Chapter 5
"You called that wind reversal off a topo chart twenty hours before you needed it."
"My father used to say that the shot happens the moment you look at the terrain. Everything after that is just execution."
Morrison was quiet for a moment. He had the kind of quiet that wasn't empty, the kind that was actually full of something being considered with care.
"I want you on the next rotation," he said. "Standing assignment. Overwatch."
I looked at him. He was not a man who offered things he didn't mean. He was not offering a courtesy. He was offering exactly what the words said, because he had watched a nineteen-year-old with a worn bolt-action rifle calculate a crosswind reversal off a topographical map in a command tent while his most experienced marksman laughed, and then execute a seven-hundred-meter moving shot in a dust-blown desert at pre-dawn light, and he had decided that the number of combat deployments on a file meant considerably less than he had once believed.
"Yes," I said.
He nodded once, stood, and walked to the edge of the canopy where the desert was turning copper in every direction. He stood there for a moment the way a man stands when he is privately revising something he thought he knew, and then he walked back toward the operations building without looking back.
I closed the latches on the rifle case and set my hand flat on the worn leather top.
Tomorrow there would be another briefing. There would be another topo chart. There would be wind data and elevation calculations and a set of variables that needed removing before they became problems. There would probably be other men who looked at the case and made the same assumption Cole had made on the landing zone.
May you like
That was all right. I had inherited a great deal from my father. His rifle. His way of seeing terrain. His patience with men who looked at a tool and thought they understood everything about the person who carried it.
And his absolute certainty, which I had never once had reason to question, that the shot doesn't lie.
