Chapter Text
The Gulf of Aden was deceptively beautiful. Warm seawater caught sunlight and glistened, often inviting unsuspecting guests for a calm and casual swim. Yet, little did they know of the trouble lurking above and beneath the surface of the crashing waves, because it would be a beautiful place for that if it the cove wasn’t fraught with piracy.
And targeted ship bombings.
And riptides.
Never mind that as Clay swam 10 meters down to the shallow, rock-strewn sea bottom of the cove, he had to carefully maneuver around dead coral reefs and the remnants of rotting, half-buried shipwrecks, all while pawing away a tangled mess of slimy brown seaweed.
Beautiful, his ass.
Bravo had been assigned a simple undercover recon mission off the coast of Somalia. Clay hated recons - he was a SEAL for a reason. He thrived on the action and the danger and the adrenaline of schwacking the dirtiest of all dirtbags. But when command called, you went, and long ago he’d resigned himself to the fact that they also had to do the less cool things like escorts and simple surveillance. That even meant if ‘simple surveillance’ involved a mission as routine as planting hidden cameras to gather intelligence on their newest HVT and their affiliates.
Earlier that morning under the shadow of dawn, Bravo had been ferried in by Full Metal on a rented boat to a small adjacent cove in the Gulf. With their kevlar vests hidden by loose fishing gear, Jason, Ray, Metal, and Brock stayed topside, fishing poles in hand. Down below the churning gray sea, Clay, Trent, and Sonny swam along the rocky shoreline, cut off from the rest of their brothers.
Just as expected, placing the surveillance cameras went off without a hitch and in less than two minutes, the three SEALs drifted back into the sea like ghosts, with their targets none the wiser that the US government was now gathering intelligence on them. With Trent on point and Sonny close behind him, Clay took the rear while keeping a close eye on his teammates and their surroundings. They swam silently through calm waters towards their fishing vessel, keeping as close to the seabed as possible to avoid detection.
Easy enough.
Except Clay’s life was never easy these days.
After a strong kick of his fin which slightly shifted his direction to the right, he was swept into a hidden rip. Like the force of a small tsunami, the current tore him in the wrong direction, away from his team. He somersaulted, completely powerless to the ocean surge, dragged against the sandy bottom and hard coral, until -
He was slammed into a wrecked skeleton of a vessel with enough momentum that actually splintered the wood and pushed him deeply into a tangle of broken beams.
He’d had enough experience in the water to know what a riptide felt like, knew their hidden nature and the absolute power they packed. He should’ve given heed to the fact that this particular beach housed a complex, narrow current system of them especially around the collections of broken shipwrecks.
Should’ve.
Dazed for a second by the painful impact, Clay finally gathered his bearings enough to realize that he couldn’t move, wedged into the mass of planks so tightly that his dive gear was nearly cutting off the circulation in his arms.
His second realization was that he couldn’t breathe.
Fighting a surge of panic, Clay tried to see the problem with his regulator line but couldn’t; whether the splintered wood had entangled, pinched, or torn the line that carried his oxygen, he couldn’t tell.
What he could see, though, was a mess of broken wood, all of which had essentially folded under pressure of his body. Arms pinned and shoulders bent backwards by the lines and straps of his gear - he was trapped at a painful angle and pushed down by the relentless rip.
Shit.
Shit.
This was bad. Really, really bad.
His head snapped up, searching for his brothers.
Sonny and Trent were there, but they were in the distance to the far left. Their legs propelled them in smooth gliding motions, carrying them further away. They had no idea and he had absolutely no way to signal them.
Turn around! He willed them in desperation, God, please, just turn around!
They didn’t.
Clay bucked and twisted. Got nowhere, pinned down inexplicably hard. He had to find a way. Clay was going to drown here if he didn’t.
He could hold his breath for six minutes, two seconds. It was the longest he’d ever held his breath, but he’d also been in BUD/S at the time and had breached the surface of the pool barely conscious. Even then, pools were contained. Orderly. Warm. Your heart beat was calm, your muscles were relaxed.
He also knew, in the tiny part of his brain that wasn’t crippled by panic, that holding your breath in a pool was very different from being trapped in the ocean - because Clay was anything but calm. He thrashed, desperate, in a useless effort to fight the skeletal death grip around him but he was failing miserably and had already used up most of his reserves. The more his body bucked, the more his lungs burned like fire.
