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prepared meals with the freshest local ingredients he could muster.Chicken and rice were staples, but they sometimes feasted on thick steaks. The chef earned the GRS operators’ affection by keeping the refrigerator stocked with leftovers for nights when they returned late to the Annex. Building B, on the east side of the Annex, provided housing and work space, as did Building D, on the west side, where Rone led Jack with his bags.
    Jack had three basic standards for a GRS workplace: good food, a good workout area, and his own room. Rone assured him that the food would be fine, but otherwise Benghazi was a bust. The workout area was a flyspecked mess, and Jack would be sharing a room. A heavy curtain strung down the middle provided a fig leaf of privacy. At least Jack would get along with his roommate, a GRS operator named John “Tig” Tiegen.

    Tig was a laid-back thirty-six-year-old former Marine. He had brown hair, a close-cropped goatee, and a wary expression that he’d occasionally relax into a smile. He stood five foot eleven, weighed two hundred rock-solid pounds, wore wire-rimmed glasses, and sported a pair of dragon tattoos, one on each side of his chest. Tig grew up in Colorado in the sort of situation that typically leads nowhere or worse: a fractured family that included a father who disappeared before Tig’s third birthday. He developed an attitude toward school that ranged from clownish to bored, making it easy for teachers to ignore him, which was fine with Tig.
    When Tig was an aimless high school freshman, he stopped by the home of a friend’s girlfriend one night when steaks were on the grill. “You want one?” the girl’s father asked. When Tig answered yes, the man said: “Gomow the lawn.” The connection between hard work and reward, discipline and order, had never been part of his life. Earning the steak satisfied Tig in a way he couldn’t quite describe. He barely knew his friend’s girlfriend, but within a month he moved into a bedroom that her father built for him in the basement. With help from his surrogate father, Tig set himself on a new path. He enlisted in the Marines before his eighteenth birthday because it was the toughest place he could find to prove himself.
    Tig left the Marines as a sergeant but didn’t want to stop doing military work, so in 2003 he signed up as a contract operator. After a year at the Army’s Camp Doha in Kuwait and some time back home, Tig joined the private military company Blackwater. Security stints followed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, where avoiding mortar fire became part of his daily routine. On paper Tig didn’t meet certain GRS operator qualifications, but his experience and persistence won him a shot at the screening program. He earned his way in. On his first trip to Benghazi, in February 2012, Tig returned home early when his wife, a former diesel mechanic in the US Army, gave birth two months prematurely to twins, a boy and a girl.
    When Jack arrived, Tig was on his third stay in the Annex, which made him the most experienced GRS operator in Benghazi. Tig had a hard edge, and he wasn’t a big talker, but his fellow operators learned to appreciate his sardonic wit and his dark humor. One day he found a disabled flamethrower in Benghazi and used it to create a series of staged photos in which he looked like an action movie hero setting fires as he marched alone down an abandoned street. None of the other operators doubted that they could count on Tig if the action became real. Tigconsidered loyalty to be his greatest strength but also his main weakness: “I’m loyal to people who’ve tried to screw me over.”

    The operators were slaves to the assignments posted on the Team Room whiteboard, which was usually maintained by Rone, who was the highest-ranking contractor and the Assistant Team Leader. Endless tasks awaited Benghazi’s CIA case officers, from gathering intelligence throughout the restive city to developing local