I've Been Reading This Valley for Forty-One Days

I got the tourniquet on in forty seconds. He was still trying to tell me to leave when I had it tightened and his blood pressure starting to stabilize. I checked his vest, his weapon — an SR-25 that he had managed to hold despite the leg — and then I looked up at the ridge.

The Tooth was visible from this position. I could see the muzzle signature point in my head like a fixed coordinate I had been carrying for twelve days.

Vickers was trying to pull the rifle toward himself when I took it.

Not pulled it away from him. Took it. With the specific grip of someone who knows exactly what they are holding and what it is for. His hand fell open and his eyes changed — the expression of a man revising a category in real time and not fully believing the revision yet.

I moved to the rubble edge, set the SR-25 across a broken section of wall, adjusted my position until the angle matched what I needed, and found my natural point of aim.

Jonah's voice came through the radio behind me. "Doc, can you even make that shot?"

I had the windage in my head from forty-one mornings and forty-one evenings of standing at the compound edge with a notebook. I had the thermal pattern from the afternoon observations. I had the range from the calculation I had done twelve days ago when I first identified the Tooth as a likely firing position and worked the math because that was what my grandfather had taught me to do with information — work the math before you need it, so when you need it the math is already done.

"I've been reading this valley for forty-one days," I said.

The position behind the SR-25 was not the bolt gun I competed with. But eight hundred and forty meters with a supported firing position, known wind, known thermal, and a target who had been shooting at people I had been treating for forty-one days was not a situation where the equipment was the limiting factor.