Chapter 2
Hayes began watching me with the focused attention of a man who has decided that observation will eventually produce the evidence he is already certain exists. He watched me on the obstacle course, which I completed without difficulty. He watched my marksmanship scores, which were flawless in the specific way that flawless scores are — not lucky, not variable, simply accurate, the product of a repeatability that can only come from a level of practice most people at this installation would not have guessed at. He watched me in training scenarios, where I made decisions that were fast and correct and, I could tell from the expressions around me, slightly wrong in terms of the pace at which someone at my apparent experience level should be making them.
He sent three separate inquiries to the Pentagon asking for supplemental information on my background.
He received three separate responses telling him to stop asking.
This made him angry in the way that people with his particular configuration of certainty get angry when the world declines to cooperate with their self-image — not explosively, but with a cold, gathering determination to find the avenue that worked.
He found it on a Thursday morning in week five.
The entire unit was assembled in the base yard, three hundred soldiers on the parade ground under a gray overcast sky, the kind of formation that Hayes used when he wanted an audience for what he was about to do. I had known something was coming for two days. Not through any specific intelligence — through the simple fact that men like Hayes, when their ordinary methods fail them, eventually arrive at spectacle, because spectacle is what they know how to use when procedure runs out.
He called me forward from the line.
I walked forward.
May you like
He stood on the elevated platform with the expression of a man who has arranged a room to his satisfaction and is about to close the door. I had, over the preceding five weeks, watched him use his rank to establish the terms of every situation before the situation had a chance to develop on its own, and I understood that what he was doing now was the same thing at a different scale — he was going to establish the terms of what happened next before I had the opportunity to establish them myself.
He told the soldier beside him to remove my jacket.
