Chapter 9
Donovan
Four days in, and the obstacle course was doing exactly what we’d built it to do.
I stood at the edge of the clearing with Andrew and Cole, coffee in hand, watching the rangers run it. Each time through, they got more efficient than the last.
“Here they come,” Andrew said.
On this particular run-through, they arrived at the ten-foot wall not as a scattered team spread out along the course, but as a tight-knit group ready to work together.
Baraka hit the wall first, jumped, and got his fingers over the top edge.
Two rangers behind him braced and boosted him the rest of the way up.
He swung a leg over, turned, and reached down.
The next man grabbed his wrist, and Baraka hauled him up like he weighed nothing.
A few days ago, a wall like this would have stopped them cold. A few days ago, Baraka would have stood back and waited for someone else to figure it out. Now, he was the one reaching down to pull the next man over.
“I’m glad they seem to have gotten their uniform standards straightened out too,” Cole said.
He was right. Every man out there was in full kit. Shirts buttoned, boots laced, weapons carried correctly. It hadn’t been ordered this morning. A silent shift had happened, and the men stopped thinking of themselves as individuals and started carrying themselves as a unified team.
At the low-crawl lane, two rangers hit the dirt and pulled themselves under the cargo net in tandem, elbows working, keeping pace with each other without a word exchanged.
At the island crossing, three of them had the plank sequence down to a system—pass, brace, cross, pass—smooth enough that I wouldn’t have reworked it.
I watched Jomo come through the balance beam.
He was slower than the others, the clubfoot dragging his left side through every step, but he didn’t fall and he didn’t stop.
When he reached the end, the ranger waiting at the wall didn’t look at his foot.
He just held position until Jomo was ready, then braced for him.
Before, they would have left him on his own. Now, they made a concerted effort to keep him with them, because somewhere along the way, they’d figured out that Jomo solved problems the rest of them couldn’t see coming.
I wouldn’t have called it acceptance. Nobody was inviting Jomo to sit with them at meals.
Nobody was walking beside him on the ruck march.
But the obstacle course required teamwork, and Jomo turned out to be the one who could rig a knot or unstick a jammed plank or see a mechanical problem three moves ahead of the man standing in front of it.
When the island crossing seized up because someone had set a drum wrong, it was Jomo who fixed it without a word.
“Speaking of yesterday,” Andrew said. He glanced at me over the rim of his mug. “How was the rhino thing?”
“Fine.”
“Fine, huh. He drove three hours into the bush with the woman he can’t stop watching, and it was fine.” Andrew looked at Cole. “Note the economy of language. You know this isn’t survival, evasion, and resistance to capture school? We aren’t your interrogators. You can tell us how it went.”
“She knows what she’s doing,” I said. “She darted a fifteen-hundred-kilogram black rhino from sixty yards, collected the vitals, refit the new battery on the collar, and brought it out of sedation without a hitch.”
“So you’re saying you guys had time for other activities?” Andrew said.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Okay, okay.” But his eyes were doing plenty of talking.
Cole saved me by changing the subject.
“The vet program,” he said. “You understand how it works?”
“It’s a fellowship or some kind of exchange program, right?”
“Right. The KWS fellowship director oversees the placements. American vets come here, Kenyan vets go stateside for rotations at university veterinary hospitals. Sarah, Alyson, and Daniel are the American fellows.” He watched the rangers cycle through the wall again.
“Worth knowing the structure. The KWS has authority over the conservancy’s wildlife management, and the fellowship director has a direct line to their regional office.
If anything escalates beyond ranger business, that’s the channel. ”
I stored that. Cole didn’t drop organizational context into casual conversation unless he thought it would matter later.
“While we’re on the subject,” Cole said. He paused long enough that Andrew and I both looked at him. “Daniel Henderson.”
“What about him?” Andrew said.
“I overheard something yesterday. Him and Alyson.” Cole crossed his arms and watched the course. His voice stayed balanced. “The way he talks to her isn’t right.”
Andrew lowered his mug. I straightened off the post I’d been leaning against.
Cole Braddock didn’t do this. In the years I’d known him, I’d never heard him wade into someone else’s personal business.
He handled diplomacy and logistics and the delicate politics of operating in countries where a wrong word to the wrong official could shut down a mission.
