Chapter 2
It was a good laugh, from his perspective. He had timed it right, delivered it at full volume, and he watched the perimeter of his audience for the confirmations he needed. A few men gave them to him because Vance laughed and they didn't want to be the one who didn't. Morrison did not laugh. He watched me, which told me more about Morrison than about the situation.
I looked at Vance. I looked at the rifle the way you look at something that belongs to you and that someone else has handled without understanding what they were holding. Then I closed the case, lifted it back onto my shoulder, and walked to the staging table.
I did not say anything. I did not give him the look he was waiting for, the heat or the embarrassment or the sharp word that would have let him play the reasonable one in the scene he was staging. I simply walked, and the insult hit the tarmac behind me and lay there, and the fact that I was not going to pick it up clearly bothered him more than anything I could have said.
Morrison laid out the mission at the briefing table. A civilian contractor named David Keller. Eleven days held. Compound deep in hostile territory. Narrow time window. My assignment was overwatch from a ridge at approximately three kilometers. I heard Vance's mouth do something at the three-kilometer figure, not quite a comment, just a preparation for one.
I was not looking at him. I was bent over the topographical chart with my father's notebook open beside it, writing numbers in the same pencil-worn shorthand he had taught me. The briefing table had placed my firing position at the base of a particular rock formation, and I had been looking at the terrain and the time of day and the way the eastern ridgeline would interact with afternoon thermal activity, and the numbers were telling me something the table position had not accounted for.
When Vance asked if I was paying attention, I said what was true: "I heard the route. I'm checking what the air will do to it."
May you like
I showed Morrison the issue. The afternoon heat off the flat stone face would rise and meet the cooler descending air from the elevation change exactly across my firing lane, creating a thermal current variable that wasn't impossible to compensate for but was an unnecessary complication when there was a better option.
"Move me three hundred meters northeast," I said. "I can compensate from the marked position, but I'd rather remove the variable."
