Chapter 11
Not a single tremor. Not a single twitch.
I pulled the heavy rifle deeply into my shoulder, locking the stock against my collarbone.
“Target window opening in thirty seconds,” Cross hissed, his breathing rapid and shallow. “I have thermals on the concrete wall. I can see a heat signature moving down the internal hallway.”
He was tracking the body heat of the guard through the concrete using the massive infrared spotting scope.
“He’s approaching the shaft,” Cross whispered urgently. “Pacing is steady. He’s walking slow. He will be in the open space of the ventilation shaft in fifteen seconds.”
I slowed my breathing.
Inhale. Exhale.
I stared through the scope. My crosshairs were aiming at blank concrete, four mils left of the tiny black square.
“Ten seconds.”
I felt a sudden, sharp panic in my chest.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a tiny red light begin to flash furiously on the battery pack attached to my jacket.
The cold. The extreme, brutal cold had destroyed the lithium cells faster than I had calculated.
The battery was dying.
“Five seconds,” Cross whispered. “He’s entering the kill zone.”
The red light blinked faster, turning into a solid, glaring red beam.
The low hum of the hydraulics in my brace began to stutter and whine, struggling to maintain pressure. I could feel a faint vibration returning to my fingertips. The nerve damage was fighting against the failing machine, desperate to take control again.
I had seconds before the brace completely lost power. If it died before I pulled the trigger, my hand would violently jerk the rifle, sending the bullet wildly into the mountainside.
“Three…” Cross counted down.
A shadow moved inside the tiny black square of the ventilation shaft.
“Two…”
The hum of the brace died to a sickening mechanical groan.
“One…”
I saw the side of a man’s head pass into the tiny window.
The battery light went completely dark.
I stopped breathing.
The silence following the death of the battery was louder than the roar of the C-17 engines. It was a vacuum that sucked the air right out of my lungs.
I felt the mechanical brace go limp. It was no longer a miracle of engineering; it was six pounds of dead titanium and carbon fiber acting as a lead weight on my forearm.
And then, the tremor returned.
It didn’t come back slowly. It hit me like a physical blow. My right hand, which a second ago had been as steady as a surgeon’s, began to dance with a violent, erratic energy. My index finger spasmed against the trigger.
“Jocelyn! The battery!” Cross’s voice was a frantic hiss in my ear. “You’re losing him! He’s in the window! Take the shot!”
“I can’t!” I wanted to scream, but the words caught in my throat.
Through the scope, the world was a blur of gray and black. The ventilation shaft was dancing, leaping around the reticle like a living thing. The guard—the man with the keys, the man who stood between Elara and a firing squad—was midway through the opening.
One second left. Maybe less.
In that heartbeat, the cold of the Carpathian Mountains vanished. The snow beneath me, the freezing wind, the pressure of the mission—it all dissolved into a haze of white dust and the smell of burning concrete.
I was back in Syria.
I felt the searing heat of the burning beam against my palms. I felt the tendons in my wrists snapping. I heard Amira’s muffled whimpers under the rubble.
I didn’t save her with a machine, a voice whispered in the deepest part of my soul. I saved her with my bare hands.
The doctors said my nerves were dead. They said the signals from my brain were scrambled, lost in the static of my trauma.
But I realized, in that moment of absolute desperation, that the tremor wasn’t just damage. It was energy. It was a fire that had been burning inside me for three years, looking for an exit.
I stopped fighting the shake.
Instead of trying to crush the tremor with my left hand, I leaned into it. I let the vibration travel through my entire body. I synchronized my breathing not with my heart, but with the rhythm of the spasm.
I became the tremor.
The rifle barrel was still moving, vibrating at a high frequency, but it was no longer erratic. It was a pattern. A cycle.
I watched the crosshairs sweep past the ventilation shaft. Left to right. Left to right.
I didn’t wait for the brace to save me. I didn’t wait for a miracle.
I timed the trigger pull to the apex of the vibration.
Now.
The Barrett screamed.
The muzzle blast was so violent in the sub-zero air that it created a localized fog of ice crystals. The recoil slammed into my deadened shoulder, the metal brace biting into my skin, but I didn’t feel the pain.
