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  READY TO ROLL

  A Troubleshooters Novella

  Suzanne Brockmann

  Suzanne Brockmann Books

  www.SuzanneBrockmann.com

  “The name Brockmann means romantic suspense!”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Openly gay FBI agent Jules Cassidy (is) one of the most charming and original characters in popular fiction today.”

  —Library Journal

  “You know when you hear a Lady Gaga song on the radio—it has a definite sound. You know when you see a Kate Spade handbag—it has a definite look. And you know when you’re reading a Suzanne Brockmann book—it has a definite style.”

  —Marissa ONeill, BN Heart-to-Heart Blog

  About Do or Die:

  “Brockmann effortlessly and expertly tosses hundreds of details into the air and juggles them with brilliance… Enthralling and breathtaking.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Brockmann leaves the reader breathless, and longing for sequels. The sex is great, the action nonstop; and the dialogue between Ian and Phoebe is some of Rita Award–winning Brockmann’s best. Her fans will cheer, as will all military-romance fans.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  Ready to Roll is a work of fiction.

  Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A Suzanne Brockmann eBook original

  Copyright © 2016 Suzanne Brockmann

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Thank you for respecting this author and supporting her work.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-9863284-2-8

  Kindle Edition

  www.SuzanneBrockmann.com

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  https://tinyletter.com/SuzanneBrockmann

  Dedication

  For the cast and crew of Russian Doll;

  particularly its writer/director.

  And for the backers who helped make this movie.

  Thank you.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Reviews

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Timeline

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Author’s note

  Excerpt from Some Kind of Hero

  Other Books and Projects from Suzanne Brockmann

  Excerpt from A Match for Mike by Jason T. Gaffney with Ed Gaffney

  About Suzanne Brockmann

  Timeline:

  Late January, 2010.

  About nine months after the end of Breaking the Rules, one month after Free Fall, and a few weeks after Home Fire Inferno (Burn, Baby, Burn).

  CHAPTER ONE

  Saturday

  Petty Officer First Class

  Irving “Izzy” Zanella:

  Oh, yeah. I remember BUD/S training Hell Week as clearly as yesterday.

  I went in with a barely healed broken rib—and a playlist of music, well, (in an old man voice) back then, my children, when I was but a wee tadpole, we called ’em mix tapes. (normal voice) And I made a few especially for Hell Week.

  See, I’ve always loved music, and even on a regular, average day I’ve got this continual soundtrack playing in my head. Songs pop in, sometimes out of nowhere.

  And because I knew Hell Week was going to be rough, I didn’t want to leave the soundtrack-in-my-head to chance.

  So I prepped by organizing and listening to this long playlist of songs. And it wasn’t just songs that I loved. I also put in at least one song that annoyed the living bejeebus out of me. Daddy was a cop, on the east side of… Yeah. That’ll make you run faster. Trust me.

  I played those songs over and over and over—headphones on and music up loud—starting even before I reported in, at Coronado. And for the first five weeks of Phase One BUD/S—it’s a six week program that’s basically a non-stop physical endurance test, so any downtime…? My music’s on.

  It helped keep me out of trouble, too, because back then I didn’t always play well with others.

  Anyway, it got so that I could hear all two-and-a-half hours in my head—note for note—from memory. I just mentally pressed play. Because you can’t wear headphones out in the grinder, you know? Excuse me, Senior Chief, but I missed what you just said because my jams was up too loud…

  (Leans in) What’s the grinder? (laughs) The grinder is part of the BUD/S training area in Coronado. It looks a lot like a school playground—part asphalt, part concrete—where you might have a game of kickball at recess. But it’s where the SEAL candidates do their PT—physical training.

  It’s called the grinder because it’s where you go to get ground up and spit out.

  During my time in the grinder, I’m sure I did somewhere in the two-to-three million range of pushups and sit-ups and squats and lunges of all varieties. And yes, it was maddening.

