Page 27 of Duty Preserved

“Balance beam,” he said. “One log, end to end, off the ground. Use the rope to lash your braces. I want it solid enough that a man can walk the full length without it shifting.”

He walked them to the next clearing. “Low-crawl lane. Cargo net pegged tight, six inches off the dirt. Peg spacing every two feet. If the net sags, you did it wrong.”

At the third site, he pointed at the stacked logs. “Ten-foot wall. Lash it tight, no handholds. You go over it as a team, or you don’t go over it.”

The fourth was the island crossing. He set three oil drums in the dirt with gaps between them and dropped two planks that weren’t long enough to bridge any of them on their own. “Figure out the sequence. I’m not giving you that part.”

Hauling the first log took eight of them. Zayn stepped in without raising his voice, put Baraka at the heavy end, spread the rest along the length, and the log moved.

Baraka put his back into it. The man was built for carrying, and when his hands were full and his legs were working, the mouth stayed shut. He shouldered weight that would have taken two of the smaller rangers and didn’t make a show of it.

Something shifted in the yard while they hauled. Cole had been right. You couldn’t teach it. You could only put something difficult or painful enough in front of them that they had to work together to figure out how to get through it.

Cole had designed all four stations. Each one was built to break if you tried it alone.

Jomo was the one who surprised me.

He couldn’t haul the way Baraka could. But when the cargo net wouldn’t seat right on its pegs, Jomo crouched beside it and studied the problem for a full minute before he touched anything. Then he drove a peg at an angle none of the others thought of, looped the netting through a figure eight, and the whole thing pulled taut.

At the wall, he rigged a rope seat so the last man over could be hauled up without a boost from below. Nobody asked him to. He just saw the gap and filled it.

I was standing far enough back to see the whole picture. Cole came alongside me.

“The little one,” Cole said.

“I see him.”

“Sharp mind.”

“Yes.”

We watched Jomo rig the island crossing. The others were debating how the planks were supposed to work. Jomo picked up a plank, laid it across the first gap at an angle that used the drum’s curve as a brace, and stepped back.

“Huh,” Cole said.

By late afternoon, they’d built all four stations and run each one badly enough to know how much work was ahead of them. They came into the dining tent that evening completely exhausted, and they ate without talking. One by one, they finished and drifted toward the bunkhouse without a word.

The three of us stayed. Andrew refilled his coffee from the pot the kitchen staff kept going and sat back down across from Cole and me.

“Zayn,” Andrew said.

“He’s a good leader,” Cole said.

“He coordinated the team pretty well. Fell into the role naturally, too.”

“And the others followed,” I said.

“Baraka surprised me.” Andrew wrapped both hands around his mug. “He carried more than anyone today and didn’t say a word about it. Yesterday, he was the loudest man in camp.”

“Give a man a job that fits him and he quits performing,” Cole said. “He’s not a leader. He’s a workhorse who thought he was supposed to be a leader because nobody gave him anything else to be.”

“What about Jomo?” I asked.

Andrew leaned forward. “That kid’s mind and spirit are something else. The net peg, the rope seat on the wall, the plank angle on the island crossing. He sees mechanical problems the rest of them walk past.”

“He finished the march last by twenty minutes,” Cole said. “But he finished it. Everything working against him and he kept moving.”

“There are men who went through our pipeline who would have quit,” Andrew said quietly. “With two good feet and half the distance.”