Chapter 3 - The First Break
The crack of the first round was sharp and flat, swallowed almost instantly by the vast, open expanse of the Wyoming plains.
BANG.
The muzzle flashed against the bright afternoon sun. A single brass casing ejected cleanly from the port, tumbling in a glittering arc through the air, clattering softly against the dry concrete apron near Claire’s right boot. The carbine’s muzzle rose by a fraction of an inch and settled instantly back onto its original horizontal plane, her bone-on-bone skeletal support absorbing the five-point-five-six millimeter recoil without allowing her torso to rock backward.
Downrange, fifty yards away, the green cardboard silhouette vibrated once against its wooden frame from the sonic shockwave.
Across the broad, bleached face of the paper target, nothing changed.
There was no clean black puncture in the outer rings. There was no visible hole torn through the upper shoulders of the silhouette. The paper remained a wide, uninterrupted plane of pale cardboard.
Sergeant Tyler Briggs threw his head back and burst into full, uncontrolled laughter.
"Did she hit Wyoming?!" Briggs shouted, slapping his knee and turning toward the squad behind him. "Did anyone see dust kick up on the ridge? I think she just ventilated a sagebrush in Montana!"
The detachment broke into loud, unrestrained hilarity. Two junior specialists leaned against the wooden benches, chuckling openly, trading glances of condescending pity.
Colonel Nathan Caldwell shook his head slowly, a smirk pulling at the corners of his mouth. "Come on, Morgan. The backstop is fifty feet wide. You don't have to aim for the sky."
Claire Morgan did not turn around.
She did not flinch, she did not blush, and her shoulders did not tense. Her cheek remained welded immovably to the stock of the rifle. Her hazel eyes remained open, tracking through the iron aperture, watching the heat mirage ripple off the fifty-yard line.
Her right index finger stayed pressed against the trigger face, holding the trigger to the rear for a precise mechanical reset.
Click.
The sear engaged with a crisp, tactile pulse that vibrated through her finger bone.
Beside the yellow railing, Master Sergeant Monroe took half a step closer to the bench. Her laughter was absent. Her eyes were not looking at the laughing men, nor were they looking at Caldwell.
Monroe was staring at the concrete backstop fifty yards downrange.
Behind the green cardboard target stood the massive, eight-foot-tall poured-concrete backstop—a gray, pitted wall of reinforced stone. Typically, when a shooter completely missed an E-type silhouette at fifty yards, the stray bullet would strike the concrete wall somewhere high, wide, or low, kicking up a distinct puff of gray concrete pulverized into powder, leaving a fresh, white-rimmed crater on the stone.
Monroe’s sharp eyes scanned the entire face of the backstop: left, right, top, bottom.
There was no fresh gray puff. There was no newly exposed white aggregate.
Monroe’s gaze shifted back to Claire’s posture.
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The rifle had not moved an eighth of an inch from its original line of sight. Claire’s breathing had not accelerated; her chest rose and fell with the rhythmic, slow cadence of an athlete in a cryogenic chamber. She looked like a marble statue holding an iron rifle in the howling wind.
If she missed the paper, Monroe thought, her jaw tightening as a cold prickle traveled down her spine, where the hell did the lead go?
