Chapter 7 - The Spotter's Secret
Concrete dust rained down into the thousand-yard trench as another volley of heavy fifty-caliber rounds from the distant firing line chewed into the top of the protective sandbag berm.
Nora stared at the glowing text screen of the tactical radio, where a low-resolution camera attachment showed her fourteen-year-old deaf brother, Toby, sitting bound to a wooden chair inside the rusted tin calibration shed two hundred yards behind the target pit.
Toby had been born profoundly deaf, and paying for his specialized residential school in Reno under a fake name was the only reason Nora had risked coming out of hiding to collect the fifty-thousand-dollar cash prize at this championship.
"Stay down behind the concrete foundation wall and keep pressure on his shoulder," Nora ordered Garrett Locke, handing the frightened champion the chrome pistol she had taken from him in the tunnel before crawling toward the dry concrete drainage culvert at the rear of the trench.
Keeping her body flat beneath the murderous stream of fifty-caliber sniper fire tearing across the desert brush overhead, Nora crawled two hundred yards through the dusty culvert until she reached the rear blind spot of the old tin calibration shed.
Inside the shed, through a crack in the weathered siding, she saw her former military spotter, Ryan Cole, standing beside a wooden workbench with a suppressed rifle pointed toward the front door while Toby sat tied to a chair in the corner.
If she kicked open the wooden door, Ryan would have a clear line of fire before she could ever raise her weapon.
Looking down at the dry desert weeds beside the shed foundation, Nora spotted a shattered concave glass parabolic mirror that had fallen off an old solar telemetry battery panel.
Picking up the curved piece of mirror glass with her left hand, she angled it carefully toward the blazing afternoon Nevada sun and bounced a blinding, concentrated beam of white light straight through the dusty side window directly into Ryan's eyes.
As Ryan cursed and threw his left forearm up to shield his dazzled vision from the sudden glare, Nora vaulted silently onto the low tin roof via a stacked pile of wooden target frames, kicked open the rusted skylight louver, and dropped straight down onto his back.
They crashed violently onto the wooden floorboards in a blur of military close-quarters combat.
Ryan tried to roll and bring the barrel of his carbine around, but Nora trapped his wrist against the floor with her knee, wrenched his backup pistol from his holster, and jammed the cold steel edge of her combat blade squarely against his carotid artery.
"Tell me why you sold out our unit in Syria and touched my little brother before I cut your throat, Ryan," Nora hissed, reading his lips with murderous fury burning in her eyes.
Pinned beneath her knee with the razor-sharp steel biting into his skin, Ryan did not struggle or reach for a weapon; instead, he shifted his eyes desperately toward the corner of the shed.
"Look at your brother's hands right now, Nora," Ryan mouthed clearly.
Keeping the knife pressed tight against Ryan's neck, Nora glanced sideways at fourteen-year-old Toby, who had slipped his small wrists out of the loosely draped rope on the chair and was signing frantically in American Sign Language.
Nora read her little brother's flying fingers, and her breath caught in her throat.
"Do not hurt him, Nora—he did not kidnap me, he saved me from four men with guns who broke into my dorm room in Reno this morning and brought me here to hide me," Toby signed rapidly.
Stunned, Nora looked back down at Ryan, who slowly used two fingers of his free hand to peel back the Velcro cuff of his tactical jacket, revealing a government-issue Defense Intelligence Agency cryptographic transponder strapped to his scarred wrist.
"I did not betray our unit in Syria, Nora—I spent eleven months in a Syrian black-site prison after the blast before the Defense Intelligence Agency pulled me out to hunt the traitor in Washington who leaked our coordinates," Ryan mouthed clearly so she could read every word.
"Wait—if you are working undercover for Military Intelligence, why did you shoot Agent David Cross on the referee podium in Chapter Two," Nora demanded, easing the blade back half an inch.
"Because I wasn't trying to kill him—I put a non-lethal round through the satellite transmitter hidden inside his right shoulder pad before he could trigger the range lockdown," Ryan said urgently, grabbing her wrist as she helped him sit up.
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"David Cross is not an investigator for the Pentagon Inspector General, Nora—Cross is the former Deputy Director of Blackthorne's covert weapons division, and he is the traitor who ordered the artillery strike on our unit in Syria!"
"Cross staged his own shooting today so you would rescue him, carry his locked biometric briefcase past the range's electronic sensors into the underground tunnel, and bring him straight to the master fiber-optic hub in the thousand-yard trench!"
