Chapter 8 - The Wolf in the Trench
Nora lunged across the wooden floor of the calibration shed, snatched her high-powered spotting scope from the workbench, and pressed the rubber eyepiece to her face to look back through the rear window toward the thousand-yard target pit.
Two hundred yards away, down inside the sunken concrete trench where she had left Garrett Locke to guard the wounded federal official, the scene had changed completely.
Agent David Cross was standing upright in the center of the concrete pit without a single sign of pain or blood loss, calmly peeling a ruptured theatrical blood bladder off his undamaged ballistic vest.
At his feet lay Garrett Locke with a bleeding gash across his forehead, while Cross held the chrome nine-millimeter pistol Nora had given Garrett aimed squarely at the fallen champion's chest.
Even worse, Cross had pried open the main underground fiber-optic junction box in the wall of the trench and plugged a miniature silver transmitter pulled from the red-sealed manila folder directly into the championship's master telemetry cable.
"The red-sealed folder was a Trojan horse," Ryan said beside her shoulder, speaking clearly as Nora read his lips in the reflection of the window glass.
"The range's automated security firewall is physically air-gapped from outside satellite hacking, so the only way to upload the Project Viper assassination code into the twelve finalists' rifles on the firing line was to plug it manually into the hardwired junction box inside the thousand-yard pit."
"Cross knew that Victor Blackthorne had betrayed him to keep the whole four-billion-dollar contract for himself, so Cross used you as his bodyguard to fight through Blackthorne's guards and deliver him straight to the cable junction!"
Through the spotting scope, Nora watched in cold fury as Cross locked a heavy metal target-calibration collar lined with remote blasting caps around Garrett Locke's neck, hauled the dazed champion out of the trench into an armored steel range-maintenance truck, and sped up the dirt service road toward the high VIP tower.
Two seconds later, Nora's speech-to-text tablet chimed with an incoming broadcast transmitted over the range's internal digital network.
Across the glowing screen scrolled Agent David Cross's words: "Thank you for clearing the tunnel for me, Captain Vance—I knew the legendary Ghost Zero would never leave a wounded man behind."
"In exactly three minutes, the Defense Secretary's Marine helicopter will touch down on the VIP pad, and the twelve smart-rifles on the firing line will automatically fire on the aircraft while my buyers short-sell Blackthorne Defense stock for nine hundred million dollars."
"And just to make sure you do not try to shoot the main antenna dish off the VIP tower to cut my signal, I have wired the dead-man's switch in my hand directly to the explosive collar around Garrett Locke's neck inside the crowded evacuee holding pen."
Nora looked through her scope toward the main parking lot behind the bleachers, where five thousand terrified spectators were packed tightly against the chain-link perimeter gates—and saw that Cross had abandoned the locked armored truck right in the middle of the crowd with Garrett strapped to the steering wheel.
If Nora shot the main relay antenna or killed Cross before he disarmed the switch, his relaxing hand would release the dead-man's trigger and detonate twenty pounds of high explosives right in the middle of five thousand innocent civilians and Garrett Locke.
And in the eastern sky above the Nevada mountain peaks, the heavy chopping blades of the Defense Secretary's olive-drab Marine helicopter had just appeared on the horizon, descending straight toward the kill zone on the firing line.
"There is no way to reach the VIP tower on foot in three minutes, and Cross is standing behind two-inch hurricane-proof ballistic glass on the eighth-floor observation balcony," Ryan said grimly, checking his watch as the countdown passed one hundred and sixty seconds.
Nora slowly lowered the spotting scope and looked up at the rusted, one-hundred-and-fifty-foot steel desert water tower standing on the rocky ridge directly behind the calibration shed.
"How many rounds of armor-piercing tungsten ammunition do you have left for your rifle, Ryan," Nora asked softly.
"Three rounds," Ryan answered, his eyes widening as he followed her gaze up the vertical iron ladder of the water tower, which stood a staggering one thousand six hundred yards—nearly a full mile—from the glass balcony of the VIP tower.
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"At one thousand six hundred yards through two inches of laminated ballistic glass, the glass will deflect any bullet on earth by at least four inches and slow it down before it can break the detonator in Cross's hand," Ryan warned.
"A single bullet will deflect," Nora replied, slinging her heavy three-three-eight rifle over her back and grabbing the bottom rung of the iron ladder, "which is why you and I are going to put two bullets through the exact same spot at the exact same fifth of a second."
