She Was Always the Most Dangerous Person in the Room

I fired four more times.

Each one went where I put it.

I lowered the Barrett slightly and turned my head to look at the board. The display showed five impacts clustered in a group that any instructor in the room could measure in millimeters. Harlan was looking at the board with the expression of a man whose model of the world has just been updated without his permission, and the model is resisting the update, and the resistance is visible on his face.

Sergeant Major Briggs, the senior enlisted in the room, walked to the board and stood in front of it for a moment. He had been in Army marksmanship evaluation programs for eighteen years. He did not say anything. He turned back to look at me and then turned back to look at the board again, the way you look at something twice when the second look is for confirmation rather than information.

Then the rear door opened.

He came in from the back entrance, the one that connected to the administrative corridor that most visitors didn't use, and he stopped when the door was still swinging behind him, which told me he had seen me before he had fully entered the room. Colonel David Rayner had twelve years on me and a combat record in two theaters that had produced a set of service ribbons that required careful geometric arrangement on his chest, and he was standing in the doorway of the Hawthorne Ridge main range looking at me like a man who has encountered something he expected to stay in the past and has found it standing in his present with a Barrett M82 in its hands.

He looked at the board.

He looked at me.

"Mercer?" he said.

The name hit the room differently than my name had hit it before, because the name that Harlan had been using all afternoon was Coordinator, and the name that Rayner had just used was a callsign, and the difference between those two things was currently making itself visible on approximately thirty-two faces simultaneously.

I set the Barrett back on the table with the same care I had picked it up with. "Colonel."

Rayner looked at Harlan. He looked at the board. He looked at the grip marks on my jacket where Harlan's hand had adjusted my position in the room earlier. Rayner had an intelligence officer's habit of reading spaces rather than just the people in them, noting the arrangement of bodies and objects and deciding what had produced the current configuration.

His expression settled into something that was not warm but was specific.

"Someone want to explain to me," he said, addressing the room rather than any individual in it, "why I am looking at the tightest five-round group this facility has produced in the last calendar year, fired by a range coordinator, on an inspection-tagged Barrett, while my shooters are at 73 percent?"

Nobody answered.

Rayner looked at Harlan for a long moment. "We need to have a conversation, Major. In my office. Now." He looked at Sergeant Major Briggs. "And I need someone to pull the personnel files for the Range Support office before I get there."

He turned back to me last.

"It's been a while, Mercer," he said.

"Yes, sir."