She Came to Inspect the Tower

It came in on the motor pool, and the blast was large enough that the concussive effect reached the bunker before the sound fully organized itself, and two Humvees became a fireball in the time it took the sound to catch up. Before anyone had found cover, the ridge opened up — heavy machine-gun fire, disciplined and coordinated, the kind that tells you the people doing it have done it before and have been patient about when to start.

Reed was screaming for sectors. Miller was screaming for air support. The RPG crossed the sky from the northeast, which was not the angle anyone was covering at that moment, and hit the observation tower at the seam I had been documenting.

The tower came down the way I had calculated it would come down — the northeast column failing first, the structure rotating around that failure point, the load redistributing catastrophically in the direction of the courtyard rather than away from it. Corporal Ford, who had been in the nest, went down in the wreckage. His M2010 sniper rifle came off the platform and bounced once on the broken slab at the base and landed in the open courtyard, in the kill zone between the rubble pile and the far wall.

I was already watching this from the bunker door.

Miller took a round through the shoulder at that moment — a secondary shooter, not the ridge, a flanking position I had flagged as a possibility in the same report that had been initialed without action. Reed got him behind the concrete pillar on the east side of the courtyard and was applying pressure with one hand and keying his radio with the other, asking for support that was still twenty minutes out by anyone's honest estimate.

Davies was behind the sandbags near the gate, firing at targets he could partially see, his magazine running low, doing everything correctly and doing it in a situation where correct was not going to be enough.

I took off my glasses.

I put them in my vest pocket.

I stood up.

The slouch came off my spine the way a coat comes off when you hang it up — completely, immediately, without ceremony. My eyes moved over the courtyard, over the rubble, over the fallen tower and the fallen rifle and the kill zone and the ridgeline position I had ranged three days ago on a scrap of field paper. I calculated the crossing distance to the rifle against the rate of fire currently coming from the northern ridge against the specific timing gap in the suppression pattern I had been observing for the last ninety seconds.

There was a window.