Janson and Katsaris had repaired to the adjoining warehouse to do the job. They started by draping the canopy and rigging over the large, flat concrete flooring. Both sprayed silicone over the rip-cord cable, the closing pin, and the closing loop. The next steps were rote. The black canopy was made of zero-porosity nylon, and Janson rolled his body over the loose drapes, pressing as much air out of it as he could. He straightened the stabilizer lines and toggles, and folded the flattened canopy to ensure an in-sequence opening, taking care that the rigging was on the outside of the folds. Finally, he bunched it into the black mesh pack, squeezing the remaining air through the edge stitching before slipping a clasp through the grommet.

Katsaris, with his nimble fingers, was finished in half the time.

He turned to Janson. “Let’s you and I do a quick weapons inspection,” he said. “Pay a visit to the junk shop.”

The premise of a team was that anybody would accept personal risk to reduce a risk borne by another. An ethos of equality was crucial; any sense of favoritism was destructive to it. When they met as a group, Janson therefore dealt with the men in a tone that was at once brusque and friendly. But even within elites, there were elites—and even within the innermost circles of excellence, there is the chosen one, the golden boy.

Janson had once been that person, almost three decades earlier. Just a few weeks after he’d arrived at the SEAL training camp at Little Creek, Alan Demarest had picked him out from the enlisted trainees, had him transferred to ever more elite combat teams, ever more grueling regimens of combat drills. The training groups got smaller and smaller—more and more of his peers dropped out, defeated by the punishing schedule of exercises—until, by the end, Demarest isolated him for intensive sessions of one-on-one training.

Your fingers are weapons! Never encumber them. Half a warrior’s intelligence is found in his hands.

Don’t squeeze the vein, squeeze the nerve! Memorize the nerve points until you can find them with your fingers, not your eyes. Don’t look—feel!

I spotted your helmet above that ridgeline. You’re fucking dead!

Can’t see a way out? Take the time to see things differently. See the two white swans instead of the one black one. See the slice of pie instead of the pie with the slice missing. Flip the Necker cube outward instead of inward. Master the gestalt, baby. It will make you free. Firepower by itself won’t do it. You’ve got to think your way out of this one.

Yes! Turn your hunter into your prey! You’ve got it!

And thus did one legendary warrior create another. When Janson had first met Theo Katsaris, years back, he knew—he simply knew, the way Demarest must have known about him.