Chapter 10
CLANG.
The empty casing hit the concrete pad with a sharp, metallic ring.
High above the valley floor, a second explosion ripped through the sky. A massive flash of fire blew outward, the blast wave dispersing the smoke from the first detonation and sending a shower of harmless, shredded metal fragments tumbling into the deep, rocky ravines far away from the civilians.
“Two down!” Jackson screamed, his voice reaching a hysterical, unbelieving pitch. “Two down! You’re doing it, Annie! You’re tracking them!”
“Round three!” Miller called out, his hands moving with lightning speed as he anticipated my next move, ready to swap the magazine the moment the receiver ran dry. “Give her the coordinates, Jackson!”
“Round three is a problem,” Jackson’s voice suddenly dropped, the excitement vanishing, replaced by a cold, paralyzing terror. “It’s a double-feed anomaly from the platoon line. Rounds three and four were fired in a rapid, overlapping sequence. They’re coming down together, Annie. They’re separated by less than fifty feet of airspace. They’re descending in a staggered line, one right on top of the other.”
My hands froze on the rifle stock for a microsecond.
A double descent.
The TAC-50 was a bolt-action rifle. It was designed for absolute precision at extreme distances, not rapid, semi-automatic fire. The mechanical time required to manually cycle the bolt, re-acquire the target through the high-magnification lens, calculate the new lead, and squeeze the trigger was roughly 1.5 seconds under perfect conditions.
But if two shells were descending together, separated by only fifty feet, the time gap between their impacts would be less than a quarter of a second.
If I shot the first one, the mechanical cycle of the bolt would take too long. By the time the second round was chambered, the final mortar shell would have already passed the intercept window, diving straight past my defensive line to obliterate the child below.
“I can’t cycle fast enough for a staggered pair,” I said, my voice completely flat as I looked through the glass at the two black specks falling in tandem through the upper sky. They looked like two black teeth tearing through the clouds.
“Then what do we do?” Miller asked, his voice cracking. “Annie, look at them. They’re entering the terminal tier. We have six seconds.”
I stared at the two specks. They were aligned along the exact same descent vector, one hovering directly above the other in a vertical column of death.
The upper shell was traveling slightly faster, its aerodynamic wake being cleared by the lead projectile, meaning the distance between them was compressing with every passing millisecond.
A wild, terrifying thought broke through my mind. It was a concept that defied every tactical manual ever written by the United States military. It was something my grandfather had joked about around a campfire when I was a child—a theoretical phenomenon that could only happen under the most absurd, mathematically perfect conditions.
Sympathetic detonation.
If I didn’t aim at the lead round, and if I didn’t aim at the trailing round… if I aimed at the precise, microscopic pocket of high-pressure air directly between them…
The fragmentation pattern from a fifty-caliber match-grade round striking the solid steel casing of the first shell would create a high-velocity cloud of red-hot shrapnel. If that shrapnel cloud expanded with enough force, and if the trailing round was close enough to the explosion, the shockwave and the flying fragments would puncture the thin skin of the second shell, initiating a chain reaction that would detonate both projectiles simultaneously in mid-air.
But the margin for error wasn’t inches. It was millimeters.
If the bullet struck the lead round too early, the trailing round would fly straight through the outer edge of the blast radius, damaged but intact, continuing its descent until it struck the bunker. If the bullet struck the trailing round first, the lead round would already be too far down the trajectory path, escaping the explosion entirely.
“Annie,” Jackson whispered, his voice trembling as he watched the two specks blur together through his optics. “Four seconds. They’re entering the final wind tier. They’re coming down right now.”
“Miller,” I said, my voice dropping into a register that was entirely ancient, entirely steady. “Hold the rifle down. Put your weight on the stock. Don’t let the barrel move a hair after I fire.”
The Master Chief didn’t ask questions. He threw his massive, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound frame over my upper back, his heavy tactical vest pressing hard against my shoulders, his hands locking onto the rear of the stock like a vise. He became a living extension of the earth, anchor-insulating my weapon from the slightest vibration of the wind or my own racing pulse.
I looked through the glass. The two black specks were massive now, growing larger by the millisecond as they tore through the lower atmosphere. The heat waves from the desert floor were screaming through the lens, making the targets look like liquid ink dropping through water.
