A Steady Hand Outruns a Loud Mouth

Vance's voice came over the radio, and the laughter that had been in it on the tarmac was completely gone. "We don't have a clean route."

"No."

"We're out of time."

"Eleven minutes now."

Another silence. Then Vance said the thing I had not expected from him and would not forget. "Then we trust the overwatch."

Morrison keyed the radio. His voice was level, the voice of a man who has accepted the shape of a situation and is operating inside it. "Ava. The shooter on the northeast corner. Current range and conditions. Can you take that shot if I call it?"

I looked through the scope at the figure on the secondary structure. I ran the numbers in my head — the distance, the current wind reading, the thermal activity off the rock face to the right of the lane, the slight downward angle from my elevation. I had been building toward this calculation since the morning briefing. All the numbers were live and current because I had not stopped updating them.

I paused. Not because I didn't know. Because I did.

"Yes," I said.

Vance's voice came through low and stripped of everything it had contained on the tarmac. "At that distance?"

"A steady hand outruns a loud mouth."

The line went quiet after that. I stayed behind the rifle and let the quiet sit, and below me Morrison's team held their position in the narrowing shadow and waited for the word. The desert had its own silence, the kind that happens when a great many things have been said already and the only thing left is the one thing that matters.