3. Gabriel
GAbrIEL
I don’t lose sleep. Sleep is a discipline like everything else.
Twenty-two years of deployments taught my body to shut down on command—in transport planes, in fighting holes, in a monastery basement outside Ravnik with artillery pounding the ridge above me.
I slept the night before Velin Pass, and I slept the night after, when nine of the men I brought out didn’t.
Tonight I closed my eyes and got brown ones staring back.
I sit up, put my feet on the cold plywood floor, and rub both hands down my face, stubble rasping under my palms. The rain quit sometime after midnight.
Now there’s just the generator hum, the drip off the eaves, and a twenty-three-year-old specialist sitting at the end of a briefing table in my skull with his arm draped over the chair back, saying yes, sir like a dare.
This does not happen to me.
I have commanded young soldiers for two decades.
Cocky ones, pretty ones, broken ones, all of it.
I have processed exactly none of them as anything other than assets and liabilities.
I built my life like a weapons rack, everything in its slot, everything accounted for.
Work in one slot. Women in another—rare, brief, chosen because they never asked questions I couldn’t answer.
Most importantly, I never let the question in my own head finish forming.
Forty-five years of never letting it finish forming.
One briefing. One mouthy specialist with split knuckles and a bruise going yellow on his cheek, and I woke up at 0350 hard as a rifle barrel with his voice in my ear.
Fine. I’ll treat the problem the way I’d treat any tactical failure. Identify the breach. Seal it. So I stand, dress in the dark, and refuse to examine the fact that I’ve dressed in the dark ten thousand times and this is the first time it’s felt like arming up for contact.
Outside, I walk the perimeter road toward the range, because walking beats lying in my bunk negotiating with my own pulse, and because I want to be there first.
The range at Kestrel is a gravel strip cut into the hillside.
Sandbag firing line, steel targets staggered out to six hundred meters, half of them scarred silver from years of hits.
I check the lane, check the wind flags hanging dead in the fog, and set up a spotting scope with hands that are perfectly steady, thank you.
He’s early.
0547, and Reyes comes up the path with his rifle slung and his collar turned up against the cold, breath fogging, hair a mess even under his cap. Thirteen minutes early. Then again, soldiers show up early to make an impression all the time.
“Colonel.” He stops at the proper distance and gives me a full salute this time, so crisp it has to be on purpose. Like he’s saying, see? I know how.
“Specialist.” I nod at the firing line. “Lane one. Cold range until I say otherwise. Show me your weapon.”
He unslings the rifle and hands it over, cleared and safe.
I go over it like I’d go over any transfer’s weapon, because a man’s rifle tells you things his file won’t.
This one is worn but immaculate—scuffed pale at the grip, finish rubbed gray along the handguard where his support hand lives, and every moving part clean enough for surgery.
Somebody either taught him well, or he learned by nearly dying.
“You maintain this yourself.”
“Every day, sir.”
I hand it back.
“Two hundred meters. Standing to prone, five rounds, on my command. Then we work back.”
“Yes, sir.”
There it is again. Two regulation words with a hook buried in them. I turn to the scope so I’m not looking at his mouth when he says it.
“Fire.”
He drops from standing to prone in one smooth motion and shoots before I expect him to. Steel rings out in the fog. Then again. Again. Five hits, a spread I could cover with my palm, and he’s already scanning past the target for the next one.
“Four hundred.”
Ring. Ring. Ring.
“Six.”
I watch him instead of watching the target, which is a mistake.
I do it anyway. The slouch is gone. Reyes isn’t the loose-hipped smartass from my briefing hut anymore.
He’s quiet and precise, cheek welded to the stock, brown eyes calm behind the optic.
So the attitude is camouflage. This, right here, is the actual soldier, and the mouth is just the tripwire he strings around himself so nobody walks up on the real thing.
The rifle cracks. A full second later, six hundred meters out, steel sings.
“Again.”
Ring.
“Again.”
Ring.
Fuck. He shoots better than his scores. His scores are in the top two percent, and he shoots better than that. I’ve stood behind enough firing lines to know how rare that is—and exactly how much trouble it buys everyone standing near it.
“Cease fire. Clear and safe.”
Reyes clears the weapon, stands, and brushes gravel off his front.
His cheeks are pink from the cold and the recoil, and a piece of hair has come loose across his forehead.
He looks up at me, waiting for the verdict, and I recognize the look.
He wants to know if it was good. And not for the record. He wants to hear it from me.
“Your quals are verified,” I say.
Reyes blinks at me. “That’s it, sir?”
I keep my expression blank. “Were you expecting a parade?”
He breathes out through his nose, and it almost sounds like a chuckle. “Okafor made it sound like a firing squad. Figured there’d at least be a blindfold.”
“The blindfold is for men who miss.” I pick up the spotting scope and fold the tripod.
“You don’t miss, Reyes. Which means when something goes wrong around you, and something always goes wrong around you, it won’t be your shooting.
It’ll be your judgment. And that’s the qual I can’t verify on a range. ”
He absorbs that. I watch him decide whether to let it land or bat it away, and the brown eyes come up bright and dangerous, and here it comes.
“With respect, sir,” he bites out. “My judgment kept me alive in a cellar for six hours.”
“Your judgment put you eleven klicks from a hostile border. By request.” I step closer than I need to.
Command distance. That’s all this is. “I read your file. I know what’s in it, and I know what isn’t.
Men like you burn hot and useful right up until they burn out everyone standing next to them, and I have buried enough of my own that I don’t intend to bury any of you.
So you’ll shoot when I say, move when I say, and hold when I say, and if that arrangement offends you, the convoy runs back to the airfield on Thursdays. ”
He hasn’t backed up an inch. Just twenty-three years old, and he takes it standing flat-footed with his chin level. A muscle in his cheek twitches once before he answers.
“I’m not going anywhere, sir.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t imagine you are.”
It comes out wrong. Lower than I intend. And on top of that, we’re standing closer than a colonel and a specialist have any regulation reason to be. His eyes flick down, then up, cataloging me.
I step back first. That’s going to rub me the wrong way all day.
“PT with the unit at 0700. Dismissed.”
“Yes, sir.” Softer this time. I’m not sure which version is worse.
Reyes slings the rifle and walks off down the path, and I stand at the firing line, watching the fog take him, and my head will not shut up.
He’s the best natural shooter I’ve had under my command in a decade. And he’s a fucking liability.