Chapter 3
Cole looked at Morrison with an expression I had seen on men's faces before. The expression that said: you cannot seriously be entertaining this.
Morrison stepped closer to my notebook and looked at the page without speaking. The calculations were tight and clean because loose calculations got people killed and I had understood that since I was eleven years old, watching my father adjust for a variable that everyone else at the range had written off as acceptable drift.
"What is your conclusion?" Morrison said.
"The overwatch position should move approximately three hundred meters northeast. At the marked position I can compensate for the reversal, but I'd rather remove the variable than overcome it."
Nobody spoke for a long stretch.
"I'll take it under advisement," Morrison said.
That night, he moved the position three hundred meters northeast.
He found me at the edge of the canopy after the sun dropped low enough for the desert to stop shimmering. He said he'd updated the overwatch coordinates. I thanked him. He told me not to thank him yet, then asked where I'd learned to read terrain the way I did.
My father, I told him. Competitive long-range, mostly. Some contract work. He taught me that most people look at where they're shooting. He taught me to look at everything in between.
Morrison nodded. Smart man, he said.
I said yes. He was.
May you like
The past tense sat there between us and he was careful enough not to touch it. I respected him for that.
The mission was pre-dawn. I was in position on the northeast ridge before first light, the rifle case open beside me, the old bolt-action seated against my shoulder the way it had been a thousand times before, the way it still sometimes felt like my father's hand guiding it. The scope found the compound in the gray half-dark before sunrise. Keller was in the lower holding room, exactly where intelligence had marked him. The team moved through the drainage channel approach on Morrison's signal, and for forty-one minutes I lay flat against the ridge and watched the world through a circle of magnified glass, breathing slow, counting variables the way my father had taught me to count them, not quickly but completely.
