Chapter 1 - The Window Exploded
The first sniper round tore through the operations-center window at 9:14 in the morning.
Glass burst across the tactical maps, coffee cups, and glowing computer screens.
Captain Mara Kincaid dropped before anyone else understood what had happened.
Her shoulder struck the concrete. One gloved hand caught the edge of the operations table while the other reached beneath it.
“Sniper!” someone screamed.
A second round ripped through the room and threw sparks from a radio console. Soldiers dove behind desks. A headset snapped against the floor. Dust and shattered glass filled the fluorescent light.
Major Cal Benton crouched behind an overturned workstation.
“Kincaid, get to the bunker!”
Mara ignored him.
She dragged a long black rifle case from beneath the table.
Benton stared at it.
Until that moment, he had known Mara as the quiet intelligence captain who wrote threat assessments nobody wanted to read. She attended briefings, tracked radio traffic, and spoke in calm sentences about patterns buried inside numbers.
She was not supposed to keep a precision rifle hidden beneath a command table.
Mara opened the case.
Her hands moved with practiced speed.
Bolt.
Magazine.
Scope.
The rifle came together as naturally as if she had touched it the previous morning.
Another shot struck the outer wall.
Mara studied the broken window.
“They’re not here to scare us.”
She crawled through the glass toward the darkest corner of the room and looked through the scope.
A faint flash appeared between rocks along the western ridge.
“I have the first one.”
Her rifle cracked once.
She shifted immediately toward another section of desert.
Then distant engines began growing louder from the east.
Mara’s expression hardened.
“Multiple shooters. East side is the real attack.”
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Benton stared at her.
The analyst he had dismissed was suddenly the only person in the room who understood the battlefield.
