Glasser handed him an M-4 as he reached the platform and then buckled on a combat harness — which fortunately fit over the breath pak — and looped a video camera over his shoulder.

“Repeat your orders,” he said.

“Start camera. Step through in tactical posture. Ensure my footing. One spin to check security. Drop weapon, pick up camera. One slow spin with the video camera. Return.” Sanson dropped the magazine from the weapon, ensured it was clear, then locked and loaded and placed it on safe.

“If you don’t return, we won’t be going in after you for at least an hour,” Glasser noted. “If it’s due to being unable to reach the globe on the far side, assume a tactical posture and wait; we will send someone else through.”

“Yes, sir,” the SEAL answered, knowing he only had forty-five minutes of air. They’d been over that and as many other contingencies as they could imagine. “Can I go now?”

“Yep,” Glasser said, gesturing up the rickety scaffolding stairs.

James Thomas Sanson had wanted to be a SEAL since he was seven years old and saw a show about them on the Discovery Channel. As he got older he studied everything he could find on the SEALs and what he needed to know before he joined. In high school he had played football and been on the track and field team. His high school didn’t have a swim team but he went down to the river, winter and summer, and swam as much as he could. He would sometimes lie in the water in winter, training himself to ignore as much as possible the cold. He’d come near to dying one time from hypothermia but he considered that just “good training.”

He’d also been a good student and an avid reader. He had graduated high school with a 3.5 GPA after having read every book of military history and fiction in the library.

He thought that he had prepared as well as he could for the SEAL course and with one exception Hell Week, while bad, had not been as horrific as it was for many of the other new meat.