My Father Taught Me to Look at Everything In Between

When the secondary threat appeared on the eastern exterior wall, moving fast and angular toward the extraction point, I had already calculated the shot. Wind behavior, elevation, the light angle, the distance. I had run the numbers twice in my head before the crosshair settled.

One exhale.

One trigger pull.

The threat went down. Keller came out on Morrison's arm thirty seconds later. The extraction window held.

It was not until we were back at the staging canopy, gear stripped, Keller in medical with a pulse and all of his names, that the conversation happened. I had not been expecting it. I had not been angling for it. I was breaking down the rifle at the folding table when I heard Cole's boots cross the concrete behind me, and then he was there, leaning on the table edge, arms folded, looking at the case with his jaw working through something he hadn't decided how to release yet.

I kept working.

"You moved the overwatch position," he said.

"Morrison moved it. I suggested it."

He was quiet long enough that I looked up. His face was different from the landing zone. Not soft, Cole Vance did not do soft, but the arrogance had gone somewhere else. What was left underneath looked a great deal like a man accounting for a miscalculation.

"The shot on the eastern wall," he said.

I waited.

"Seven hundred meters. Moving target. That wind reversal would have pushed the marked position three to four inches of uncompensated drift at that range."

"Closer to four," I said. "At the speed he was moving, four inches doesn't secure the extraction."

Cole looked at the rifle case. Then at me. Then at the case again.

"That thing," he said, "is not a toy."

"No," I said. "It's my father's."

He straightened up from the table, gave the case one more look, and walked away without adding anything to that. I watched him go. I did not need an apology from Cole Vance and I was not going to wait for one. The shot had spoken in the only language the landing zone ever actually listened to, which was the language of result.

Morrison came to find me an hour later, when the canopy had cleared out and the desert had gone the particular shade of copper it turned just before dark. He sat on the crate across from me and looked at the rifle case for a moment before he said anything.