Chapter 5
He extended his hand. I shook it.
Cole was still standing at the equipment table with the expression of a man recalculating an entire morning in real time. Webb turned to him before he turned to leave.
"Clear the lane for Captain Sawyer," he said. "She's going to demonstrate something for the qualification standard before I take her."
I did not need to demonstrate anything. But I understood why he asked, and I understood what it would mean for the six recruits and four Rangers who had spent the morning watching me get smaller in response to their contempt.
I stepped to the line.
"Then let the math speak," I said.
I will not describe what followed in detail because there is nothing about it that needs description — wind calls, elevation, a hold at fourteen hundred meters that Rodriguez had already calculated for me and confirmed again, this time watching my hands instead of my badge. What I will say is that by the time I stepped back from the line, Cole's face had gone through every stage of a man revising a judgment he had been completely certain of six hours earlier, and Thompson was standing slightly apart from everyone else with the specific stillness of someone who has just had a private suspicion publicly confirmed.
May you like
I flew to Washington two days later under sealed orders, testified in a closed proceeding I am not permitted to describe in detail, and was home in Colorado Springs on the evening of the third day, in time to sit beside Maya in the pediatric oncology waiting room the following morning while she swung her feet against the chair and asked me, for the eleventh time that week, whether I thought her scan would be clean.
It was clean.
