Chapter 2
For twelve days, I had tracked intermittent movement on the far ridge.
It appeared in the same three-hour window, always when the haze was worst. Always near a broken rock formation I had named the Tooth, which jutted from the ridge at a position that gave a clean line onto the patrol route's natural funnel at approximately eight hundred and forty meters. I had calculated the range from the firebase's elevation data. I had estimated the wind correction. I had noted the elevation differential and the likely shooting position.
I had filed the observation through the intelligence sergeant, Galloway, who had entered it as a supplemental note from a non-tactical source.
A polite way of saying: the bandage girl saw something, but no one important saw it too.
Jonah Pike was the first person at Anchor who seemed to understand the difference between stillness and absence. He watched without staring. He noticed where I sat in a room. He had glanced once at my wind notebook before I closed it, and he had not pretended he hadn't looked.
He found me one afternoon near the compound edge where the ground dropped into the valley.
"How long have you been shooting?" he asked.
I told him since I was seven. He didn't smirk. He asked who had taught me, and I told him about Walter, about the .22 at seven and the steel at two hundred by ten and the positional work by twelve, and about the five-hundred-yard groups at sixteen when grown men beside me blamed wind they hadn't read. I told him about the nine hundred and fifty meters before deployment.
His head turned slowly. "Does Vickers know that?"
"I tried to tell him."
"And?"
May you like
"He told me to stay in my lane."
Jonah looked out across the valley. Below, the patrol route crossed the exposed section near the natural funnel between the two rock formations, briefly open before climbing back toward the firebase. The afternoon haze was rising off the southern slope.
