Chapter 8
"Crosswind at nine knots, gusting. Thermal interference from the approach valley. Moving targets, two of them. Eleven-minute window before the team lost their covered position." I said it the way I had said it to the investigation board, factually, in the sequence it had happened. "I used a rock outcropping upwind as a thermal indicator. Timed the gust pattern for four cycles. Adjusted for the moving component. Fired on the third second of the fourth cycle."
"The distance."
"Eight hundred and forty meters."
"With that wind."
"With that wind."
Rourke was quiet again. Around us, the range had begun the slow process of returning to its ordinary functions, men moving equipment, officers redistributing themselves across the firing line. Harlan had walked toward the administration building with the gait of a man who has not yet accepted where he is going. The range technician was speaking to one of Kincaid's aides with the specific cooperation of someone who has decided that cooperation is his best available option.
"The report was right," Rourke said.
"Yes."
"Then why the doubt."
I looked at the flags moving in the desert wind. At the rocky rise beyond the firing lanes where the brass disc was still swinging in its patient arc. At the line of men who had come to watch a legend get disproved and were now watching something else entirely, something they had not anticipated, which was the specific and clarifying moment when a thing that has been doubted reveals that the doubt was never about the evidence.
"Because the doubt was never about the shot," I said.
May you like
Rourke nodded once. It was the nod of a man who has heard the correct answer to a question he has been carrying for some time.
The formal review convened three days later in a closed room with Kincaid at the head of the table and a JAG officer taking notes and Rourke sitting at the far end with the file open in front of him. Harlan was not at the table. Harlan was in a different kind of meeting, one that had started the morning of the range and would continue for some weeks after.