  But that brings me back to my mental playlist, because my music kept me focused and it got me through.

  If you see a faded sign at the side of the road… I still hear echoes of the B-52s every time I find myself in freezing water. We spent a lot of time cold and wet and miserable during Hell Week, but that very first surf torture session—it started about an hour in—that was extra memorable.

  I know that Grunge—and that would be Lieutenant Greene to you—but Grunge still starts Hell Week with a little torture de la mer. It’s a real bell-ringer.

  And believe me, watching other men quit…? Guys that you know are smarter and stronger than you…? That can put a great deal of doubt into the equation at a time when you can afford to have exactly zero doubt.

  Unless… you’ve got a party playing in your head, drowning it all out. Then you’re like, Shut that door behind you, bro!

  Because… (sings) Everybody’s moving, everybody’s grooving, baby…

  * * *

  SEAL Candidate Petty Officer Third Class

  John “Seagull” Livingston:

  Hell Week starts this Sunday. At night, of course. So naturally they have us out in the grinder all day today, with an impending visit to the O-course—the Obstacle Course—this afternoon. And maybe that’s a good thing because there’s no time to sit and reflect on what’s coming.

  I mean, we all know what’s coming. Hell Week is the final killer week of Phase One of BUD/S training—we all dread it and some of us fear it.

  BUD/S stands for Basic Underwater Demolition slash SEAL. It’s what you do if you want to be a Navy SEAL. I’ve always loved the water and I’ve wanted to be a SEAL since before I can remember. My dad’s Navy, or he was before he retired and we moved back to Brooklyn. So I grew up all over the world, desperately wanting to belong to the Teams.

  I know I’m not the biggest or the strongest guy in the class, and I’m definitely not the smartest, but I’m fast and I can really swim. And maybe most importantly…? I’m not afraid. I can do this.

  And Hell Week’s not really a week. It’s five and a half days—which is long enough, because it’s nonstop physical, mental, and emotional challenges. Every candidate gets a swim buddy—someone whose side they cannot leave. And then they
put us into eight man boat squads, and we have to work together, as a team.

  They’ll have us doing all kinds of fun activities like surf torture, sugar cookie drills, log PT, and… you get the picture. And of course every boat squad needs to hump around their rubber duck at all times. That’s what we call the IBS’s or Inflatable Boats, Small. Only our adorable rubber duckies weigh around a hundred and ten pounds. Try carrying that on your head for five and a half days straight. And it won’t get lighter as the week wears on and your boat squad shrinks.

  We’ll get maybe four hours of sleep for the whole week—in very short blocks. Like, here’s ten minutes to nap. Go. (laughs)

  So if you’re prone to hallucinations from lack of sleep combined with extreme cold, those tend to start late on day three.

  That’s gonna be awesome.

  The one thing we do get plenty of during Hell Week is food. Between the three squares and mid-rats—that’s the meal they give us in the middle of the night—we’ll probably consume about seven thousand calories. Each day. Yeah, that’s a seven with three zeros. And we’ll end up skinnier than when we started. At least I will.

  And oh, yeah, if you reach your breaking point and you decide that you want to quit, you have to do something called ring out. And yes, that’s about as humiliating as it gets. You ring a bell, essentially announcing to your boat squad, to the class, to the instructors, and to the entire U.S. Navy that you’re not good enough. You put the green liner of your helmet on the ground near the bell—your name’s on it in big black letters, so everyone knows exactly who failed—and then you slink away and never become a SEAL.

  Dream? Completely crushed.

  Ouch, right?

  I don’t plan to ring out. Of course, nobody plans to ring out. I mean, I hear the same thing from all the guys in this class. I’ve wanted to be a SEAL since I was seven years old. The big dream is to make it through, to not be the guy who rings that bell.

  But no BUD/S class ends Hell Week as large as it started. Most classes lose more than half their guys. Way more.

  So the truth is, most of them are going to be the guys who ring out. Most of them aren’t going to be SEALs.

