Chapter 48 - THE WIND AT TWO HUNDRED FEET
"Dead is convenient!" Kincaid’s voice echoed back through the speaker horn, mocking and harsh. "Dead men don't have to answer to congressional subcommittees! Dead men don't have to watch pencil-pushers like Vance dismantle thirty years of silent work!"
Another shot rang out. The round ricocheted off the lower cross-brace of Emma’s platform, the high-pitched whine of the deformed bullet singing away into the mist.
"You know what Davies built, Emma!" Kincaid shouted through the megaphone. "The Ghost Needle isn't a weapon of terror! It’s an iron wall! Once the failsafe executes, the entire military-industrial network is severed from the civilian grid! No foreign infiltrators, no political betrayals, no more compromise! We return to iron sights and hard lines!"
Emma didn't listen to the ideology. Her mind was calculating the ballistics of his shots.
*Distance: ninety-two yards.*
*Angle of inclination: eleven degrees upward.*
*Crosswind: north-northwest at thirty-eight knots, gusting to forty-five.*
*Barometric pressure: twenty-eight point nine inches and dropping.*
In this crosswind, a standard bullet would be blown nearly fourteen inches to the left over a hundred-yard flight path. But Kincaid was using a specialized high-density tungsten match round; his drift would be less, roughly six inches. He was firing from behind the structural shield of the central winch housing on Tower Two, exposing only three inches of his rifle barrel and the right side of his skull.
To hit him, she couldn't shoot at him. She had to shoot *around* the structural gusset plate of the tower.
Emma reached into her vest pocket and pulled out a single round of custom-loaded .30-06 ammunition—a round with a slightly shorter, rounded ogive designed for extreme wind stability at intermediate ranges, which she had hand-balanced thirty years ago in a basement in Munich.
She fed the round into the open chamber of her rifle, sliding the heavy steel bolt forward until it locked with a solid, definitive *thunk.*
"Come on, little clerk!" Kincaid’s voice boomed through the mist, laced with bitter laughter. "Show the colonel what Davies trained you for! Take the shot, or watch the eastern seaboard go dark!"
Emma didn't rise. She slipped her rifle through the narrow gap between two horizontal angle-irons of the platform floor, resting the barrel on her leather glove to prevent the metal-on-metal vibration from disturbing the barrel harmonics.
She waited.
She didn't look through the crosshairs. In this dense fog, the glass was useless, clouded by condensation and rain. She flipped the scope mount release lever with her thumb, allowing the heavy optical sight to drop off to the side, exposing the clean, indestructible post of the iron aperture sight.
*The iron sight doesn't fog.*
*The iron sight doesn't lie.*
She felt the structural tower sway beneath her—a three-inch deflection to the south as a massive gust slammed into the lattice. She calculated the period of the sway: four point two seconds per oscillation.
At the apex of the tower's sway, there would be a quarter-second of absolute equilibrium—a moment when the steel stopped moving before snapping back in the opposite direction.
*Wait for the pause.*
The wind roared like an approaching locomotive. The rain surged, blanketing the sky in white spray.
The tower leaned... reached its limit... and stopped.
May you like
Emma squeezed the trigger.
***
