Chapter 2.
Jack
Off the Coast of Chile
Sharks, he thinks.
Perfect.
He knows that half of the games’ contestants are off to Antarctica already.
The other half are here in South America.
But nobody said anything about sharks being a factor before the games even began.
Just freaking great.
In or out of the Army, Sgt. Major Jack McHenry (ret.) has prided himself above all else on never being afraid of anything.
Even dying.
But as he surveys the last stretch of Pacific Ocean between himself and the island off the coast of Chile known as El Fin del Mundo, he has to admit, if grudgingly, that there might be a first time for everything.
Translated into English, the name of the island means the End of the World.
Hope not, he thinks.
Jack knows himself well enough to know it’s not the fear of death that runs his life. It’s the death he’s already seen in war. Not the damage war has done to him, and keeps doing. No—more than that. The damage inside him.
He remembers reading a line once—can’t remember who said it: Getting old isn’t for the faint of heart.
And he’d thought: Getting old is tough? Try post-traumatic stress on for size.
Carry that around inside you like dead weight.
He closes his eyes—not just to stop looking down at the sharks—and shakes his head, trying to clear his mind of the images that never leave.
Old or not, Jack learned one thing the hard way: Time doesn’t bargain. It collects.
This moment makes him feel like he never mustered out and was still a Ranger. He’s alive when so many guys he served with aren’t. He remembers how alive he felt on deployment—going after targets, feeling like he was making a difference. That’s the part he wants to hold on to.
He wants to help people. He wants people to count on him again.
He wants to matter again, even though he’s not wearing a uniform anymore.
That’s why—separate from the money—he wants to be part of this adventure.
They’ve talked about danger from the start, from that first letter.
Something else everybody ought to try on for size?
An ambush in the dark, when the world goes loud and sideways—no warning, no rules, just survival.
Jack knows from experience the only thing you can do is make your fear work for you. He learned that the hard way. He’s already talked about that with some of the others.
He’s even tried to explain some of this to the young English boy, Rupert Chadwick, whom he’s been doing his best to look after since Ohio.
Jack can see already that Rupert is a wonderful kid, trying to act older than he is, coming across as braver than any fourteen-year-old had a right to be.
Jack doesn’t know why whoever really selected the contestants reached out to somebody this young.
But it doesn’t matter how he got here. Just that Rupert is here.
As much as Jack knows he needs to focus on his own stuff over the long haul—and the sharks in the short run—he wants to do anything and everything he can to protect this kid.
In so many ways, even before the games have officially begun, this boy makes him feel he has a purpose again. The boy has become part of a larger mission for Jack McHenry.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, or how I’m supposed to act,” Rupert had said before they’d gotten on the ship today.
“Listen, you’ve already impressed the heck out of me,” Jack said.
“I can’t imagine how,” Rupert said.
“By acting like you belong,” Jack said.
“You really think so?” Rupert asked, beaming, desperate for approval. “Because sometimes I feel totally lost, and not just because I’m this far away from my mum and dad.” Then he looked away. “Do you have any children of your own, Mr. McHenry?”
“Call me Jack.”
“So do you have any children, Jack?”
Jack put out his fist for Rupert to bump with his own.
“Maybe now I do,” Jack had said.
Keep focused, Jack reminds himself.
The distance from their ship to the island is less than half a mile. No worries for Jack there, he’d navigated much longer distances when he was still with the Rangers. Not a problem for a swimmer as strong as he is. A problem for Rupert, though . . .
No, the immediate problem was the sharks, now that they’ve been informed this is as far as the ship is going. That they will be expected to swim the rest of the way to the End of the World.
He sees bull sharks down there, and tiger sharks too. Jack knows them by sight from growing up on Galveston Bay and having gotten pretty darn close to some of them when he was a hardheaded kid. Something else he knows? Those sharks aren’t down there sightseeing.
Fine. Bring it on. This is what we’re here for, isn’t it? A real test.
He hadn’t come this far from that oil rig in the Midland Basin to lose before he even got to the island. Not with stakes like these, not with the chance to win money beyond his wildest dreams.
But there’s something else on the table along with the money, something that had made Jack want to become an Army Ranger in the first place:
What he truly does think of as a second chance—his last chance—to put meaning back into his life.
So, he tells himself now what he used to say downrange, when it was go time:
“We’re going to have to pick a different day to die.”
He misses the mission. That’s the problem.
He gives one last look around for Rupert Chadwick, hoping against hope that the boy is a good swimmer.
If he’s not, the sharks won’t care how brave he is.