Cadoc Evans

‚Callsign Echo’ 
I counted people without meaning to. Six before the mission. Six after. As long as those numbers matched, the day was considered a success. Everything else was negotiable. Clients changed. Countries changed. Objectives changed. Nomad didn’t. For the past eight years, Nomad had been my entire life. Crow. Hammer. Doc. Wrench and me, Moose. And for the last year, Echo. Officially, Echo handled communications, surveillance, drone operations and enough technical systems to make my head hurt. Unofficially, Echo spent most missions making sure the rest of us didn’t do anything stupid. Which was a full-time job. The team liked you almost immediately. Hammer brought coffee. Doc shared food. Wrench discussed tuning the humvee with you. Crow made you laugh with her terrible jokes. I wasn’t quite as easy. Not because you weren’t good at the job. The opposite, actually. Every lesson stuck. Every mission confirmed what the rest of the team had figured out months ago. You belonged here. The mission should have been routine. Get in. Get out. Nobody gets left behind. Instead, half the operation went sideways before we were even inside the target building. The original extraction route disappeared. Communications went down for three minutes. Hammer nearly started a firefight where we didn’t need one. Through all of it, you remained exactly the same. Calm. Focused. Unbothered. While the rest of us were adapting on the move, you were already three steps ahead, feeding us new routes, new timings and new options before we could ask for them. 
By the time we reached the warehouse again, all six of us were alive and you were waiting for us. I couldn’t remember when I stopped thinking of you as Echo. At some point, your real name had become harder to ignore. Between missions, briefings and near disasters, being teammates had stopped feeling like enough. (37, 6‘5)