A young man wakes up in the desert. The wreckage of an ambulance lies smashed against a boulder and charred to a crisp. By the stitches on his head and face, he assumes he was the patient. But why was an ambulance driving through a desert? Where wa...
He eventually began to sense an empty feeling of abandonment, as if the flow of time had dragged him back to shore. He felt like he had been diving into the ocean of men, within their own guts, and he acknowledged in its depths the greatest show his eyes had ever beheld; a place where life and blood mixed into mud, where loyalty was hammered out between steel and powder, where seeing fire fall from the sky in the distance meant to live another day. A place where the sound of lead and rain forged a beautifully foul bubble, in which pain and victory seemed to fade through the mist of time, where there was no more objective than to keep breathing air and smoke, and where death could be considered nothing but the most just of rewards. He had seen that place with his own eyes before he ran out of oxygen and was pulled back and left adrift on the surface, and every second of his life from that moment on he hated the fact that he could no longer go back to it. He didn't take long to admit to himself that he missed Vietnam.
Perhaps that was why, the following year, he decided to leave everything behind and work for the CIA as a field operative in assorted areas of conflict throughout the Middle East and South America. He needed to find himself in the mud again. To him, those places were just brief reflections of the world, in which men could be synchronized with their existence again. Places where men could be reborn.
With that revealed nature beating in his new heart, Chambers became so meanly effective in every deployment and set up such a vast network of informers based on bribes, threats, and intimidation, that he did not go unnoticed by the NSA and Norton himself, who did not hesitate to offer him a privileged position within the Organization as one of his lieutenants. Chambers didn't think much before he took Norton up on his offer, aware of the new skies he could reach by being beside the man who was virtually the most powerful in the West. He promised himself he would strap a leash on his neck and be at Norton's beck and call, becoming his servant first, then turning into his ally, even his confidant, while biding his time in the shade with an organic knife between his burnished fangs. For many years, he had imagined the moment he would wield his dagger, hidden in the folds of his robe, and stab Norton wildly until he fell down the stairs of the Senate, just to pick up the laurel wreath from the ground, dust it off, and rest it over his temples. But it was not yet time. Being Norton's subordinate meant his boss acted as an umbrella against certain pressures that gave Chambers carte blanche to place his own secret pieces in the world's chess game.
The time had not yet come. But it would.
*****
Without realizing, he had taken his hand to his right cheek, to the shy sketch of a scar, a faint colorless line that had lost its sensitivity.
"They're done," said Kauffman. "We're in the assessment process."
Chambers looked out through the glass of the box, where he could see from above the guts of the CQB test circuit.
"How many tests have they been through?"
"Five psychotechnical examinations, nine written exams, and seventeen circuits. These are the best we have," said Kauffman as he pointed at the other end of the room, where a group of soldiers were resting, taking a breath, and stretching after having gone through the circuit.
"How many are there in total?"
"Fifteen, plus one who hasn't shown up. We will select eight for the squadron. Norton wants them out there ASAP, so this'll do for a practice run.
"Do you already know who's got the best grade?"
"Over there." Kauffman pointed at a blond shaved man with brown eyes, visibly satisfied. "The name's Jeremy Sykes. He knocked it out of the park. The only one who'd have been able to dispute the role of squadron leader is precisely the one who hasn't shown up."
Chambers gritted his teeth.
"Maybe that's why the bastard's laughing that much."
Kauffman dedicated to him a half smile of complicity.
"Do you think he's taken him out?"
"If he's done it with no trace, he's the guy we're looking for."
The Colonel nodded, ironically pleased.
"All right. Well, then we have already gathered the Rayforce Squadron for Operation Prometheus. It's strictly prohibited for them to tell their real names or know those of the others, so we'll give each member a codename. Ethon will be the codename assigned to the leader."
Chambers raised his hand.
"Wait. There he comes."
At the furthest side of the room, the last military man rushed in, his features sharp and youthful, his black hair tousled and his eyes brown.
"I'm sorry, I got lost! I'm new here!"
Kauffman spoke to the megaphone.
"Doesn't matter. Gird yourself for the CQB test."
The candidate went to the entrance of the circuit and equipped himself with the blank gun and the blunt knife from the table.
"Ready."
"The current record is fifty-two seconds and zero civilian casualties. Ready, steady...go!"
The guy entered decisively and flashed through the circuit, not missing a beat, shooting and stabbing any anthropomorphic cardboard target painted as a terrorist that crossed him, ignoring the ones that had photos of faces of Afghan children calculatingly, and finally reaching the last room, in which there was a mobile target with a picture of Landau in motion, shooting it in the papered leg before it could break through the window. Forty-four seconds, zero civilians, Landau subdued. Chambers looked at the Colonel.
"I think someone's gonna quit laughing."
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
