Chapter 6 - The Mocking Applause
The silence beneath the pavilion was instantaneous.
For two seconds, the only sound was the howling Wyoming wind whistling through the steel framework and the distant rumble of a diesel generator behind the ammunition bunker.
Then, Colonel Nathan Caldwell began to clap.
Clap... clap... clap.
The applause was slow, exaggerated, and dripping with venomous amusement. Caldwell shook his head, a wide, condescending grin splitting his tanned, weathered face as he stepped up to the edge of the firing bench.
"Well..." Caldwell drawled, his voice carrying effortlessly across the entire range bay. "That was... truly educational, Private Morgan."
Behind him, Tyler Briggs let out a loud, mocking snort of laughter, turning to slap Corporal Davis on the shoulder.
"Educational?" Briggs crowed. "Sir, that was a miracle! She fired five rounds at a stationary silhouette fifty yards away and managed to miss every single square inch of the paper! You couldn't do that if you tried! She shot clean around the target!"
The six soldiers on the ready line chuckled openly, shaking their heads in collective derision.
"I think we found our new head of logistics," Briggs added, smirking directly at Claire. "No danger of her accidentally expending any inventory."
Caldwell smiled, crossing his arms over his chest. "I believe this concludes your transfer request, Morgan. You will report back to the warehouse at zero-seven-hundred tomorrow. Perhaps you can practice zeroing a barcode scanner; it might be more forgiving of your marksmanship fundamentals."
Claire Morgan did not look at Caldwell. She did not look at Briggs.
She reached up with calm, methodical hands, removed her ballistic safety glasses, and wiped a speck of dust from the lens using the hem of her camouflage blouse. Her face remained completely unruffled—no flushed cheeks, no clenched jaw, no downcast eyes. She stood with the quiet, detached stillness of an engineer who had just completed a routine laboratory test.
Beside the yellow railing, Master Sergeant Rachel Monroe did not join in the laughter.
Her face was not smiling.
Monroe had brought the ten-power Leupold monocular to her right eye.
Through the coated glass optic, the fifty-yard line snapped into sharp, high-definition clarity. The heat mirage shimmered along the edges of the green cardboard torso, and the fibers of the paper trembled in the thirty-knot crosswind.
Monroe’s eye did not scan the outer white scoring rings where Briggs and Caldwell assumed the misses had flown.
Her lens zoomed directly into the anatomical dead-center of the target—into the three-inch black zeroing dot.
In the center of that three-inch dot, there was a hole.
It was not a wide, ragged tear. It was not a scattered pattern of five separate impacts across the black ink.
It was a single, clean, perfectly circular perforation, barely eight millimeters in diameter—the edges of the paper fibers pushed cleanly inward, darkened by a faint ring of black bullet lubricant.
Monroe’s breath caught in her throat.
Her heart slammed against her ribs with the force of a sledgehammer.
One hole, Monroe realized, her fingers tightening around the rubber armor of the monocular until her knuckles turned chalk-white. There are not five misses. There is only one hole.
She shifted the monocular slightly, looking through the center of that single perforation to the heavy poured-concrete backstop directly behind the target frame.
On the gray face of the concrete wall, directly in line with the black dot, was a single, deep, dime-sized crater in the stone. Inside that crater, welded together by five consecutive supersonic kinetic impacts, was a solid, mashed core of lead and copper jacket.
May you like
Five rounds. Standard iron sights. Fired off-hand. In a thirty-knot Wyoming crosswind.
Every single bullet had passed through the exact same microscopic hole in the paper.