  But me? I’m doing this.

  Count on it.

  * * *

  LT Peter “Grunge” Greene:

  Nah, I don’t remember much of my own Hell Week. It’s a blur of noise and pain. (smiles wryly) I think that’s probably a good thing.

  * * *

  Izzy Zanella found the tadpoles happily at play on the O-course.

  And okay, happily probably wouldn’t have been the word choice of this current crop of SEAL candidates who were humping it through the playground-soft sand, crawling beneath barbed wire, and then clambering up and over the cargo net before wrangling with the diabolical obstacle that was lovingly nicknamed The Fugly Name.

  No one ever did the Fugg happily. Oh, it looked simple enough. It was a wooden structure set up like a gymnast’s uneven bars—except the “bars” had the diameter of a telephone pole. They definitely weren’t grab-able with mere human hands—they required a both-arms grasp to keep from slipping off. So you clambered up onto the shorter one—easy enough—but then you had to fling yourself toward the taller one, which was four feet away. Since you had to grab that pole via bear-hug, you also tended to slam into it with your chest, no matter how graceful your try. It happened every mother-freaking time. It was only then, cursing wildly, that you’d drop back down to the sand and stagger off to the next obstacle.

  Once upon a time, Izzy had cracked a rib on the Fugg.

  And when you cracked a rib on the Fugg during BUD/S, as Izzy had done, the instructors didn’t kiss your owie, tuck you into bed, and tell you to take some time off to heal. Nope. Instead, they gave you the opportunity to do the entire O-course over again, immediately, while strongly suggesting that you not fuck it up this time. If you couldn’t do it—if you really were badly hurt—you’d be rolled for medical reasons. And that meant you had to start the entire first phase of BUD/S all over again, at a later date.

  Most SEAL candidates would do damn near anything to avoid being medically rolled.

  So Izzy had run the O again. With the broken rib. And one great thing about doing it with a broken rib… It made it so much easier to run the course without the broken rib. And he’d been lucky, since his injury had mostly healed by the start of Hell Week.

  But that was long in the past. He was here now as a day-shift instructor for this shiny new class’s Week O’Hell—which meant that he was going to sleep in his own bed with his brilliant and beautiful wife, Eden, every night for the next week.

  To say he was happy to be here was an understatement.

  And his standing on the sidelines instead of scrambling through the O always made him oh-so-happier. BUD/S was much more fun from this side of graduation.

  “Yo! Iz!”

  Marky-Mark Jenkins was waving to him from just beyond the cargo net. The SEAL had set up a trio of beach chairs with little umbrellas attached to the backs, and he, Tony V, and Jay Lopez—knee brace on—were sitting and observing as the tadpoles scrambled and grunted and sweated in the afternoon sun.

  “How’s Lindsey?” Izzy asked as he approached. Jenk’s wife was still in the violent-morning-sickness phase of pregnancy.

  “She’s good,” Jenk said. “And feeling better every week, you know?”

  Izzy did know. Lindsey Jenkins had miscarried last year, and every day that passed put them that much closer to the successful delivery of a healthy baby.

  “How’re Dan and Jenn?” Jay Lopez asked. Their teammate—and Izzy’s SEAL-in-law Danny Gillman, brother to Izzy’s wife Eden—had just spawned. Dan’s wife Jennilyn had given birth to a super-sized Gillbaby that they’d named Colin.

  “Last I heard, Col’s still kicking their collective asses in the not-sleeping department,” Izzy reported as he plopped down in the sand next to Lopez. “How’s the knee, bro?”

  “Meh.” The chief was uncharacteristically glass-half-empty as he gazed balefully down at the brace on his leg. He’d recently had knee surgery—because he’d carelessly landed wrong after jumping out of a plane.

  And yes, there was way more to it than that. But the whole not-talking-about-it-after-almost-dying thing was an unspoken SEAL rule.

