend; both boys got into trouble in the heavy surf. She went into the water to back up her partner. Alex reached them first, securing a hold on one boy bleeding from a gash on the forehead and pushing his float board to the other boy. As Alex headed toward the shore towing the injured boy, she went for the other teen, not surprised when in his panic he fought her. At the same instant she got hit in the eye, they hit the riptide. The sea tore them apart.

  The sea helped her this time, tossing her the last few feet. She snagged the boy’s arm as she slammed past him, spun into him, the wave breaking over her head and into her face. She coughed hard, struggling to clear her lungs as she held on for all she was worth. She was not going to lose him again.

  The fight had gone out of the teen. The straps of the float board that had been pushed to him were around his left wrist, his right arm hugging it. Even though she desperately needed a few brief moments of rest, she was careful not to put any of her weight onto the float board. It had kept his head above water during the last long separation and been a factor in keeping him alive. It would never support them both.

  Sandy blond hair, blue eyes, slim, younger than she originally thought, fourteen or fifteen, long, skinny arms and lanky, still trying to fit into his sudden growth spurt. Both his fear and fatigue were obvious in his face. The waves sent them up and down and rocked them back and forth in a never-ending sensation of movement that made seasickness too calm a word for the reality. “What’s your name?” She leaned close to him to be heard.

  He was swallowing water, coughing, and his voice rasped. “Ryan.”

  “I’m Kelly.” Fighting fingers that were stiff, that did not want to do as she asked, she unwrapped the nylon rope at her waist and maneuvered the buddy line around his waist, securely tying the line. She wasn’t going to take a chance on the sea once again tearing them apart. She put her hands on his face, smiling at him, even as she studied his eyes and
assessed his condition. “That was a pretty impressive wipeout you did on the surfboard.”

  He gave a glimmer of a smile back. “My dad is going to kill me. I wasn’t supposed to be surfing.”

  Hypothermia. She could hear it in the dragging words and see it in his swollen eyes as he struggled to keep them open against the sting of the salt water and the cold-induced fatigue. She wasn’t in much better shape herself.

  She looked to the east. The twilight was almost gone; the shoreline appeared only by reflected lights on the horizon. The distance was distorted by the dim twilight, but even by optimistic assessments it was far away. Getting them back to shore was no longer possible. Even if she had the strength, she would not be able to judge the location of the beach and the dangerous rocks in the descending darkness. There was little she could do but keep the boy talking and hope help arrived soon. She knew the rescue crews would be out looking. As soon as Alex had reached shore, the call for help would have gone out.

  “Who’s your dad?” The conversation was as much to distract her as to distract him. Waiting was almost harder than searching. She had to figure out some way to get them through the coming ordeal while she still had the clarity to plan. The cold water was a deadly foe for it ruined the ability to think clearly.

  “Charles Raines.”

  “You live here in Coronado?”

  “Across the water on the Point Loma peninsula. Dad bought a place on Hill Street.”

  A wealthy man’s son. The homes on Hill Street bordered Sunset Cliffs National Park. That stretch of shoreline had the most beautiful rock formations carved out by the sea she had ever seen. “Those are beautiful homes.”