Chapter 6 - The One-Thousand-Yard Trench
The steel wheels of the motorized maintenance cart screamed along the iron center rail at fifty miles an hour, eating up the four hundred yards of narrow concrete tunnel in less than sixteen seconds.
Strapped to the front bumper of the hurtling cart was a twenty-pound block of military C4 explosive rigged to an infrared proximity sensor that would vaporize the entire five-hundred-yard section of the tunnel the moment it came within ten feet of a human body.
There were no side doors, no alcoves deep enough to shield them from the blast wave in the confined concrete tube, and no time to run back to the firing line.
"Get down on one knee right now and do not breathe," Nora snapped, shoving Agent Cross flat against the floor while pushing Garrett Locke down onto one knee in the center of the dimly lit corridor.
Before Garrett could even ask what she was doing, Nora whipped her heavy bolt-action rifle off her shoulder and slammed the steel barrel straight across the top of Garrett's padded shooting vest like a human bipod.
Three hundred yards down the pitch-black tunnel, the only visible target on the hurtling bomb cart was a tiny blinking red LED light no larger than a matchhead attached to the brass detonator relay cap on top of the C4 block.
Because the cart was bouncing violently along the iron rail at seventy feet per second in near-total darkness, no optical scope on earth could track the tiny red light fast enough by sight alone.
Nora did not look through the glass lens of her scope at all.
Instead, she pressed the bare fingertips of her left hand flat against the cold concrete wall of the tunnel, closing her eyes for half a second as her bone-conduction implants translated the rhythmic steel-on-steel vibration of the rail joints into a precise mental map of the cart's bounce cycle.
Every forty feet, the cart's front wheel hit a welded rail seam and jumped three-quarters of an inch upward for a tenth of a second.
One hundred yards away, the blinding headlight on the front of the cart illuminated the terror on Garrett's face as the roaring electric motor filled the narrow tunnel.
Fifty yards away, the proximity sensor began its high-pitched three-second arming whine.
Right as the front wheels struck the welded rail seam forty yards in front of Garrett's boots, Nora opened her eyes and pulled the trigger.
The deafening muzzle flash lit the concrete tube like a bolt of lightning as her heavy three-three-eight lead core sliced through the dark, grazed the top edge of the steel bumper, and sheared the brass detonator relay cap clean off the C4 brick without igniting the stable plastic explosive.
A split second later, the disarmed maintenance cart slammed into the heavy steel hydraulic buffer block at the five-hundred-yard junction, showering all three of them in harmless sparks and crumpled aluminum before grinding to a dead halt.
Garrett let out a ragged, trembling breath and stared back at Nora as if she weren't entirely human.
"Nobody on earth can make a shot like that in the dark," Garrett whispered, helping her lift Agent Cross to his feet as they scrambled past the smoking wreckage of the cart and sprinted the remaining distance to the end of the tunnel.
Two minutes later, Nora pushed open the iron ceiling grate at the far end of the conduit and hauled Cross and Garrett up into the sunken, six-foot-deep concrete trench of the thousand-yard target pit.
Above the lip of the concrete berm, the blinding Nevada desert stretched a full kilometer back toward the distant stadium bleachers, which were now completely empty as private security helicopters circled overhead.
Suddenly, the massive stadium loudspeaker system boomed across the desert valley with Victor Blackthorne's amplified voice.
"Attention all tactical test personnel on the firing line, armed domestic insurgents have seized the thousand-yard target trench and taken a federal agent hostage—open fire with fifty-caliber armor-piercing rounds on Target Pit Twelve immediately!"
An instant later, six heavy fifty-caliber sniper rifles on the distant firing line roared in unison, and fist-sized chunks of concrete exploded off the upper lip of the trench wall inches above Nora's head, pinning them flat in the dirt at the bottom of the pit.
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Right as Nora reached for her rifle to return fire, a small black tactical radio clipped inside the maintenance box on the trench wall crackled to life with a text-to-display alert from the tin calibration shed two hundred yards behind the desert berm.
Nora read the incoming message on the tiny screen and felt the blood freeze solid in her veins: "Leave the fed in the pit and come to the calibration shed alone in sixty seconds, Nora, or your little brother Toby dies right here."
