Page 2 of The Code

Evan runs.

The beach is endless. The sand makes for shitty traction. He is sweating and grunting and seeming to make no progress. His ingrown toenail goes from aching to throbbing. Soon enough, every step brings a needle-jab of pain. Toward the end, he is stoop-limping like Igor. When he spots the cherry of a cigar piercing the darkness up ahead, he straightens out his form. The master chief sits on the hood of his Jeep, his legs folded with surprising agility, making him even more compact.

Evan slaps the front headlight and stops, hands on knees, panting.

The master chief slides off the hood, climbs into the Wrangler, kicks the passenger door open. “Next stop,” he says. “You can puke out the window on the way.”

Next stop proves to be underwater knot-tying drills in the Combat Training Tank, the master chief glowering at Evan from the aquarium window, cigar still lodged in his molars. Orphan training has forced Evan to reconcile with the reality that he is the eternal focus, separated from his tribe to be anthropologically observed and improved. Jack tells him that is how many people feel while in the crush of whatever vises fate has chosen for them and that at least Evan has the opportunity to be solidly built into excellence. Sunk in the tank, held breath firing his lungs, his hands working a clove hitch, he feels a thought tickle the back of his mind: Maybe one day if he is still alive and has served his time, he might orient whatever excellence he’s achieved to the light of some other sun.

Hauled out of the tank, Evan is shoved up to his tits in the surf, where he eats an MRE, shrimp jambalaya, the worst kind. The throbbing in his toe spreads through his entire foot, barbed-wire claws twisting up his calves. He makes the call—after the obstacle course, he’ll ask for medical. That’ll get him out of the three-mile night swim, the grand finale, which he dreads more than anything else.

The O-course is murder, with its five-story cargo net, the elevated rib-breaking logs he has to beanbag himself onto, and the platformed tower he pull-ups to the top of and then shimmies down from on a suspended fast rope hung with Golden Gate undulations. He collapses over the finish line, panting into the sand. The ingrown toenail has taken him out, every movement ramming the edged keratin into raw puffy flesh.

The master chief clicks the stopwatch. “Ain’t that a sad time. I’ve had boys come through in half that, younger’n you, nuthin’-years-old with a waiver. And you’re lying there like you just took marathon gold at Munich. On yer feet, Sally.”

The pain is so bad Evan can barely speak. “… need … need medical.”

The toe is too far gone. Without permission he curls up on his side, tugging off the boot. He winces from the pain, bites his lower lip to stifle a cry. The smell is diabolical, rotting meat basted in sweat. Whimpering, he peels his sock off.

The toe looks postapocalyptic. It is deserving of some trace of pity, even from a SEAL master chief. And Evan has timed this perfectly to shirk the night swim.

The master chief crouches over him, knees cracking. He stabs his lit cigar at the spectacle on Evan’s foot and it takes everything Evan has not to flinch. “Go.”

Medical is a one-mile jog. He does it with gratitude. He is moving toward the glow at the end of the tunnel. His body is exhausted, his mind melting. The pain feels like it has roosted permanently in his toe; the digit will never not be a hot poker of agony.

He thumps through the door into medical.

Another instructor is waiting. A blue shirt and khaki shorts, despite the hour. There is a TV on an office-beige file cabinet and it shows a clip of a shark attack, rolling hockey-puck eyes, teeth undulating like a spike harrow on a tractor. The instructor is half the depth and width of the master chief but still, next to Evan, he looks like a gun safe. He gestures at a metal folding chair with a pair of janky paramedic scissors.

Evan’s stomach drops through the floor.

He sits. He is facing the television. A great white breaches, ripping a sea lion from side to side. On the metal tray by the instructor’s foot waits a pair of needle-nose pliers.

The instructor lowers the scissors toward the sickly black-green wreckage of the toenail. “You might think this is blackout pain. But it’s not. So keep your eyes open.”

Evan does.

He also makes noises he cannot help and there is no shame in them as long as he doesn’t look away. His eyes water and his chest convulses, but he is there and present and breathing so it does not count as crying.

The scissors chomp down the middle of the nail past the cuticle to the root.

Before Evan can find breath, the pliers wrench the two stiff planks free from the nail bed.

He swoons from the pain but the instructor catches his sagging forehead on a meaty biceps, props him once more into the folding chair, and slaps a cold washcloth on the back of his neck. The TV documentary has switched to fatal shark attacks on humans—churning red water, missing limbs, last-ditch medical attention.

“You got five breaths,” the instructor says.

“Till my car?”

The instructor laughs. “Ocean water’s good for the swelling. And it’ll help disinfect it.”

Evan feels an instant of utter and comprehensive defeat.

There is no way.

They can’t make him.

He can’t do it.