Chapter 6
"I knew someone was coming," I said. "The range was too clean this morning. Too organized. Someone had been asking questions they didn't want me to hear about."
He looked at me with the expression of a man updating an assessment that was already high.
"And you set up that position anyway."
"I set up the position I would always set up," I said. "The only difference was that today someone was watching to see whether I would."
The record was unsealed the following Tuesday. The unsealing produced a document that required a separate clearance tier to read in full, which meant that most of the people who would have objected to its contents were not cleared to access the objection's basis, which was the specific structural protection that the classification had been designed to provide.
Holt was transferred to an administrative advisory role before the week was out. The transfer was described, in the language that these transfers are always described in, as a planned rotation that had been in process for some time. The timing was what it was.
Pierce requested a reassignment to a different qualification track the same week. The request was approved.
Garrison signed my next cycle evaluation personally and filed it with a recommendation category that had not been used in the unit's records for seven years.
I found out about the recommendation through the same channels I had found out about most things in my career — not through anyone telling me, but through the system showing me, because the system shows you things when you know where to look and have been looking long enough to understand what you are seeing.
I read the recommendation once. Filed it. Went back to the range.
There was a wind condition I had been working on for three weeks that I had not yet fully solved. It appeared at specific elevation angles in late afternoon, when the thermal gradient off the desert floor interacted with the descending air off the ridge in a way that produced a drift pattern that no existing ballistic table addressed correctly.
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I had a theory about the correction.
The desert was the only place to test it.
