Chapter 4 - THE READING OF THE STONE
The backstop was an ancient, massive slab of poured industrial concrete, six feet thick, reinforced with rebar, and pitted by thirty years of heavy military small-arms fire. Its surface was grey, chalky, and gouged with thousands of overlapping impact craters, bullet splashes, and lead streaks left by generations of soldiers who had qualified on Range 4.
The gravel floor between the fifty-yard targets and the back wall was rough, littered with old shell casings, target scraps, and dry tumbleweeds tumbling across the dust in the howling crosswind.
Donovan reached the base of the giant concrete wall.
Back at the firing line, the silence was total. The thirty soldiers of Combat Group Charlie leaned over the concrete partition, their previous amusement completely replaced by quiet, baffled curiosity. Colonel Mercer stood motionless, his hands resting on the top of the barrier, his eyes locked onto his range supervisor’s back.
Beside Bay 7, Private Emma Carter remained standing in her safe carry posture. She hadn't moved an inch. She didn't look down at her boots, nor did she look up at the colonel. Her grey eyes were fixed calmly on Donovan’s distant silhouette against the grey concrete backstop.
Donovan stopped two feet from the pitted concrete wall.
She reached down with her right hand and pulled off her heavy tactical glove, tossing it onto the gravel beside her boot.
She lifted her bare hand. Her fingers—calloused, weathered, and sensitive from decades of mechanical assembly and precision ballistics work—reached out toward the rough, cold surface of the concrete backstop.
She didn't just look at the wall; she began to feel it.
Her fingertips moved slowly, deliberately across the rough surface, tracing a tiny, specific area located roughly four feet off the ground, directly in line with Lane 7’s firing axis—one hundred yards behind where the paper target sat.
The sunlight glared off the grey concrete, making it nearly impossible for the soldiers standing back at the firing line to see what she was looking at. From fifty yards away, the wall looked like nothing more than a giant slab of gouged, grey stone.
Donovan’s hand moved left, then right, her index finger sweeping across a three-inch patch of grey surface.
Suddenly, her hand stopped.
Her fingertips froze over a tiny, dark mark on the concrete.
Donovan leaned in closer. Her nose was barely four inches from the stone. She squinted against the bright sunlight, examining the microscopic details of the mark beneath her finger.
Her chest stopped moving. Her shoulders went rigid.
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For ten long seconds, Master Sergeant Donovan remained completely frozen in a crouch against the giant back wall, her bare hand pressed against the concrete, staring at something invisible to everyone else on the range.
Slowly, very slowly, she withdrew her hand. She stood up to her full height and turned around to face the firing line one hundred and fifty yards away.
