Chapter 3
Morrison studied the map. The table was quiet. Vance looked at Morrison, apparently waiting for the lieutenant to smile or dismiss the request, and Morrison did neither. He picked up the marker and moved the position.
That night I sat alone at the far end of the staging table with the rifle laid out on a cloth. I cleaned it the way my father had cleaned it — piece by piece, in the same sequence he had taught me, with the same attention to the same tolerances. There was something I needed to do carefully in that cleaning, something that was not about the mechanics of the rifle, and the men on the other side of the tent understood this without being told. I heard everything they said. I said nothing back.
I was keeping a promise. That was all. I cleaned the rifle and I listened to the desert outside and I went over the position in my head, the angle and the distance and the variables I had mapped, and eventually the tent went quiet and I put the rifle back in its case and got three hours of sleep.
At dawn the mission moved.
The desert takes sound first. Then landmarks. Then any reasonable sense of how far you have come and how far you have to go. I separated from Morrison's team and climbed toward the northeast position alone, moving carefully, reading the ground the way I had been taught to read ground. The ridge came up after forty minutes of climbing and I settled into the position, checked the sight lines against the calculations I had made the night before, adjusted the bipod, and keyed the radio to confirm.
May you like
Then I waited.
Waiting is not the same as stillness. Waiting is active. Waiting is collecting — reading the heat shimmer over the distant compound, reading the way it changed as the morning shifted toward noon, reading the stone faces for the thermal activity I had predicted and tracking the actual against the predicted to confirm or revise. I had the notebook open beside me with the morning's wind numbers and I was updating them as I watched, keeping the solution current, because a solution that was right an hour ago can be wrong now and the only way to know which you are working with is to never stop checking.
