Chapter 10 - THE UNTOUCHED AUTHORITY
The empty steel bolt locked open to the rear with a final, sharp PING, an empty brass casing clattering onto the hot concrete apron, rolling until it stopped against the toe of Caleb Rourke’s polished boot.
A thin wisp of blue-gray smoke curled out from the rifle’s open chamber, carrying the rich, sulfurous scent of burned gunpowder into the quiet air.
Elena Ward stood motionless on the firing line for three seconds, her breathing steady, her eyes tracking the distant steel plates that were still swaying violently on their chains three hundred meters away.
Slowly, she lowered the weapon to her side.
She turned around to face the assembly of men standing in the shadow of the briefing room overhang.
Not a single man moved. Caleb Rourke was trembling visibly, his jaw slacked in total, catastrophic ruin, his eyes darting between the smoking barrel in her hands and the distant targets he couldn't even clearly resolve without his eight-hundred-dollar tactical scope. Dylan Hayes had his head bowed, staring at the floorboards, utterly humiliated by the magnitude of what he had witnessed.
Colonel Marcus Vance stood at the edge of the shadow, his eyes glossy with unshed tears, looking at Elena as if he were looking at the living embodiment of an army that modern men had long forgotten how to be.
Elena walked slowly across the concrete, her bare feet making no sound.
She stopped in front of Lieutenant Caleb Rourke.
She looked down at the table where the modern, expensive, carbon-fiber rifles sat resting on their pristine cleaning mats. Then, she raised her left hand, holding the scarred, fifty-year-old wooden rifle out toward him.
"You can tell supply they didn't screw up my order, Lieutenant," Elena said, her voice dropping into a low, terrifying whisper that belonged in an operational field.
She set the battered rifle gently down across the center of the table, right next to the cracked optic she had removed.
May you like
"They just gave it to the only person in this room who knows how to shoot."
Elena turned her back on him, walking calmly toward the lockers to retrieve her gear, leaving the silence of the North Carolina range to swallow the broken pride of the men she had left behind.
