A supply clerk fired five rounds that appeared to completely miss the target, but the range supervisor saw something that made her freeze.

They reached the perimeter fence of the quarry communication post two minutes later.

The site consisted of a mobile command trailer, an array of diesel generators, and a massive satellite uplink dish mounted on a hydraulic flatbed trailer. But the area was eerily quiet. The three perimeter guards Claire expected to encounter were slumped over the sandbag barricades—dead.

Each man had been taken down with a single rifle round through the ear canal.

Miller drew her sidearm, backing against the chain-link fence. "Claire... what happened here? Your contractors didn't do this."

Claire knelt beside one of the fallen guards, examining the entrance wound. Her expression grew darker than Miller had ever seen it.

"No," Claire whispered. "Contractors didn't do this. Contractors shoot center-mass. They double-tap."

She touched the edge of the clean puncture wound. "Sub-sonic .300 Winchester Magnum. Fired from over nine hundred yards away. In total darkness. Through a five-knot crosswind."

Claire stood up slowly, her body going rigidly alert. She grabbed Miller and dragged her behind the heavy steel frame of the generator.

"What is it?" Miller hissed.

"We aren't fighting contractors anymore," Claire said, her voice trembling with a rare, terrible emotion—not fear, but recognition. "The Director didn't trust Vance's team to finish me. He brought the anchor."

"The anchor?"

"Operative Zero-One," Claire said. "The original. The one who trained me. He was the prototype for Project Blackwood before the neural mapping was refined. He doesn't miss. Ever."

A single, suppressed bullet passed through the heavy steel casing of the diesel generator, four inches above Claire’s helmet, punching a clean hole through both sides of the three-quarter-inch steel plate before disintegrating against the rock face behind them.

The sound of the shot arrived three seconds later—a dull, distant crack from the highest peak of the northern ridge, over a thousand yards away.

Miller stared at the hole through the solid steel engine block. "He’s shooting through solid machinery?"

"He’s tracking the vibration of our boots through the ground," Claire whispered. "He knows our exact coordinates. If either of us steps into the moonlight for half a second, the round will hit us before the sound ever reaches our ears."

"Then how do we fight him?" Miller asked, terror finally creeping into her voice. "He has the high ground, a heavy-caliber rifle, and the same training as you!"

Claire looked down at the captured M4 carbine in her hands—a short-barreled infantry weapon designed for close-quarters battle, hopelessly outranged by a high-caliber sniper rifle perched a kilometer away on a mountain peak.

"He has the training," Claire murmured, checking her single remaining magazine. "But he’s seventy years old. His heart beats forty beats per minute slower than mine. That means his firing rhythm is predictable."

She looked at Miller. "I need you to draw his fire."

Miller stared at her. "Are you insane? You just said he doesn't miss!"

"He won't shoot to kill you immediately," Claire said. "He knows you’re an amateur. He’ll take your shoulder or your knee to anchor you, forcing me to expose myself to drag you back. That split-second delay between his target acquisition and his trigger pull is three-tenths of a second. That is all the time I have."

Miller swallowed hard, looking at the distant, black mountain peak. "God help me."