Legacy of Terror (Brannigan's Blackhearts Book 13) by Peter Nealen

Author:Peter Nealen [Nealen, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-03-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

A part of Hank Brannigan was bothered by what they were about to do. He knew that necessity demanded it, and that there was a lot more at stake here, but the fact of the matter was, they were about to steal some local fisherman’s boat.

He’d known a lot of Marines, enlisted and officers, who had viewed the constant slogans about integrity as just that: slogans. Platitudes to mouth while they did what they could get away with. He’d never been that kind. His father had driven that integrity home when he’d been growing up, and that had held even when he’d left the house, gone to college, to OCS, and then into the Fleet.

Stealing from civilians was something that he’d always believed was wrong. Something that the good guys didn’t do. But that was before he found himself working on a small team, far from support, and had to make do, sometimes weighing one moral imperative against another.

The mission had to come first. They had accepted it on the grounds that they believed it was righteous—the Blackhearts got well paid, but he knew and trusted his dad enough to trust that the pay would never be the deciding factor—and therefore it was worth completing at risk of life and limb. This mission, at least the punishing the junta for piracy part, had only gotten more righteous as they’d found out that the junta’s people had murdered the American crews. Kill Americans, pay the price.

Still, he was glad that he was on security and not actually cutting the boats loose. It was a thin sort of self-justification, but it was something.

“Bring it in.” The whisper at his ear caught him slightly by surprise, which pissed him off. Not that Gomez had snuck up on him; that was almost expected at that point. He hadn’t known Mario as long as some of the others, but he should have anticipated that Gomez would just appear wherever he wanted to be. The man was a ghost, even more than Flanagan.

No, it was because he’d been thinking too much about the situation they’d found themselves in. He hadn’t been paying enough attention to their surroundings and the here and now.

Boot move, Hank. Fix yourself.

He got up and moved to join the rest of the team. Two fishing boats were now floating just off the beach, with Brannigan at the helm of one and Santelli steering the other. Wade and Bianco were at the bows, keeping them straight as much as possible in the faint swell. The others, Puller, Tackett, and Gomez, were wading out and clambering over the gunwales, making the boats tip a little in the water as their weight shifted.

Hank clambered in across from Puller, and then Bianco heaved himself into the bow, where his K3 was already lying against the gunwale. The boat rocked even more violently as Bianco’s considerable weight got settled and the big man, beaten up as he was, got his belt fed ready to use.

The locals

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