Chapter 5
He looked at what he was holding. Then he looked at me. Then he looked at the ridge lines again, at the forty positions, at Garrison standing on the observation platform with his coffee thermos and his clipboard and the expression of a man who has been waiting for exactly this moment without ever telegraphing that he was waiting for it.
Something moved through Holt's face that I did not see often on faces like his. Not shame exactly — men who have operated the way he has operated do not arrive at shame quickly or directly. It was something more practical. Recognition. The specific recognition of a man who has just understood that the room he thought he owned has been owned by something else the entire time, and that the something else is documented, witnessed, and patient.
"Clear the range," he said. He was not looking at me anymore. He was looking at the ground beside my feet, at the torn paper, at the bullet hole sitting in the sand between the two halves. "I want her record unsealed."
Pierce did not speak.
Garrison walked off the observation platform without hurrying.
The forty operators on the ridge lines did not move from their positions. They did not need to. They had said what they needed to say with the sound of forty bolts in the Mojave morning, and the sound had done everything a statement needed to do — clearly, precisely, and without a single wasted syllable.
I slung my rifle and picked up my kit.
The walk back to the equipment station took three minutes. The desert floor was exactly what it had always been — hard, unforgiving, specific about the truth in ways that the platform had not been for the preceding two hours. I passed the range table where Pierce had been standing, and he was no longer standing there, and the space where he had been standing was just space again.
Garrison fell into step beside me when I reached the staging area.
He did not say anything for a long moment.
Then he said, "How long do you think it takes to unseal a record?"
"Less time than it took to seal it," I said.
He considered this.
"That's probably right." He looked back at Holt, who was still standing near the torn paper, talking to no one, working through something privately and visibly. "He's going to want a full debrief."
"He can have one."
Garrison stopped walking. I turned.
May you like
"You knew he was coming," he said. Not a question.
"I knew someone was coming," I said.
