Just the ones you remember.
Finn sat at the foot of his rack and spread out the items Stickman had procured for him. Two little component frames, designed to hold a pair of AAA batteries. A jeweler’s tool kit, including a few tiny screwdrivers, a miniature pair of pliers, wire cutters, and tweezers. A small soldering iron. A jeweler’s magnifying headset. To which he now added a pocket digital recorder he’d brought on board with him and a roll of duct tape from the ship’s store.
He slipped on the magnifying headset and picked up the first component, a miniature amplifier. Removed each of the tiny screws that held the case together and pulled it gently apart. Removed the circuit board and placed the empty casing pieces to the side.
An incipient short in the wiring.
Next he unsoldered the wires leading to the amplifier’s two tiny microphones, extended them several inches and resoldered them, then located the power wires and extended those and connected the free ends to one of the AAA battery frames.
He set the device down, picked up a second component—a mini-transmitter—and repeated the procedure, removing the board from its case and extending its power wires, then attaching those, too, to the AAA battery holder, using heat-shrink tubing wherever he made connections to prevent shorts.
He plugged the two components together, then set that whole assembly to the side. Now he turned his attention to the next bit of electronics, a miniature receiver, and began disassembling that one.
Once the miniature receiver’s innards were exposed, he picked up his little digital recorder and began peeling the electronic meat out of its shell.
Has your friend had other memory lapses?
It had started two weeks earlier, with that botched raid in Mukalla. They breached the compound, found themselves staring at nothing but smoke—and his next clear memory was of waking up the following morning at daybreak, lying on the ground on his Gore-Tex blanket back at their base camp.
Finn’s memory was among his most precious assets, possibly the most powerful weapon in his sniper’s tool kit. Far more than being able to aim and shoot a rifle, it was his abnormal talent for observation, storage, and retrieval that caused SOCOM to pour a small fortune into training, equipping, and deploying him.
The other guys in Spec Ops training had to work like fiends to develop their powers of observation and recall. Building memory muscle was a critical part of sniper training, and he’d watched his teammates struggle. Not him. For Finn, it was just there. Among the teams he was known for it. Legendary, even.
A memory prodigy with holes in his memory.
Fucked-up mass of contradictions.
He set the finished assembly down on his bunk, went over to his locker, and retrieved a thick, leather-bound volume he’d persuaded Olivia, the writer at the PAO office, to “loan” him from their reference library.
Did he miss something critical that night in Mukalla? See something critical? Some pivotal footage buried in that hours-long trench between crashing into the empty building and lurching awake the next morning?
He opened the big book, picked up his steel ring knife, and began slicing into the pages.