Page 26 of Duty Preserved

“I don’t know.”

“That foot has to be killing him.”

“It has got to be miserable.”

Andrew was quiet for maybe ten seconds, which for him was an act of restraint.

“So,” he said. “The redhead.”

“Don’t.”

“Do you think she prefers the Prince of Paris or the Marsh Man look she saw last night?”

I didn’t answer. Whatever Sarah Calloway had probably thought of me in Paris, last night had rewritten it.

“She may like the strong and silent type,” Andrew said, “but I think it would show great strength if you used your words to talk to her.”

“We have work to do.”

“Just think about it.”

We drove in silence after that. Ahead of us, Jomo kept the same grinding pace, alone on the track, the rest of the column long gone around the bend.

At the midpoint, Cole had the front-runners lined up and was already going through their rucks. Jomo came in last by a wide margin, drenched through, his shirt stuck to his back. He stopped in front of Cole, bent forward with his hands on his knees, breathing in long, shaking pulls. We pulled in behind him and killed the engine.

Nobody had dropped a rock. Nobody had ditched kit along the trail. Cole checked Jomo’s ruck without a word. Everything was there.

Andrew and I drove back ahead of the column. Cole followed in the rear this time. We spent the next hour scouting obstacle-course materials and found what we needed: two downed acacia trunks that would take four men to move, a stack of bald tires behind the bunkhouse, fifty meters of old rope in the vehicle bay, a cargo net under a tarp behind the vet facility, and three empty oil drums beside the generator housing. We marked what we’d use and left it for the rangers to haul.

By midmorning, the first rangers started coming back in.

Baraka led the pack, barely winded. Three more came in close behind him. Then a gap, and the middle of the group filtered in over the next ten minutes, sweating, breathing hard, a couple of them walking the last stretch with their hands on their knees. We sent each one to drop their kit and get some chow.

Then a longer gap.

Andrew and I stood at the edge of camp and waited. The dirt road ran straight for half a kilometer before it bent behind a stand of trees, and for a while, there was nothing on it.

Then Cole’s Land Cruiser came around the bend, slow, rolling at a walking pace. And ahead of it, alone on the track, Jomo. Still moving. Still at the same pace.

He crossed into camp and stopped. Cole pulled up behind him and killed the engine.

“He never stopped,” Cole said, stepping out. “He’s got some spirit.”

Andrew and I had seen the same thing from the vehicle on the way out.

We’d all been through selection pipelines that washed out ninety percent of the men who tried. We knew what it looked like when a man’s body was telling him to quit and he didn’t listen.

The rangers who’d come in first had already eaten by the time Jomo crossed into camp. Chow closed when it closed, and he hadn’t made it back in time.

I saw Andrew catch him at the edge of the path. The limp was worse than it had been that morning. Andrew said something I couldn’t hear and pressed a protein bar into his hand, then walked away. Jomo stood there holding it, staring after him.

We formed everyone up after they’d dropped their kits and explained the plan for the afternoon. They were going to build an obstacle course. One they would love to hate.

“First things first,” Cole said. “We need materials. There are two downed acacia trunks past the vehicle bay. A pile of tires behind the bunkhouse. Rope in the vehicle bay. A cargo net behind the vet facility. Three oil drums by the generator housing. Bring all of it to the clearing south of the bunkhouse.”

They moved out in groups, hauling everything to a single staging area.

Andrew walked them to the first station, the acacia trunks.