Chapter 8 - THE TRIPLE THREAD
CRACK-CRACK-CRACK.
The three shots broke so fast they sounded like a single, elongated burst of automatic fire. Three brass casings arced through the harsh Wyoming sunlight simultaneously, bouncing off the concrete barrier and falling into the pale gravel.
Before the sound of the third shot had even finished echoing off the distant mountain ridges, Emma had already flipped the safety switch back to SAFE and lowered the muzzle.
Total elapsed time: less than 1.2 seconds.
Fifty yards downrange, the blank white paper target fluttered in the thirty-knot crosswind.
Master Sergeant Donovan didn't wait. She grabbed her high-powered observation binoculars from the range desk, lifted them to her eyes, and adjusted the focus ring, aiming the lenses directly at the center of the distant white paper.
Through the high-magnification lenses, the white paper filled her view.
In the dead center of the blank sheet, where an invisible heart would sit on a human torso, there was a single, neat, star-shaped hole.
Not three holes. One hole.
The edges of the paper around the hole were charred and frayed, indicating that all three high-velocity projectiles had passed through the exact same spatial coordinates in mid-air, traveling down the exact same trajectory line to punch through the paper at the exact same entry point.
Donovan lowered the binoculars. Her hands were shaking—a rare, unprecedented sight for a woman who had spent two decades in the military.
She looked at Colonel Mercer. She didn't say a word. She simply handed the binoculars to the commanding officer.
Mercer snatched the binoculars, lifted them to his eyes, and focused on the paper.
He stared through the glass for ten agonizing seconds. His face turned from red to pale grey as the physical reality of what he was looking at sank into his mind.
A three-round rapid-fire string. Fifty yards. Thirty-knot crosswind. Iron sights. A single bullet hole.
It was not luck. It was not a fluke. It was absolute, terrifying, mathematical perfection.
Mercer slowly lowered the binoculars. He looked at Emma, his voice completely stripped of its previous authority, replaced by an unsettling reverence.
"You're not a quartermaster clerk, Carter," Mercer stated flatly. "Nobody with that muscle memory spends four years sitting in a supply vault counting boots."
May you like
Emma looked back at him, her gray eyes clear, steady, and entirely calm.
"The Army assigned me to logistics, Colonel," she replied quietly. "I go where I'm ordered, and I do the job I'm given."
