Page 22 of Duty Preserved

“All right,” Cole said. “Let’s start with the rifles.” He looked at me.

“Present your weapons for inspection,” I said. “Hold them out where I can see them.”

They held the rifles out, and I walked the line.

Up close, it was worse than I’d guessed. Rust freckled the receivers, and dust sat packed into actions nobody had opened in weeks. One barrel had enough grit down it to plant a garden. A gas plug had seized so hard with old fouling that the kid holding it couldn’t have adjusted it if his life depended on it, which out here, it might. Most of them couldn’t tell me the last time they’d cleaned the thing, because the honest answer was never.

I took the worst one of them out of its owner’s hands. “Anybody tell me why you carry this?”

Nobody did.

“It’s the one thing out here that decides whether you go home.” I turned it over so they could all see it. “A lion doesn’t care how brave you are. A poacher with a rifle of his own doesn’t care how young you are. This is what gets a say in it. And a rifle you can’t keep running is a heavy, expensive club.”

One or two of them almost smiled.

“So you’re going to learn this weapon better than you know your own hands. Clear it, strip it, put it back together in the dark, half asleep, with something coming at you out of the grass. You take care of it before you take care of yourselves. Before you eat, before you sleep. The day it counts, it’s the only thing out here that won’t run for you.” I set it back down in front of its owner. “Now, show me. Field-strip and reassemble.”

You could tell how well a man knew his rifle in the first ten seconds of watching him strip it. With these kids, it took about two.

They dropped parts in the dirt. One kid thumbed the takedown latch, broke the rifle open on its hinge, and then sat studying the halves as if someone had rearranged them while he blinked. Another had his back together in under a minute, quick enough that Andrew drifted over to look.

“That was fast,” Andrew said.

The kid beamed.

Andrew put out his hand. The kid handed over the rifle. Andrew snapped it open, slid the carrier out the back, and worked the bolt free, turning it up to the light.

“Bolt’s in upside down,” he said. “It’ll never lock. This one won’t fire.”

The kid’s smile went while he worked out what that meant. Andrew seated the bolt right, closed the rifle up, and handed it back gently enough before he moved on.

Across the group, Zayn already had his weapon apart and back together.

The rest of them got there eventually, more or less.

“Again,” I said. “All of you. Break it down, put it back together. Then again after that.”

That was when the big one spoke up.

He stood a head taller than the rest and carried a width through his shoulders the others hadn’t grown into yet. He’d hung back at the rear of the group through all of it, arms crossed, his rifle on the ground in front of his feet. Baraka. I’d caught one of the others use the name.

“I already did it.” He looked at the weapon on the ground in front of him and left it there. “Why do I have to do it again?”

“Because repetition is what builds the skill. Do it a thousand times and your hands do it without you.”

“And why should we listen to you at all?”

“Say that again,” Cole said, easy.

Baraka looked around at the others as he said it, working them. “You come here and tell us we’re doing it wrong. Our land. Our animals. You’ve been here, what, a few days?” A few heads nodded. “Why should we listen to a word you say?”

It was a fair question. It was the first intelligent thing anyone in that group had done all morning.

Andrew answered before Cole could.

“What makes you think you shouldn’t?”

“Because we don’t know you,” he said. “Not really. Anybody can walk in here and say he’s some kind of soldier.”