And as much as he fought, he didn’t move an inch.
He was well and truly trapped.
For a horrifying second, Clay understood that there was no way out of this. He was actually drowning. He was going to die.
Please...
Through water-blurred eyes, desperate to see Trent and Sonny one last time, desperate for a connection, he looked for them.
They were gone.
In their place was the deep gray waters and calmly swaying kelp. The lifeless coral and rotten planks of a drowned boat.
Pain grew and his chest was crushing him.
Dark spots encroached his vision.
This couldn’t be it.
This couldn’t be it this couldn’t be it this couldn’t be it!
Despite his slipping consciousness, Clay could feel it all: the bursting, unbearable pressure in his chest. His lungs: a spasming, agonizing mass of fire. Muscles and limbs that pulled and bent and fought and twisted with every bit of strength he possessed because he had no air, God he needed to breathe! A frantic heartbeat that pounded like thunderclaps, inescapably in his head. Then, the very, very real and horrifying fact that this was it.
The bottom line.
He couldn’t take the crushing pain… his body gave up the fight. Clay’s mouth opened and the regulator mouthpiece slipped out from between his lips. He saw an explosion of silvery bubbles that erupted from his mouth, the last breath he had taken, just as he sucked in a flood of water.
Eyes rolled and blown wide, he coughed. Reflexively sucked in more water. Floundered weakly. Got nowhere.
And all sounds were swallowed by the silent, calm sea.
Everything slowed down.
Awareness deadened.
He went still.
Floated.
Gone.
###
“Get in the boat, get in the boat!” Jason cried. The moment Trent and Sonny breached the surface, enemy fire cracked from a vessel a hundred yards to their left. Brock dove for his HK, knelt and returned fire in long bursts, giving Jason just enough cover to lean over the hull and grab Three and Four by the backs of their dive gear, dragging them into the boat. “Havoc, troops in contact! I say again, troops in contact! Everyone stay down! Where’s Clay?”
Bullets rained around them. Trent, barely able to catch his breath, crawled on his belly to the bow where they’d stowed their rifles, managing to tear off his cumbersome dive gear at the same time.
“He’ll be up in a minute, he was a little ways behind us. Sonny!” He called and tossed him his rifle. He ducked as another round of bullets pinged off the hull, just barely missing them.
“Where in the holy hell did these fuckers come from?”
Jason leaned over the edge of the boat, just long enough to get off a rapid series of shots before ducking for cover once more. Sonny was up and firing seconds behind him, but the swaying of both boats from the waves made it hard to hit anything.
Brock shoved a fresh mag into his rifle. “You see how many there are?”
“I got eyes on three,” Ray said as he came up firing, and somehow, even with the pitching of their boats, his shots found center mass. “One down.”
“Trent?”
And something in Sonny’s voice hit Jason hard in the gut, because Sonny was an absolute force and unwavering and hard-as-nails, and only sounded like that when…
When a brother was down.
Jason’s eyes snapped over and only then realized Four was no longer beside him. A second later and he saw his medic on the deck, a pool of blood forming under his right leg. “Trent!”
“Jesus! Trent! Where you hit!”
“Let me see, let me see. Move your hands,” Ray had shoved Trent flat on his back, saw the blossom of red near his knee. Shaking hands used the existing rip in his jeans to open it wider… “ Damn, Sawyer,” he puffed out a harsh exhale. “You had to give me a heart attack over a damn scratch?” Panic dimmed and it was wholly replaced by a gratitude that the gash, a neat slice that had barely cut through muscle, wasn’t much, much worse.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Trent panted through a wince and batted Ray’s hands off of him. He got his elbow under him and reached for his rifle, though noticed that enemy fire had ceased. “Woulda given me a second, I’d’a told you it was a flesh wound.”
“We got all three,” Brock announced. He held a pair of binoculars up and studied the boat, which now bobbed aimlessly and gushed black smoke into wind. “Two have headshots. One’s hit center mass... Twice. I don’t see any other boats but that smoke is gonna turn some heads.”
“Anybody else hit?”
“We’re good.”
“Nice work, boys. Let’s pack up and get outta here.”
“Sonny, hand me that med bag. We’ll need to pack his wound.”
“Guys…” Brock’s brow was pinched and his eyes were wide from adrenaline and… something more? Breathless, he asked, “Where’s Clay?”