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’76 and BUD/S Class 95 (1978), had commanded SEAL Team Three in Coronado, then DEVGRU itself, and served in the number three position on the staff at the U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa. Like his immediate predecessor at JSOC, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, Wes Bolin was a lead-from-the-front operator who often accompanied assault elements of Task Force 131, which specialized in capture/kill missions against high-value targets.
    Bolin was also a scholar of warfare in general, and of special operations in particular, who understood that what war ultimately came down to was killing people and breaking things. And that winning meant doing it to them before they did it to you.
    In fact, in 1994, as a student at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, Lieutenant Commander Wes Bolin had inspired his fellow student and SEAL Team Three colleague Bill McRaven to write Spec Ops: Eight Case Studies , a seminal work on special operations warfare. The book, published commercially a year later, dissected eight significant special operations warfare ops, including disasters (Operation Chariot, Britain’s 1942 raid on St. Nazaire), triumphs (the U.S. Army Ranger raid on the Cabanatuan prison camp in January 1945 and Operation Jonathan, Israel’s 1976 Entebbe Raid), and dry holes (Operation Kingpin, the U.S. Army’s abortive raid on Son Tay in 1970). McRaven had almost dedicated the book to Wes.
    Troy had met Admiral Bolin, an Arizona native and former Naval Academy football letterman, during one of the JSOC commander’s frequent visits to Afghanistan. Wes Bolin had even ridden in Troy’s helo on two capture/kill missions. So the young SEAL knew he and his teammates would get a fair shake from the boulder-chested admiral with a bone-crushing handshake, whose radio call sign was Slam. It was Admiral Slam, after all, who had, more than once in public, referred to the politically correct, zero-defect Naval Pentagoners currently calling for Red Squadron’s heads on pikes as “perfumed princes.” And who was one of the few flag officers who regularly displayed loyalty down his chain of command as well as demanding that it bubble up from the bottom.
    Troy’s other ace was Alpha Troop’s master chief. Danny Walker was Red Squadron’s official Old Man. Now forty-three, he had enlisted in the Navy after five years in the 82nd Airborne. He went through BUD/S Class 203 at age twenty-nine, the oldest candidate by four years. He’d been at DEVGRU for a decade now and was not only Troy’s best friend, but also his mentor and coach. They even attended the same church.
    Danny’s advice had been short and sweet: “Think of this as Purgatory, T-Rob. It’ll sort out. And I’ve got your back. So keep your mind in neutral, your ass in gear, and your hatches dogged.”
     
    It began to drizzle. Troy glanced up and scanned the horizon. There were gray clouds overhead, but he could see blue sky to the west. The rain wouldn’t last long. He picked up his pace, anxious to finish his PT and get to the office.
    He hated doing nothing, and he knew the longer he was deprived of the shoot house, the helos, all the training that kept his skills honed, the longer it would take to get them back. But God, Troy believed—believed to his very core—had his reasons. There was a plan. Of course he didn’t know what it was, but it was there. Just as surely as God had allowed him to survive BUD/S and Green Squadron selection, just as surely as He’d given Troy the talent that allowed him to jump out of a perfectly good aircraft seven miles above the Earth’s surface, fast-rope from a helo, breach a door, and pull the trigger on a high-value target.
    Yeah, life sucked right now. But God had a plan, and He would see Troy through. So Troy’s faith would keep him on an even keel until God revealed His hand and—dear Jesus, please—sent him back to war.
    On the secular side, Troy also knew deep in his heart two of the basic