She Aimed for the Gap No One Else Could See

Hayes pinned me to the eastern ridge forty meters from the main entry as Master Sergeant Miller took his team to the gate. "Stay here and look pretty with your cannon, Vance. You're too clumsy for the courtyard."

I did not respond to that either. I found my position on the ridge, settled the bipod, and began reading the compound through my thermal optics while the breach team moved into place.

I saw the DShK 12.7mm heavy machine gun emplacement inside the reinforced concrete bunker eighteen seconds before Miller hit the gate.

Eighteen seconds is a very long time and also not enough time to change the course of what was already in motion. I keyed the comms and reported the emplacement and the bunker position and the concrete construction and heard Hayes acknowledge with the flat tone of a man who had already decided his plan was correct and was filing incoming information as a lower priority.

Miller hit the gate.

The compound lit up.

High-intensity floods killed every set of night-vision goggles in the courtyard simultaneously — a countermeasure that required intelligence and preparation, which told me in real time that the compound had been informed of our timing, which was a problem I filed behind the more immediate problem of the DShK rounds tearing through stone and steel and Master Sergeant Miller going down in the first six seconds.

Hayes's voice on the comms was the voice of a man whose plan has just been revised by reality. "We're pinned. Miller is hit. Air support is jammed — anti-air batteries are active. Vance, fall back. That's an order, get out of—"

Through my thermal optics, four hundred yards away, I could see exactly what Hayes's team could not see from inside the courtyard: the bunker's construction, the gun slit's dimensions, and the geometry of what was possible from elevation at distance. The 5.56 rounds from the courtyard team's short-barreled rifles were not going to touch that concrete. I was four hundred yards away with fourteen pounds of equipment Hayes had called a museum piece.

I dropped prone. I wedged the bipod into the rocks. The wind was crossing at twenty knots from the southwest and I dialed the correction and found my breathing and put the crosshairs on the gun slit, which was approximately the width of a mailbox slot at four hundred yards through heat shimmer and wind, and I understood why Hayes had thought it was theoretical.