The arrogant captain thought she fired at the wrong plate, until a metallic hit echoed from a target nobody was supposed to be shooting at.

Three thousand miles away, high above the dark, icy waters of the Baltic Sea, a C-17 Globemaster III cut through the heavy cloud deck at thirty thousand feet.

Inside the cargo hold, the red tactical interior lights cast a dim, crimson glare over two rows of webbed seats. The four operators who had escorted Claire off the range at Fort Carson sat in full tactical gear—black load-bearing vests, suppressed carbines secured between their knees, encrypted communication headsets resting around their necks.

At the rear of the hold, near the hydraulic ramp, Claire sat alone.

She had stripped down her rifle once again, inspecting the firing pin under a small, flexible LED light attached to her collar. Her face was completely calm, devoid of fatigue, despite having been awake for twenty-eight hours straight.

One of the operators—a tall, thick-set man with a scarred jaw who went by the callsign Grizzly—unbuckled his harness and walked over, holding two silver foil pouches of field rations.

He dropped one in her lap. "Twenty minutes to drop zone, Director."

"Thank you, Grizzly," Claire said, not looking up from her rifle bolt.

Grizzly leaned against the aluminum hull of the aircraft, watching her steady hands as she reinserted the firing pin into the bolt housing with a smooth, silent twist.

"The guy on Lane 14," Grizzly said softly, his voice barely carrying over the roar of the four massive turbofan engines outside. "He was good. I watched his first string of shots before you took the bench. He had a clean group at a thousand yards."

"He was very precise," Claire agreed smoothly, locking the bolt back into the receiver.

"He's going to spend the rest of his life trying to figure out how you did it," Grizzly remarked, a slight smirk touching his scarred lip. "You broke his head, Director. You took a guy who thought he was the king of the world and showed him he was playing in a sandbox."

Claire stopped her movements. She looked up at Grizzly, her pale green eyes serious, steady, and unblinking.

"I didn't break his head, Grizzly," she said softly. "I saved his life."

Grizzly blinked, his smirk vanishing. "How do you figure that?"

"If Grant Holloway believes he is the best shooter in the world, he will eventually volunteer for an assignment in a real operational theater," Claire explained, her voice carrying that same quiet, terrifying authority that had silenced the gallery at Fort Carson. "He will take a contract in South America, or eastern Europe, or the Straits of Malacca. And he will face an opponent who does not play by range rules. He will die because he thinks his silver trophy and his hand-crafted CheyTac make him invincible."

She picked up her optical sight, checking the alignment of the quick-detach mount.

"Now he knows there are forces in this world that he cannot see, cannot measure, and cannot beat," she concluded, locking the scope into place. "He will stay in Georgia. He will teach young soldiers how to shoot straight at eight hundred yards. He will live to be an old man with grandchildren. That is not a punishment, Grizzly. That is a mercy."

Grizzly stared at her for a long moment, then nodded once, slowly. "Ten minutes to green light, ma'am."

"Understood."

Claire stood up, slipping her arms through the shoulder straps of her high-altitude parachute rig. She pulled her black tactical helmet over her dark hair, pulling the clear visor down over her eyes.

The hydraulic ramp at the rear of the aircraft began to lower with a heavy, mechanical groan. The freezing Baltic air rushed into the warm cargo hold, bringing with it the scent of salt water, clouds, and endless, dark sky.

Claire stepped to the edge of the ramp, looking down into the black abyss six miles below.