Chapter 8
“No,” I said.
The word was quiet, but it had the weight of an anchor.
Jackson turned his head slowly, his eyes wide as he looked down at my prone form. “Annie, what are you talking about? There is nothing we can do. The rounds are in the air.”
“How many?” I asked, my fingers wrapping tightly around the checkered grip of the TAC-50 rifle.
“Four,” Jackson said blankly. “Standard four-round battery spread.”
“Give me the terminal velocity of an eighty-one-millimeter mortar shell at this altitude,” I commanded, my voice flat, devoid of fear, entering that cold, mechanical state of mind my grandfather had beaten into me through years of merciless mountain training.
Jackson blinked, his brain stalling for a fraction of a second before his special operations training kicked back online. “Standard charge four… terminal velocity is roughly two hundred meters per second. Descent angle is approximately seventy degrees. They’re diving fast, Annie. They’re small, matte-black, and aerodynamically stable.”
“And the crosswind at the upper thermal layer?” I asked, my hand moving to the elevation turret, my fingers sensing the distinct, metallic clicks before my brain even processed the numbers.
“The wind is shearing at eight hundred feet,” Jackson reported, his voice rising in pitch as he realized the insane, suicidal calculation I was attempting in my head. “It’s pushing twenty-five knots from the north up there, but it drops to twelve knots near the valley floor. Annie… you can’t be serious. You’re talking about hitting a moving, ballistic missile with a single rifle bullet. The cross-section of a mortar shell is less than four inches wide. It’s traveling at six hundred feet per second. The math is impossible. It has never been done in the history of ballistics.”
“Then we’ll make history,” I said.
I didn’t wait for his permission. I didn’t care about the historical precedents or the statistical probabilities. My grandfather had spent a decade teaching me that a rifle bullet doesn’t care about human doubt. The bullet only obeys the laws of physics. If the muzzle alignment, the velocity, the windage, and the timing were perfectly synchronized, the bullet would occupy the exact same coordinate in three-dimensional space as the incoming shell. It didn’t matter if the target was a stationary piece of steel or a high-explosive projectile diving from the clouds. The math remained the math.
“Jackson, you are my radar,” I said, my voice cutting through the rising panic on the ridge. “I need the descent vector and the vertical lead. Don’t look at the bunker. Look at the sky above the ridge line. Find the black specks.”
Jackson didn’t argue. He dropped back down to his knees, his massive frame pressed tight against my left side, his spotting optics swinging upward into the pale blue expanse of the desert sky.
“Master Chief,” I murmured, my hand steady on the bolt handle. “Hold my spare magazines. When I throw the bolt, I need you to ensure the feed ramp is clear of dust. If this rifle jams once, they die.”
Miller didn’t speak. He simply dropped to the dirt beside my right shoulder, his massive, scarred hands moving with practiced efficiency as he unclipped two fresh five-round magazines from my tactical kit and laid them gently on a clean section of his uniform.
“Sixteen seconds,” Jackson called out, his breathing turning into a rhythmic, measured cadence. “I’ve got visual tracking on the lead round. It’s breaking through the upper haze layer now. Vector is zero-four-zero. It’s coming down along the western trajectory line.”
I shifted my entire body, pivoting my hips in the dirt to realign the axis of my spine with the new targeting solution. The TAC-50 rifle swung upward, the heavy metal barrel pointing toward the empty blue sky above the distant mountain peaks.
Through the high-magnification Nightforce lens, the blue sky wasn’t empty. It was a swirling, turbulent sea of heated air currents. I dialed the magnification down slightly, widening my field of view to catch the movement.
And then I saw it.
A tiny, wicked black speck. It was incredibly small, looking like nothing more than a distant insect or a piece of ash drifting in the wind. But it was moving with a terrifying, linear velocity, cutting through the sky at a steep, downward angle. It was the first high-explosive shell.
To hit a target moving horizontally across your field of view is a standard marksman skill. You calculate the lead, hold the crosshairs ahead of the target, and let it walk into the bullet. But to hit a target diving vertically toward the earth while you are looking upward from a low-angle ridge means calculating a dynamic, three-dimensional intercept vector where both the target and the bullet are changing altitude, velocity, and wind exposure simultaneously.
The bullet from my TAC-50 would take approximately 2.8 seconds to reach the intercept point. During those 2.8 seconds, the mortar shell would travel nearly 1,700 feet downward.
