Chapter 9
I had to aim at a point in the empty sky where the mortar shell wouldn’t arrive for nearly three seconds. I had to shoot at nothingness, trusting that the convergence of two independent ballistic trajectories would occur at the exact millisecond required.
“Twelve seconds,” Jackson barked. “Lead round is entering the mid-tier wind layer. It’s drifting slightly south. Adjust your hold left, Annie! Left two mils!”
I didn’t use the turrets this time. There wasn’t enough time to click the mechanical dials for a moving target. I had to use the fine black grid lines inside the reticle—the Christmas-tree-shaped holdover markers that allowed for instantaneous adjustments on the fly.
I dragged the crosshairs away from the falling black speck, moving the center point of my reticle down and into the empty space below the projectile. The distance between the mortar shell and my point of aim looked immense through the glass. My brain screamed at me that I was missing the target by hundreds of yards. Every survival instinct drilled into a human being told me to pull the rifle back up to track the threat.
I killed the instinct. I forced my mind to trust the numbers.
“Ten seconds,” Jackson whispered, his voice dropping into a low, tense growl. “Line is good. Wind is stable. Take it, kid. Take it now.”
I didn’t wait. My finger applied the final, clean ounce of pressure to the trigger.
BOOM.
The rifle roared, the massive fifty-caliber shockwave blasting across the ridge, kicking up a violent wall of dust that Miller immediately tried to shield with his body. The heavy recoil slammed into my shoulder, but my eye never left the scope. I rode the recoil, tracking the barrel through the movement, my right hand already yanking the bolt handle upward with a raw, desperate speed that tore the skin on my knuckles against the metal receiver.
The smoking brass casing flew outward, hitting Miller’s chest before bouncing into the dirt. I slammed the bolt forward, locking the second round into the chamber before the sound of the first shot had even finished echoing through the canyon.
Through the clearing dust of my muzzle blast, I watched the empty sky inside my reticle.
One second.
Two seconds.
For a terrifying, agonizing moment, nothing happened. The black speck continued its relentless, murderous dive toward the valley floor, getting closer and closer to the fragile concrete bunker where the child was hidden.
And then, at exactly 2.8 seconds after the trigger pull, the sky turned into an inferno.
A brilliant, orange-red explosion erupted in mid-air, nearly a thousand feet above the valley floor. The solid brass fifty-caliber bullet had struck the nose cone of the incoming eighty-one-millimeter mortar shell with a precise, high-velocity impact. The sheer kinetic energy of the collision instantly detonated the shell’s primary explosive charge, creating a massive, expanding cloud of black smoke and white-hot steel fragmentation that ripped through the empty air.
“Holy mother of God,” Miller breathed, his eyes wide as he watched the mid-air detonation through his bare eyes. “She did it. She actually hit it.”
“No time!” Jackson roared, his hands slamming down onto my shoulder to steady his position. “Round two is right behind it! It’s offset to the east! Vector zero-four-five! It’s coming in hotter, Annie! The thermal updraft didn’t catch it!”
My eye was already tracking the sky above the smoke cloud of the first explosion. Through the black residue drifting in the wind, I spotted the second black speck. It was diving faster, having traveled through the cleaner air on the eastern side of the canyon mouth.
The calculation had to be entirely rewritten in my head within a fraction of a second. The lack of thermal resistance meant the shell was dropping at a steeper angle, requiring less horizontal windage lead but a significantly larger vertical drop hold.
“Eight seconds to impact on round two!” Jackson yelled. “Hold lower! Hold at the four-mil hash mark!”
I dragged the rifle barrel down, the heavy steel mechanism groaning against the bipod as I forced it into position. The heat coming off the rifle barrel was beginning to create its own localized mirage, a thin, wavering layer of distorted air rising directly from the metal handguard that threatened to blur my vision.
I squinted through the sweat stinging my right eye. I found the four-mil marker on the vertical reticle line. I aligned it with the projected path of the second speck.
My heart was pounding now, a dangerous, erratic rhythm that threatened to throw off my stability. I forced myself to sink deeper into the earth, letting the heat of the desert ground absorb the tension in my muscles.
I squeezed the trigger.
BOOM.
The second shot tore through the desert air, the concussion so violent it rattled the spotting scope tripod beside us. I didn’t wait to see the result. My hand moved in a blur of muscle memory, throwing the bolt, ejecting the spent casing, and slamming a third round into the chamber.
