Chapter 2
Behind me, the SEALs had gone quiet, though I could still hear the faint sound of their footsteps as they gathered around to watch the show. They were waiting for the failure. They were waiting for the massive recoil of the .50 caliber round to slam into my shoulder, bruise my collarbone, and force me to give up.
“Hey Jackson,” one of the men whispered loudly. “Ten bucks says she misses the entire mountain.”
“No bet,” Jackson replied smoothly. “The wind just picked up to twenty-five knots. She doesn’t even know how to calculate the spin drift at this range, let alone the windage.”
I ignored them. I opened the bolt of the TAC-50, sliding a single, heavy match-grade round into the chamber. The metallic clink of the bolt closing sounded incredibly loud in the heavy desert air. I placed my cheek firmly against the adjustable riser on the stock, aligning my right eye perfectly with the glass of the high-end Nightforce scope.
The world immediately changed. The vast desert vanished, replaced by a circular field of view dominated by a complex grid of fine black lines—the reticle. I dialed the magnification up, searching through the heavy, shimmering heat waves that distorted the landscape.
It was exactly as Miller had warned. The air looked like liquid glass, boiling and swirling over the valley floor. The target, a white steel plate shaped like a human torso, was barely visible through the distortion. It appeared to be dancing, shifting left and right as the thermal currents rose from the sun-baked rocks.
To hit a target under these conditions, you cannot aim at what your eyes are seeing. You have to calculate the physical reality of the bullet’s flight path through the air. At eighteen hundred yards, the bullet would take nearly three full seconds to reach the destination. During those three seconds, the wind would push it, gravity would pull it down in a massive, curving arc, and even the rotation of the earth itself would gently nudge the trajectory.
I began the mental math, my brain working through the variables that had been drilled into me through thousands of hours of practice. The wind was blowing from my nine o’clock position, but halfway down the valley, near a deep dry creek bed, the dust patterns showed that the wind was actually swirling back in the opposite direction.
“She’s taking too long,” one of the operators muttered behind me. “She’s freezing up.”
“Let her be,” Miller said, his voice entirely neutral now. “She requested the lane. She gets her time.”
I adjusted the elevation turret on top of the scope, feeling the distinct, mechanical clicks beneath my fingers. Click. Click. Click. Then I adjusted the windage turret, holding a specific offset in my mind based on the movement of the sagebrush in the mid-range valley.
I took a deep breath, filling my lungs completely, and then let half of it out. I held the remaining air in my chest, allowing my body to become entirely still. I closed my eyes for a fraction of a second to reset my vision, then opened them again. The reticle was steady, resting on a point several feet above and to the left of where the actual target appeared to be through the mirage.
My finger gently contacted the curved metal of the trigger. I didn’t pull it. I simply applied a slow, steady increase in pressure, letting the weapon surprise me when it finally fired.
BOOM.
The roar of the rifle was deafening, a massive shockwave of sound that tore through the air and pressed hard against my chest. The muzzle brake redirected the burning gasses to the sides, kicking up a massive cloud of dust and small rocks that completely obscured my vision for a split second. The heavy recoil slammed into my right shoulder, but because my body was perfectly aligned, the force travelled straight down my spine and into the earth, keeping the rifle perfectly on target.
I immediately cycled the bolt, ejecting the smoking brass casing and loading a second round into the chamber without ever taking my eye away from the scope.
One second passed. Two seconds passed.
Behind me, Miller was staring through his high-powered spotting scope. The rest of the SEAL team stood completely motionless, their eyes fixed on the distant mountain side.
Then, a faint, metallic sound echoed back across the mile of open desert.
CLANG.
“Holy shit,” Miller breathed, his body freezing in place behind the spotting scope. “Dead center. She hit the exact center of the plate.”
The silence that followed was absolute. The whispering stopped. The smirks vanished. I could hear the wind whistling through the dry brush, but from the elite operators behind me, there wasn’t a single sound. Jackson slowly lowered his arms, his eyes wide as he stared at my small form lying in the dirt.