  “That good, huh?” Izzy said. As far as wrong-landings went, it could’ve been way worse. On the bad-landing scale from ankle-twist to a full chute-didn’t-open-splat-yer-dead, Lopez’s damaged knee was significantly closer to the twisted ankle end of the spectrum.

  “Day two of rehab always sucks,” Lopez said darkly. “Although not as much as day three will.”

  “On the bright side,” Izzy pointed out, “unlike Dan and Jenn, you don’t have a miniature human being crying and waking you up every few hours, all night long.”

  “Adam told me that Eden told him that Jenn told her that the longest Colin’s slept is an hour and forty-eight minutes,” Tony leaned forward to join the conversation. “We’re talking best time ever.”

  “Seriously?” Lopez asked.

  “That’s not terrifying news,” Jenk said.

  Tony nodded. Ice cubes rattled against plastic as he fished in a cooler that he’d tucked in the shade beneath his chair. “His per night average is more like an hour ten. He tends to be wide awake and, you know, both hungry and noisy, from oh-two to around oh-seven hundred.”

  Tony’s significant other, Adam, had become close to Izzy’s wife, Eden, over the past half year—which was good. Eden didn’t make friends easily, but her friendship with Adam was solid.

  “You want?” Tony pulled an icy cold can of beer out from the cooler and held it out to Izzy.

  It was a Fat Tire Amber, so Izzy grabbed and popped. “Am I hiding this, or—”

  “Nah, we’re cleared,” Jenk answered. “The LT—Grunge—asked for this whole setup. The chairs, the beer…”

  “The overwhelming waves of hatred radiating back at us from the youngster
s in BUD/S class nine million and twelve,” Izzy said, toasting said tadpoles with his beer before he took a healthy slug. Yum.

  “Danny must be on the verge of losing it,” Jenk commented. “I half expected to see him here—begging for the senior to call him back in so he could do something easier than two-week-old infant-care. Like, single-handedly rescue hostages being held by terrorists in some cave in A-stan. While armed only with a Ka-bar.”

  “Does Lindsey know you feel this way?” Tony asked, laughing.

  “I’m not talking about me, I’m talking about Danny,” Jenk protested.

  “There was a certain frightened desperation in your tone,” Lopez teased.

  “Am I scared?” Jenkins asked. “Of course, I’m scared. In fact, I’m terrified. The closest I’ve ever come to a baby is when we babysat for Tommy Paoletti, remember that, Iz?”

  “We babysat?” Izzy asked. “Only if I’m the Queen of England, bro. Because if I recall that evening, the you part of that we was involved with exactly zero hands-on baby-care.”

  “Yeah, well, Your Majesty, that’s because you’re really good with babies,” Jenk said.

  “We appreciate the compliment,” Izzy said in his best falsettoed Queen Elizabeth. He’d been his parents’ oopsie-baby, and because of that, his pack of significantly older brothers were baby-making ages themselves before Izzy was out of middle school. He’d learned to feed, burp, and change his nieces and nephews long before he’d learned to drive. And the under-one set recognized both his superior skill level and his time-won ease, and knew they couldn’t frighten him. So they relaxed around him.

  “I keep offering to assist Danny and Jenn,” Izzy added. “Eden does, too. But they don’t want help. In fact, after the initial welcome home visit, Jenn asked us to stay away while they try to get into a rhythm.” He made air quotes around the words.

  In fact, Jenn had said that Eden and Izzy were doing plenty by having Ben stay with them for these first few weeks.

  As the youngest of the Gillman siblings, sixteen-year-old Ben usually split his time between Izzy and Eden’s apartment, and Dan and Jenn’s new house. It was an arrangement that worked well for everyone—including Ben, who was the most responsible and mature teenager that Izzy had ever met. The kid was, in Izzy’s opinion, a little too somber and constrained. Which was why Izzy had secretly cheered when Ben had gotten into a fight with a bully at school a few weeks ago—even though they’d been dealing with the fallout of that misadventure ever since.