Chapter 4 - Eight Rounds
Sara had eight rounds and a bad angle. The cracked scope cut a thin distortion across the lower right of her view, which would have ruined a shooter who needed equipment to tell the truth perfectly. Sara did not. Her father had made her shoot through rain, heat shimmer, scratched glass, dim light, and one memorable Texas afternoon when he covered half her optic and told her, “The world won’t always give you the whole picture. Learn to read what’s left.”
The first hostile silhouette moved too quickly below the ridge, not exposing enough for a clean center shot, so Sara did not waste the round. She waited. Bishop’s breathing rasped beside her. The Black Hawk was gone. Reaper was gone. The team that had called her Doc was gone. Sara let all of that become background.
A muzzle flash blinked near a broken archway. Sara fired once toward the position, controlled and professional, forcing the threat behind stone without showing any impact. Dust jumped far downrange. The second figure shifted to flank, and Sara fired again, not at the man, but at the wall beside him, collapsing his confidence and stopping the movement. That was the work now: not movie heroics, not rage, but geometry. Keep Bishop alive. Keep the ridge closed. Make every enemy below believe the hill held more guns than it did.
By the fourth shot, the compound slowed. By the sixth, the voices below grew uncertain. By the eighth, the last round in the magazine cracked through the morning and turned the lower approach silent enough for Sara to hear Bishop whisper her name.
“You hit them?”
“I stopped them.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“That’s the answer you’re getting.”
May you like
Bishop laughed once, then groaned from the pain. Sara checked his bandage with one hand and scanned the ridge with the other. Off in the distance, rotor noise returned.
This time, the Black Hawk was coming back.
