The Unsung Hero

8 August

Tom swung his duffle bag down from the overhead rack and shuffled slowly with the other passengers off the commercial flight and out into Boston's Logan Airport.

Moving slowly was good, especially since--like right now--he still had bouts of dizziness from that head injury that had nearly taken him out of action permanently.

Outside the terminal, the city skyline was muted by the hazy morning sky. Welcome to summer in New England.

The humidity would lift, Tom knew, as he headed toward the tiny North Shore community of Baldwin's Bridge. The stiff ocean breezes kept the temperature down and the skies blue in the picture-perfect tourist town.

Tom was staying only until Sunday.

He had thirty days of convalescent leave to fill, which pissed him off. He didn't want thirty days, dammit. He'd just spent far too much time in the hospital, too much time away from his command. Of course, thanks to Rear Admiral Larry Tucker, at this point he wasn't sure he even had much of a command to return to.

Was it any wonder he'd lost his temper when he'd found out that while he was in a frigging coma, Tucker had tried to make SEAL Team Sixteen a line item to be deleted on the upcoming fiscal year's budget And when Tom had found out that Tucker had taken Sixteen's SO squad, the elite group of men that Tom had taken years to handpick--nicknamed "The Troubleshooters" by some and "The Troublemakers" by the non-SEAL brass like Tucker--and scattered them to the ends of the earth ...

But Tom had only lost his temper with the rear admiral. He hadn't thrown the man through the fourth-story window of his D.C. office. He hadn't even slapped the self-satisfied smirk off the bastard's face.

All he'd done was list his objections perhaps a little more strenuously than he normally might have.

And for that, he'd lost another week of his life undergoing psych evaluations, as teams of medical doctors and psychiatrists tried to decide whether or not his outburst was directly related to his recent severe head injury.

Tom had tried to assure them that, indeed, his loss of temper was merely a side effect of dealing with Tucker.