Chapter 4
Then he reached across and grabbed the rifle case from her other hand, popped the latches with the practiced ease of someone who has handled equipment cases for years, pulled the bolt-action rifle out, and dropped it. Not lost his grip. Not stumbled. Dropped it. Deliberately. Into the dirt. In front of her.
"Take that back to the museum, sweetheart," he said. "Men are dying out here."
The rifle hit the dirt and lay there.
The laughter reached its peak.
And Ava Cross looked down at the rifle.
She looked at it for exactly the amount of time it took to register where it had landed and what condition it was in. Then she looked at Morrow.
No shouting. No flinch. No performance of humiliation in any direction.
She bent and closed her hand around the stock and lifted the rifle out of the dirt in one clean, controlled motion — not fast, not slow, with the precision of someone picking up something that has always belonged in their hands and was only briefly somewhere else. She straightened, and as she straightened she brushed the dirt from the stock with two careful fingers, working from the chamber toward the muzzle the way you work when you actually know what you are doing rather than when you are trying to look like you know.
The laughter began dying. Not all at once. One voice at a time, like lights going out on a string.
She held the rifle at her side and looked at Morrow, and whatever Morrow had expected to find on her face when he finally saw it clearly — embarrassment, or anger, or the particular collapse that public humiliation produces in people who have not survived enough of it to develop a different response — was not there. What was there was nothing that required a response from him, and the absence of it made him less certain of himself than a direct challenge would have.
He said, again, louder: "Take that back to the museum, sweetheart."
Ava's eyes moved from Morrow.
Past me.
Toward the interior of the base.
Up toward the ridge line.
"Watchtower Three," she said.
I looked at her. "What?"
"Watchtower Three has the best sight lines."
"You've been here thirty seconds."
"I studied the satellite imagery on the way in."
The remaining laughter died. The last two voices stopped mid-sound, not because they made a decision to stop, but because the thing she had just said had reached them before the decision process could.
May you like
She continued, still looking past me toward the ridge line, the rifle in her right hand and her voice at the same quiet register it had used to say her name.
"Watchtower Three has the longest clear engagement corridor on three sides. The fourth side has a blind spot that can be partially compensated for from the second platform level if the base mount is angled correctly. The tower structure shows compromised support on the east load-bearing element — I could see it from the gate — but it will hold weight if that weight is distributed correctly."
