Chapter 3
Lieutenant Rodriguez ran the numbers on his own equipment and went quiet.
"She's within point one mil," he said.
That was the first real crack in the morning's architecture. The second came when Specialist Chen pulled up my contractor profile on his tablet and found a clearance marker behind it that nobody on that range had the authority to open. Staff Sergeant Thompson, gray at the temples, the kind of operator who has seen enough to recognize what he is looking at even when he cannot name it, stepped closer and said, low, that he had seen that marker exactly three times in twenty-two years of service.
I kept sorting ammunition. Busy hands. People mistake restraint for weakness more often than they should.
Then the convoy arrived.
Three black Suburbans in perfect formation, and General Marcus Webb stepped out with the kind of presence that pulls an entire range tighter on a single invisible string. I turned my shoulder. I tried to make myself smaller, the way I had not needed to try in eleven years.
It did not work.
Webb stopped at the equipment table so abruptly his aide nearly collided with him. His eyes had found the dime-sized pin on my collar, half hidden under the contractor badge lanyard — a skull, crosshairs through one eye socket, twelve small stars around the rim. The color left his face.
"That pin," he said.
The entire range turned toward me.
May you like
Cole's mouth opened and produced nothing.
Webb took one step closer. "That's a Ghost 7 pin." The flags snapped hard enough in the wind to sound like applause, and nobody moved, and nobody breathed, and then Webb looked at me with the specific directness of a man who has spent thirty years giving orders and is, for the first time that morning, asking a genuine question.
