A colonel staged a public firing drill to humiliate a quiet clerk, unaware she had just performed an impossible marksmanship feat.

"Are you insane?" Donovan screamed over the rising roar of turbine engines that began to vibrate through the concrete walls. "You can't fight two attack helicopters with a bolt-action rifle! This isn't a shooting match at the range, Emma! Those are flying tanks! They have armor-plated cockpits, titanium tubs, and rotary cannons that fire forty rounds a second!"

"A Hind is a machine, Donovan," Emma replied calmly, checking the sling tension on her arm. "And every machine has an architect. My grandfather worked on the survivability assessment tests for captured Soviet armor at Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1983. He knew every bolt, every hydraulic line, and every structural flaw in that airframe."

She turned to Davies. "Can you walk with assistance?"

"I can crawl," Davies grunted, his teeth bared in pain as he dragged himself up using the radio rack. "And I can pull a trigger. Give me Donovan's submachine gun. I’ll stay at the hatch. If ground troops follow the gunships in, I’ll take as many into the dark as I have brass for."

"No," Emma said. "You take the journal and Donovan takes you. There’s an emergency service tunnel behind the secondary generator—it leads into the lower drainage wash three hundred yards south. If the rockets hit the bunker, the wash will protect you from the overpressure. Get in the tunnel. Now."

Donovan looked at Emma, tears of frustration and terror spilling down her cheeks. "And you?"

"I am going to the high ground," Emma said. "A helicopter cannot maneuver in a narrow gorge without maintaining forward airspeed. To fire rockets into this bowl, they will have to enter the gap at sixty knots, level their wings, and hover for three seconds to acquire the target through the snow."

Emma looked Donovan straight in the eyes, her gaze so steady, so utterly devoid of fear, that the young intelligence officer felt her own panic freeze into silence.

"In three seconds," Emma whispered, "I can fire two rounds."

Without waiting for an answer, Emma turned and slipped out of the blast door, vanishing into the howling whiteout before Donovan could even call her name.

Outside, the storm had reached its peak. The wind was shrieking at fifty knots, driving needles of ice horizontally through the narrow gorge. The visibility had dropped to less than eighty yards, but Emma did not need her eyes. She moved by the vibration in her boots, scaling the steep shale slope of the southern rim with the sure-footed agility of a mountain goat.

Her mind was operating at an impossible level of clarity.

A standard 7.62x51mm or .300 Winchester Magnum round could not penetrate the titanium tub of a Hind's cockpit. The armored glass was two inches of laminated polycarbonate, designed to deflect .50-caliber fire from oblique angles.

To disable a Hind from the front, you did not shoot the glass.

You shot the swashplate—the exposed mechanical linkage that connected the flight controls to the rotating rotor blades. Or, even more vulnerable, you shot the narrow, unarmored air intake of the Klimov TV3-117 turboshaft engine, right at the moment when the compression blades were spinning at twenty-one thousand revolutions per minute.

A single match-grade steel-core projectile, entering the intake at three thousand feet per second, would cause a catastrophic compressor stall, turning the spinning turbine blades into self-destructing shrapnel that would shred the engine block from the inside out in less than half a second.

Emma reached the summit of the southern outcrop.

She did not use a bipod this time. The snow on the crest was too soft, too unstable. Instead, she wrapped the heavy leather sling tightly around her left tricep, locking her skeletal structure into the ancient, unbreakable "hasty sling" position developed by marine scouts half a century ago.

She sat in the snow, cross-legged, bracing her elbows against her knees, transforming her own body into a rigid, human tripod.

Through the shrieking wind, the sound of the approaching gunships grew from a low hum into a bone-rattling roar.

The lead Hind burst through the wall of fog at the mouth of the canyon—a massive, monstrous silhouette of dark green metal, its stubby wings bristling with rocket pods, its dual turbine exhausts glowing dull orange in the freezing gloom.

The pilot leveled his wings. The massive machine slowed, settling into a hover three hundred feet above the valley floor, nose down, preparing to unleash sixty-four unguided rockets into the bunker below.

Emma looked through the Unertl scope.

The air intake was a dark, oval mouth situated directly above the pilot's canopy, barely nine inches wide, partially shielded by a wire-mesh foreign object deflector.

Emma Carter took a half-breath.

She did not calculate the range. She knew it: four hundred and ten yards.

She did not calculate the wind. She felt it on her left cheek: thirty-four knots, gusting forty, quartering from the northeast.

"For Pale Horse," she whispered.