Chapter 9 - The Mile-Long Slipstream
A hundred and fifty feet above the desert floor, a scorching twenty-knot crosswind howled across the narrow iron catwalk circling the rusted steel tank of the water tower.
Nora Vance lay flat on the vibrating metal grating, tucking the stock of her heavy mechanical bolt-action rifle against her bruised shoulder while Ryan Cole lay prone six inches to her left with his high-velocity military rifle wedged against the iron railing.
Nearly a full mile away across the shimmering heat mirage of the valley, the glass-walled eighth-floor balcony of the VIP command tower looked no larger than a postage stamp to the naked eye.
Through the thirty-power magnification of Nora's glass scope, however, she could clearly see Agent David Cross standing inside the locked VIP suite behind two inches of tinted hurricane-grade ballistic glass.
On the floor behind Cross lay billionaire Victor Blackthorne bound in zip-ties, while Cross held the silver dead-man's detonator switch clamped tightly in his right fist and watched the Defense Secretary's helicopter descend less than four hundred feet above the range helipad.
Down on the unmanned concrete firing line, the twelve prototype smart-rifles resting on their motorized calibration tripods whirred softly as their hacked servos automatically swiveled upward to lock onto the windshield of the descending helicopter.
"Distance is one thousand six hundred and दस yards, angle of depression is four degrees, and we have a full-value nineteen-mile-per-hour gusting crosswind from nine o'clock," Ryan signed rapidly with one hand against Nora's forearm so she could feel every wind call without taking her eye off the scope.
At a distance of nearly a mile, their bullets would stay in the air for two-point-four full seconds and drop more than sixty feet before reaching the VIP tower, requiring them to aim high above the roof of the building and twelve feet into the wind just to touch the glass.
Even worse, if Ryan's armor-piercing tungsten round shattered the laminated ballistic glass too early, Cross would hear the impact and release the dead-man's switch in his hand, blowing Garrett Locke and hundreds of spectators to pieces in the parking lot below.
And if Nora's lead-core bullet arrived at the glass at the exact same instant as Ryan's, the supersonic shockwaves of the two projectiles would collide in mid-air and knock both bullets wildly off target.
Nora had to pull her trigger exactly zero-point-one-eight seconds after Ryan fired—close enough for her bullet to ride inside the low-pressure vacuum slipstream carved by Ryan's heavier tungsten projectile, punching straight through the dime-sized hole in the shattered glass before a single nerve impulse could travel from Cross's ear to his fingers.
"The helicopter wheels are fifty feet above the pad, and the smart-rifles on the firing line just armed their electronic triggers—we have less than ten seconds," Ryan tapped against her wrist.
Nora closed her eyes for one heartbeat, tuning out the shaking iron catwalk and the roar of the distant helicopter rotors until the entire universe shrank down to the steady pulse beating in her fingertips.
She rested her left thumb lightly against the side of Ryan's trigger guard so she could feel the exact microscopic click of his sear releasing.
"Wait for the wind trough between the flags—three, two, one, mark," Ryan tapped.
Ryan's rifle roared beside her shoulder, kicking back hard against the iron grating as his armor-piercing tungsten bullet screamed out over the valley at three thousand feet per second.
Exactly eighteen-hundredths of a second later—the precise time it took a human eye to blink once—Nora squeezed her trigger.
Across nearly a mile of sun-baked Nevada desert, the two supersonic projectiles arched sixty feet into the sky, curved twelve feet to the right on the desert wind, and dropped down toward the eighth floor of the VIP tower like twin bolts of lightning.
Inside the glass suite, Agent David Cross smiled as the Defense Secretary's helicopter touched its rear wheels to the asphalt pad and his finger tightened on the laptop key to fire the twelve rifles on the range.
Ryan's tungsten penetrator struck the two-inch laminated ballistic glass first, blasting a spiderwebbed, one-inch crater clean through the hurricane-proof pane.
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Before the first shard of glass could even fall half an inch through the air, Nora's three-three-eight bullet screamed straight through the open center of that exact crater without losing a single degree of trajectory.
Her bullet struck the silver dead-man's detonator switch in Cross's hand, vaporizing the internal circuit board into harmless plastic dust while the copper jacket grazed his wrist and slammed the open lid of his satellite laptop straight into the master stadium PA broadcast button on the wall console.
