Chapter 2

The double doors burst open and out of them came a tall, dark haired man. He was young and in his early twenties but the wear and tare on his face aged to be at least thirty. The glow of the fluorescent lights washed all the color out of the room and the white tiling on the floor had the occasional black shoe scrape. The man passed room after room and even pushed open two more sets of double doors all the while never taking his piercing glare off of the invisible target that lay just ahead of him. Finally, he rounded the corner and into a small office where a man of his mid thirties sat behind his cluttered desk, discussing something obviously bothering, to an unknown person.

"Where is he!?" the young man demanded.

"Ben," the man behind the desk looked up and then spoke back into the phone. "I'll call you right back. Just don't go through with anything until you hear back from me."

With that the man hung up the phone.

"Where is he!? Where is Skinner!?"

"We don't know, Ben. If you would just sit down we can discuss our options when..."

"Options? What options do we have? We have to go get him!"

"You know we cant do that."

"We have to!"

"Ben, we don't even know where he is!"

The words seem to hang in the air longer than what they were supposed to. Ben looked at the man through a few tears and then brought a hand up to wipe them away.

"If you could just take a seat, we can discuss this."

Ben slowly took a few steps forward and then slid himself into the black leather seat.

"CO, look at me. He is in this situation because of me; because I wasn't there with him."

"You weren't there with him because you haven't been cleared by Doc yet, you know this. Don't go and think that this was some how your fault or that you did something wrong. You didn't! You were doing exactly what you were supposed to be doing. You were home with your family."

Ben brought a sleeve up to his eye to wipe away one more tear that seem to have snuck out.

"Look, we don't know what happened. Skinners OBC's went out right before everything started going wrong. We were able, though, to continue tracking his position until finally it went dead."

"Dead?"

"Oh, Ben, don't start that! You know those trackers fail all the time!"

"Yes, but their powered by your own body heat! Skinner's went out! Skinner's lost power!"

"We went to the last known location and didn't find a body."

"Did you find anything else?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact, we found quite a lot."

"You did? Like what?"

"Look at these photo's that were taken their maybe an hour at most after we tracked him there. You can see the crater and the shrapnel scattered in an elliptical pattern. There is a good chance that that was created by a high powered explosive most likely from a tactical helicopter."

"Could it have been one of ours?"

"No, we usually use US MH-60L's and those can't be retrofitted with something of this size."

"Who was it then?"

"We have our guesses. We do know that this was the last place that Skinner was on foot."

"How do you know that?"

"We found blood at the scene and all of it matches Skinner's. We were able to identify a trail and it leads to a clearing where all the grass was blown down, most likely from a helicopter. That's where the trail ends."

Ben sat back in his chair and took a deep breath.

"Based on the amount of blood found at the scene," began Ben, "is there any way to determine the extent of his injuries?"

"Yes, there is a lot of blood but we do not believe that his injuries are life threatening. Now we don't know the extent of any internal injuries so it's hard to say for sure."

Ben starred longingly into CO's eyes, hoping to find some hint of a lie but he found none.

Ben broke the silence.

"What do you want me to do?"

"I need you to go see Doc. He has something he wants you to try. If you can convince him to clear you, come back to me and I'll tell you what to do next."

The door to CO's office opened and small, frail man stepped in.

"Excuse me, Agent Dawson?" The man asked.

"Yeah," Ben replied.

"Brad was wondering if you could join him down in the weapons lab for a brief tutorial on the new caliber system."

Ben sighs.

"Yeah, I'm gonna be heading that way any ways."

"Ben, before you go, I have a question for you."

"Ok, what is it?"

"What keeps you going? What makes you get up every day and know what you might have to do?"

Ben stands up and takes a step towards CO's desk.

"In training, they confronted us with that very same question. They said that it's different for each of us. For me, I do it because the world we live in is a shitty one. And I can't go through my life with out trying to make it better."

With that, Ben gives a subtle nod then turns and walks out the door.