Chapter 47 - THE ASCENT IN THE RAIN
The steel rungs of Tower One were slick with grease and cold rain.
Emma climbed with her rifle slung diagonally across her back, secured by a webbing strap that kept the barrel pointed down and away from the girders. With every fifty feet of elevation, the wind increased exponentially, howling through the steel cross-braces with a hollow, shrieking resonance that vibrated through the metal into her bones.
Her fingers were numb, but her grip was iron. She didn't look down at the dark perimeter below, where the miniature shapes of Sterling’s vehicles sat concealed behind the ruins of the brick switch houses. Her eyes were focused solely on the structural outline of Tower Two, eighty yards away across the open sky.
The rain beat against her face like thrown needles. At two hundred feet, the clouds enveloped the tower in a swirling, gray-white soup that cut visibility down to less than thirty yards.
*He’s above the cloud deck,* she calculated. *The cloud ceiling is at two hundred and forty feet. If he’s on the maintenance platform at two-eighty, he’s shooting in clean air while the ground below is blinded.*
She paused on a narrow steel rest platform, unhooked her safety lanyard, and breathed.
Her lungs burned with the cold dampness. Her heart was beating at a steady, controlled rhythm. Across the gap between the towers, she caught a momentary, rhythmic pulse of amber light—the indicator light of a portable satellite uplink dish, mounted to the safety railing of Tower Two.
Then, a sudden, sharp *snap* tore through the storm.
A high-velocity round punched through the steel lattice two inches above Emma’s left shoulder, showering her cheek with jagged flakes of rusted zinc and paint.
She did not flinch. She dropped her center of gravity instantly, melting flat against the steel grating of the platform.
*He knew I was coming,* she thought, wiping a smear of blood and rain from her cheek. *He wasn't watching the ground. He was watching the ladders.*
Through the howling gale, a voice crackled through an old, weather-beaten megaphone mounted to the structural leg of Tower Two—an auxiliary horn wired to the radio shack below.
"You’re three seconds slower than you were in Prague, Carter!" the voice rasped, distorted by the static of the storm and the rusty diaphragm of the speaker. "You hesitated on the hundred-foot platform! A real sniper doesn't check her lanyard!"
Emma lay completely motionless on the grating, her cheek pressed against the cold iron, her rifle cradled beneath her chest to protect the optics from the driving water.
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"You should have stayed dead, Thomas," she whispered, knowing the wind would carry her words into the void.
***
