CORONADO, CALIFORNIA

STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS-8 DAYS

Scot Harvath sat in the Hotel Del Coronado’s Babcock amp; Story bar sipping one of their signature margaritas, but his mind was a million miles away. Coming home had not been easy for him, at least not like this, but his mother had insisted, and if nothing else, Harvath was a good son.

It had been ten years since they had laid his father to rest and on this anniversary, his mother thought it appropriate that they do something to remember him. Scot didn’t have the heart to tell his mother that he remembered his father almost every day, because he knew she did too. Michael Harvath had been a good man-a good husband, a good father, a good soldier, and the reason Scot Harvath had become a Navy SEAL.

It was during a training mission that Harvath’s father, a SEAL instructor at the Naval Special Warfare Center, was killed in a demolitions accident. At the time of the accident, Scot was training with the U.S. Freestyle ski team in Park City, Utah. He had been with the team for several years at that point, much to the chagrin of his father. Michael Harvath had not worked as hard as he had to watch his son forgo college for a career in professional sports. The two had fought bitterly, as only two proud, headstrong men with passionate convictions can.

The fighting had been a strain on their relationship; one that Scot’s mother had worked tirelessly to try to mend. It was as if she had somehow sensed that her husband’s life was going to be cut short. It was only through his mother’s Herculean efforts that the family stayed together at all. The stronger Michael pushed, the more Scot pulled away and pursued his own path. Father and son were more alike than either of them realized. By the time Scot figured this out for himself, his father was already gone.

The loss was devastating. Scot’s mother had lost her husband, but it could be argued that the greater grief was Scot’s, who had not only lost his father, but had lost him with so many things between them left unsaid and unfinished.

Up until his father’s death, Scot had done extremely well on the World Cup circuit and had been favored to medal in the upcoming Olympics, but try as he might, after his father’s death he just couldn’t get his head back into competitive skiing. It suddenly wasn’t important any more.

Instead, he chose to immediately follow in his father’s footsteps. After graduating from college cum laude in less than three years, he joined the Navy where he passed the rigorous Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL selection program, also known as BUD/S, and was made a SEAL. With his expertise in skiing, he was tasked to Team Two, known as the cold-weather specialists, or Polar SEALs. With an exceptional aptitude for languages and a desire for even more action, Harvath applied, and was eventually accepted to Team Six, the Navy’s elite counterterrorism detachment, also known as Dev Group. It was while he was with Dev Group that Scot Harvath came to the attention of the United States Secret Service.

Whenever a President made an appearance on or near water, the SEALs were called upon to provide support. Harvath was part of a contingent that assisted several such protective details for a former president who loved to race his Cigarette boats off the coast of Maine. Scot had proven himself to be extremely talented on many occasions, but when he discovered and defused an explosive device meant to disrupt one of the president’s outings, the Secret Service stood up and took notice. They had been looking for someone just like him to help improve the ways in which they protected the president.

It took some doing, but the Secret Service eventually succeeded in wooing Scot to join their team. After Harvath completed his courses at the Secret Service advanced-training facility in Beltsville, Maryland, he joined the presidential protective detail based at the White House. A lot had happened since then. Harvath had not only rescued the president from kidnappers and helped to prevent a major war in the Middle East, but also realized along the way that the life of a Secret Service agent was not for him. Surprisingly, the president had agreed and tasked Harvath to a new assignment.

President Jack Rutledge had added a new weapon in his war on terrorism. As part of his reorganization of the American Intelligence community and renewed dedication to countering terrorism, the president had created a special international branch of the Homeland Security Department dubbed the Office of International Investigative Assistance, or OIIA. The group represented the collective intelligence capability and full muscle of the United States government to help neutralize and prevent terrorist actions against America and American interests on a global level.

Though Harvath’s title at the OIIA was listed as a “special agent,” very few people knew what his job actually entailed. The benign title led most to believe that he worked in the field, assisting foreign governments and law enforcement agencies in their counterterrorism efforts. That, after all, was the express mission statement of the OIIA. Had Congress known Harvath’s true marching orders, the Office of International Investigative Assistance would never have gotten their budget approved.

Thinking about his deceased father often led Scot to think about the man who had become like a second father to him. It was this same person whom the president had tapped to head the new OIIA-former Deputy Director of the FBI, Gary Lawlor. Having been the number two man in the world’s premier law enforcement organization, Lawlor was a perfect choice. The president also appreciated the special relationship that existed between Lawlor and Harvath. It was precisely that relationship Harvath was considering when his girlfriend, Meg Cassidy, walked into the bar.

“Have you heard from him?” she asked as she sat down on the empty stool next to Scot.

“Nothing,” he answered, spinning his cell phone on the bar in front of him. “What about in the room? Any messages?”

“None at all. What did the airline say?”

“It took my contact a while to get to the bottom of it, but he said that apparently Gary had gotten on the plane and that just as they were preparing to close the doors and push back, he jumped up and demanded to be let off. Flashed his credentials and everything. It freaked the hell out of the passengers.”

Meg looked at Scot as he absorbed this piece of information. It would all probably turn out to be nothing, but for now it seemed worrisome, especially in light of his new job. Though Scot didn’t go into a lot of detail, the fact that they had met when he had rescued her from a hijacked airliner in Cairo, and that in his mid-thirties he was in better shape than most men even ten years younger, told Meg that the new position the president had assigned him to probably didn’t involve pushing a lot of paper. He was a soldier on America ’s front line in the war against terrorism, and Meg was smart enough to know what that meant. It meant not asking a lot of questions and being prepared for anything, even the worst. She was willing to do that for him. In the little over six months they had been together, she had come to care for Scot Harvath very deeply. So much so, that she was even considering relocating her entire business from Chicago to Washington, DC, moving away from all of her friends and contacts, and building a new life with this man.

With his ruggedly handsome face, sandy brown hair, blue eyes and muscular five-foot-ten frame, Scot Harvath was quite a catch by any woman’s standards, but it was the man inside that had most attracted her from the beginning. In addition to his wit and intelligence, there was something else. He was driven by one simple objective-doing the right thing no matter what the cost. In a world so often governed by self-interest, being in the company of a man like Scot Harvath made Meg realize what a noble life worth living was really about, but she also realized that the quality she most admired in him might also turn out to one day to be his downfall.