He did not comment on other people’s relationships.
“What did you hear?” I asked.
“She was on her phone, posting something. He told her she embarrasses herself every time she does it. Said it like he was correcting a dog.” Cole’s jaw shifted. “She laughed it off, but I don’t think he was joking.”
The yard was loud enough with the course that nobody beyond the three of us could hear this conversation, but Cole kept his voice low anyway.
“It’s not my business,” he said. “But I don’t like it.”
Andrew and I looked at each other. Neither of us had ever heard Cole meddle in someone’s relationship quarrels.
Andrew, because he was Andrew, went straight at it.
“You got a crush, Braddock?”
Cole’s expression didn’t change. “I’m old enough to be her grandfather.” He uncrossed his arms and picked up his coffee. “I’m just saying. Something about the way he treats her doesn’t sit right. Somebody should keep an eye on it.”
He said it and moved on. Cleanly, without a thread left hanging for anyone to pull.
Andrew caught my eye again. I gave him nothing.
But I watched Cole walk toward the course to call the rangers in, and something about the set of his shoulders stayed with me.
Cole Braddock, the most contained man I knew, had just broken his own rule about staying out of other people’s lives because a woman he barely knew was being talked to in a way he couldn’t let go of. I knew what that looked like.
“All right,” Cole said. “Bring it in.”
The rangers came off the course breathing hard and gathered in a loose semicircle in front of the clearing where we’d laid out the field-stripping station. A tarp on the ground, tools arranged, four rifles disassembled down to their component groups.
“Same drill as day two,” I said as Andrew and I joined the circle. “Full strip, full reassemble. But you’re faster now, and I want to see it.”
They paired off and got to work. The improvement was visible. Hands that had fumbled on day one moved with something approaching certainty. Parts went down in order and came back up in order, and nobody was putting a bolt in upside down anymore.
Baraka was working across the tarp from me when he stopped and held up the bolt head he’d just pulled from the carrier.
“These rollers,” he said. “The carbon on them. Does that change how the bolt locks?”
I looked at him. Four days ago, this kid had stood in the muster yard and asked why he should listen to a word I said. Now he was asking a real question about the locking mechanism, and the question was a good one.
“It does,” I said. “Carbon buildup on the rollers keeps them from seating fully into the barrel extension. If the bolt doesn’t lock right, then you get failures to go into battery.
That means a round in the chamber and a trigger that won’t break.
Your weapon stops working at the worst possible moment. ”
Baraka turned the bolt head over in his fingers, studying the rollers. “So when I clean this, I should make sure the rollers move freely every time.”
“Every time.”
He nodded once and went back to work. He seemed earnestly trying to learn, and watching him work through the problem made me feel a bit prouder than I was ready for in that moment.
“Hey, boss.” One of the younger rangers had been watching me work through a reassembly while he waited for his turn. “Can you do that with your eyes closed?”
A ripple of interest went through the group. Heads came up from the tarps.
“Blindfolded,” Andrew said from behind me, because Andrew couldn’t help himself. “He can do it blindfolded.”
“No way,” the ranger said.
“Want to bet on it?” I said.
The yard went quiet. Every ranger was looking at me now, including Zayn, including Jomo, including Baraka with the bolt head still in his fingers.
“Here’s the deal,” Andrew said. He was grinning. “Donovan strips and reassembles blindfolded, and you all get the rest of the afternoon off.”
“And if he can’t do it?” Otieno asked.
“Then you all run the course again. Twice.”
Otieno looked at the others. The others looked at me. The calculation was simple: a free afternoon against two more runs of the course they’d already done five times today. Their bodies wanted the afternoon. Their pride wanted to see me fail.
“Do it,” Baraka said.
Andrew pulled a rag from the kit bag and tied it across my eyes. I heard the rangers shuffle closer. Someone’s boot scraped the tarp.
I reached forward and found the rifle by touch. The receiver was warm from the sun.
This was muscle memory laid down across twelve years and ten thousand repetitions.
The rear pin pushed free under my thumb.
The buttstock and trigger group separated from the receiver with the solid click of the housing clearing its seat.
Cocking handle back, bolt carrier group out, bolt head rotated and pulled free.
The firing pin and its spring came next, then the locking rollers, each one placed on the tarp where my hands could find it again without searching.