Chapter 2
Harlan's laugh was the laugh of a man who believes laughter settles questions. "With what? Her clipboard?"
I looked past him at the maintenance rack against the far wall. The Barrett M82 sitting in its cradle had been tagged for inspection — it was old, worn at every edge, the bipod scuffed and the receiver showing the particular patina of a weapon that had been through many hands over many years and had been retired from primary use while it still had more to say. Most of the room had already discounted it. A museum piece. A prop. The kind of thing you keep around because you haven't gotten around to disposing of it.
I pointed at it.
"Can I borrow your rifle for a minute?"
Nobody laughed.
The shift in the room happened before anyone moved. It happened the way shifts happen in environments built around the reading of other people — quickly, collectively, with the specific quality of thirty-two trained individuals arriving at the same revised assessment simultaneously. Harlan's smile left his face on a delay, the way smiles leave faces when the decision to remove them comes from somewhere slower than the smile itself.
He looked at the Barrett. He looked at me. He gestured toward the rack with the expansive confidence of a man who is certain he is about to be proven right.
I walked to the rack and took the Barrett M82 off its cradle in one clean motion, the weight arriving in my hands exactly where I had placed it a hundred times in rooms that are not on any public map, the rifle coming free with the familiar authority of a thing that has always belonged in my hands whether or not anyone in the room was aware of that fact. I turned with the weight of it, letting the rifle settle into position against my body the way it settled, and the sound of it coming down was the sound that ended all remaining conversation in the room.
I carried the Barrett to the range table.
Harlan had not spoken. Neither had anyone else.
I settled into position — not dropping into it, settling, the way you settle into something that is not foreign to your body — and found the grip with my right hand and aligned the bipod and placed my cheek against the stock at the precise angle that the geometry of the system and the specific angle of my face had always produced together. The old Barrett smelled like gun oil and years and the particular metallic cold of a weapon that has been sitting in an indoor rack but was built to be used outdoors. Through the scope, the downrange target system resolved into the clarity that a good scope provides to a person who knows how to let it do its work.
I breathed once. I found the stillness that lives between the inhale and the exhale, the specific quarter-second of biological quiet that my grandfather had first pointed out to me when I was eleven years old on his property in eastern Montana, standing behind a rifle considerably smaller than this one, learning that patience and marksmanship were the same discipline applied to different surfaces.
I fired.
The sound of a Barrett M82 in an enclosed facility is a statement rather than a noise. It arrived and departed and the downrange target board updated before anyone had finished processing the concussive exit of the round from the building.
May you like
The hit was center mass. Not approximately. Precisely.
The silence that followed was a different kind of silence from the silence before the shot. The first silence had been the silence of people waiting to see something fail. The second was the silence of people recalibrating.
