Chapter 4
Reed was behind the pillar with Miller when he saw me step out of the bunker and cross the courtyard at a sprint, low, moving in the specific way that people move when they have been trained to move through fire rather than away from it. He shouted "Get down!" with the full force of a man who has been ordering people around under fire for a decade.
I did not turn my head.
The bullets came in behind me — close enough that the sound of them was different from the sound of bullets passing at distance, a different register, a snap rather than a report. I dropped into the slide my body had been waiting to execute for three days, let the momentum carry me, and my hands closed around the stock of the M2010 before the slide was fully complete. My thumb cycled the bolt. A spent casing spun out from the ejection port and hit the dirt. A clean round chambered.
I pressed myself behind a slab of broken concrete at the base of the ruined tower and adjusted the bipod with two movements — the same two movements, in the same sequence, that I had made on training rifles for nine years and on operational rifles for six. My eye went to the scope.
The northern ridge at 1,100 meters. The position I had ranged. The muzzle flash pattern I had logged for seventy-two hours. The shooter's support structure, the rock formation on the left side of the nest that was load-bearing in the wrong direction if you knew what you were looking at from the right angle.
I knew what I was looking at.
Davies was two meters to my left when he heard my breathing slow. He was not looking for anything in particular when it slowed — he was looking for cover, for a target, for a way through the next thirty seconds — and the slowing of it reached him through some mechanism that did not require conscious attention. He looked at me.
Later he would describe it as watching someone become a different person.
What he was actually watching was a person stop performing a different person.
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I exhaled once. The wind was moving at approximately six knots from the southwest, consistent with what it had been doing all morning, consistent with my logged readings. The elevation correction for 1,100 meters with this rifle in these conditions was a number I had already entered into my scope two nights ago when I had come to the courtyard at 0200 and ranged the position in the dark and reset the optics with the same care I had given to every document on the clipboard that Reed had dismissed.
"Now we work," I said.
