"Or Big Mac!"

"Screw you, Razor!" Holt called out.

"An' twelve! An' thirteen! An' fourteen!"

Another quiet Friday night at Samelli's, MacKenzie thought, wrapping his big hands around his glass of Bombay gin. Samelli's, a little bar and restaurant on Little Creek Road in east Norfolk, had long been a popular watering hole for naval personnel, but since the creation of Team Seven it had become virtually a private domain, SEAL territory, and all others enter at your own risk.

"He's getting' tired. Look at his face!"

"Aw, he's just getting' warmed up!"

"...twenty! An' twenty-one! An' twenty-two!"

Actually, MacKenzie reflected, it was rather quiet tonight, and that worried him. There were only seven SEALs in the whole place, counting him, all wearing civvies and none of them even bothering with the handful of Marines and Navy personnel already there when they arrived. Outwardly the boys were as rambunctious as usual, and as determined to get drunk, but there was a hard edge to their laughter, a bitterness to their jokes and banter that typified what MacKenzie had been noticing all week.

The platoon's morale was way the hell down. Lately, good-natured hazing or kidding was more likely to be taken as an insult, and there'd been a number of fights during the past few days. In a booth over in one corner, Doc Ellsworth was ignoring the push-up contest. He'd picked up two pretty SEALettes, a blonde and a redhead, and was demonstrating his famous double-beer-drinking trick, holding two open bottles of Budweiser upended in his mouth at once, no hands, and chugging the contents down in a steady series of gulps. The girls, a couple of military groupies MacKenzie had seen hanging out at Samelli's with his boys before, watched wide-eyed. The rest of the SEALs were clustered around Holt and Lucy.

"Forty-three! Forty-four! Forty-five!"

Doc spit out the two empty bottles, then leaned across his table. "Aw, shit, guys!" he called. "Wouldn't it be better if Lucy was underneath him while he was doing that?"

"Yeah Doc's right! Hey Holt, you dumb ass! You got it backward! The girl's s'posed to be under you!"

"Fifty-two! Fifty-three! Fifty-four!"

"Wait! Wait!" Garcia shouted. "I'll fix it!" The SEAL positioned himself, then dove head-first toward the two people on the floor, landing on top of Lucy, who squealed and wiggled beneath him. Holt oofed and staggered a bit under the impact, then continued pumping away. "Sixty! Sixty-one! Sixty-two!"

"Hey, it's a Lucy sandwich!" Nicholson called. "Samelli's house specialty! Looks real good!"

Roselli laughed as Garcia kissed Lucy on the cheek. "Looks like fun, anyway. Can anybody play?"

"What the fuck's going' on back there?" Holt demanded from the bottom of the pile, though he never missed a beat. "Garcia! Get your ass off of there! That ain't in the bet!"

"Yeah, get the fuck out of there, Garcia!" Miguel Fernandez shouted, his dark face flushing darker as he advanced on the unlikely, heaving trio. "I got money riding on Ron and you're screwin' up the bet!"

"That ain't all that's riding on Ron," Roselli said, snickering.

Fernandez grabbed Garcia by his waistband and hauled him off Lucy bodily. She gave a loud scream and almost fell off Holt.

"Put me down, you pussy!" Garcia bellowed.

"Who's a pussy, you piss-balled, penny-pricked little son of a bitch?" In an instant, the atmosphere had transformed from camaraderie to vicious, flaring anger. Fernandez launched a swift right hook that connected with the side of Garcia's head and sent him tumbling across a table.

"Knock it off, you two!" MacKenzie bellowed, moving toward the two antagonists. On the floor, Holt kept doing his push-ups with Lucy still clinging to his back.

Garcia scrambled up off the floor and came back, fists clenched, but when he threw a punch it was only a feint. His foot came up instead, slamming into Fernandez's side.

MacKenzie suddenly stepped between them, reaching out with two long arms and snagging both combatants by their collars. "I said knock it off, shitheads!" He didn't raise his voice, but the cold deadliness behind the words somehow penetrated the two SEALs' blind anger. "I don't give a shit, but the L-T wouldn't like to see you two kill each other. You boys read me?"

"Mac," Garcia said, panting. "That bastard..."

"Stow it, Boomer! Chill out!"

"Chief..."

"You too, Rattler. I said the L-T wouldn't like it!"

That stopped them cold. MacKenzie could feel the fight drain out of both men.

"Now shake hands."

They shook... then embraced, hugging each other warmly. MacKenzie stepped back, nodded approvingly, then turned to face the bar again.

"Aw, now ain't that sweet," he heard from the front of the restaurant. "The SEALies are hugging."

"Must be springtime," another voice said, a bass, gravelly rumble. "Mating season for fuckin' SEALS."

"You boys listen to your momma there and be nice to each other!"

The SEALs went dead quiet at the intrusion. A dozen strangers had entered the bar, and now they were closing slowly around the tight-knit group. They too wore civilian clothes, but the close-trimmed hair above their ears, "whitewalls" in military parlance, gave them away.

Marines. Marines out on liberty and cruising for trouble, from the look of them.

"You SEALies're making too damned much noise," one of the Marines growled. He was drill-sergeant lean, recruiting-poster handsome, and had the cold look of a competent killing machine.

"Yeah," a second man chorused. "A man can't hear hisself think." This one stood six-two and must have weighed two-fifty, all of it workout honed, chiseled, and sweat-polished slabs of muscle. When he lunged his blond head forward and scowled, he forcibly reminded MacKenzie of that wrestler guy on TV... what was his name? Hulk Hogan, yeah.

"Shouldn't be a problem for you shit-for-brains jar-heads then," Fernandez said, his argument with Garcia forgotten now. "Seein' as how you guys can't think anyhow."

"Ooh," the first Marine said, shaking his hand as though he'd burned it. "We got us a wise-ass tough-guy SEAL here, men. I think maybe we'd better house-break it, don't you guys?"

"Hey, no fighting in here!" a bartender called from behind the bar. "Take it outside before I call the SPs!"

"Aw, this won't take that long, Pops," another Marine said. "We just gonna do a little after-hours moppin'up for you here."

"Yeah, no fuckin' Navy puke SEAL alive can take on the Marines," the big guy said. He curled his forearm up, flexing it, and muscles popped and rippled impressively from wrist to bull-massive neck.

"So you grunts figure you're better'n SEALS, huh?" Roselli demanded, stepping closer. There was a nasty glint in his eye.

The big Marine apparently didn't see that glint or else was too drunk to care. "Fuck! All you SEALs are pussies! Right, guys?"

"Right on, Fred!" There was a chorus of assent, but Fred probably never heard it. Roselli had turned slightly, his hands had blurred, and then the Marine was hurtling through the air upside down, touching down neatly and briefly in a big bowl of popcorn on the bar, then somersaulting behind the bar with a shattering crash and a sudden snow flurry of snack food. Lucy screamed and scrambled to get off Holt before another flying body landed on her. The two SEALettes with Ellsworth shrieked and ducked under the table, while other Samelli's patrons ran for cover. A second Marine slammed face-first into a decorative wooden pillar, clung to it lovingly a moment, then slid limply to the deck.

Sipping his gin, MacKenzie briefly considered the tactics of the situation. Clearly, it was his duty as senior man present to break up the fight before someone got hurt or Samelli's suffered any more wear and tear to the crockery. The men of Third Platoon looked to him for leadership, and to set a good example. He was, in fact, a father figure for these younger boys, and he took his position in that regard quite seriously.