Chapter 4
For the first time that morning, Bishop stopped smiling.
I settled behind the rifle. Cheek to stock. Finger outside the trigger guard. The range went quiet with the specific quality of quietness that belongs to large numbers of people who have decided to watch something fail and are waiting for the moment to begin. I let it all become another kind of wind — the laughter, the three weeks, the photograph, the names — and I found the stillness that lives between the inhale and the exhale.
The tattoo on my left ribs was invisible beneath my shirt. Had been invisible the entire three weeks. A black serpent wrapped around a bullet, mouth open, fangs curved toward the primer. Two letters. Two numbers. BV-12.
Black Viper. Operation Red Line. Twelve names. Twelve coffee cups. Twelve voices on a radio. Twelve families who received folded flags and clean versions of a truth that had never been clean at all. Three years had passed. Time does not bury everything. It only teaches the dead to whisper softer.
The wind flags downrange told me what they had been telling me all morning if you were paying attention, which required being quiet long enough to actually listen.
I touched the trigger.
The shot broke the silence the way shots break silence on long-range training ranges — one clean detonation, and then the specific quality of waiting that follows precision fire.
The scoring officer's call came back flat and measured.
Center mass.
The range did not erupt. It did something different. It went still in the particular way that still happens when forty-three trained observers simultaneously update an assessment they had held with complete confidence for three weeks.
May you like
Bishop's phone was no longer at his side.
Harland was looking at his range log with the expression of a man whose paperwork has just been complicated.
