"You got a call sign, sweetheart? Or did they let you carry the clipboard?"
The young man said it loud, so the whole end of the bar would hear, and the whole end of the bar did.
He stood with one boot up on the rail and a beer sweating in his fist, turned half away from the woman so that the words were really for the four men behind him. They laughed on cue. That was the point of them.
The woman did not look up.
She sat at the dark end of the bar where the light from the neon sign did not reach. A plain blue shirt buttoned to the second button, a single glass of water in front of her that she had not touched. Her hands lay flat on the wood.
She had chosen the stool that put her back to the wall and her eyes on the door. And she had chosen it without thinking. The way some people choose to breathe.
The bar was called the Holdfast, and it sat a mile outside the gate of the Naval Special Warfare base, close enough that the men who drank there walked in still smelling of salt and cordite and sunscreen.
Tonight, it was full of one team, loud and easy and certain. A team on liberty the night before a change of command. They owned the place. They always owned the place.
The young man with the beer owned it most of all, because he had decided that he did. And nobody at his back had told him otherwise.
His name was Trevor Cain, Special Warfare Operator First Class. He was 27 years old and very good at a job that had not yet asked him for the only thing it would one day take. He had a hard, clean jaw and the kind of confidence that has never been corrected.
When the woman did not rise to him, he leaned closer.
"I'm talking to you," he said. "The clipboard, the badge. You're the new contractor, right? Safety, readiness, whatever they call it now."
He grinned for his friends.
"You wandered into the wrong bar, ma'am. This is a frogman's house."
The woman lifted her water, drank a small amount, and set it down exactly where it had been. The ring of moisture matched the old ring beneath it.
"I'll keep that in mind," she said.