Chapter 4: 0521

Kirsti Duncan—twenty-two years old, Private First Class, sniper, the girl they laughed at, the girl they sent to the quiet corner, the girl they called sweetheart and princess and crier—put her eye back to the optic. She laid her cheek against the stock. She let her breath out halfway and held. She let her heart beat steady between beats. She moved her finger from the receiver to the trigger.

A thousand four hundred and thirty meters away, on a ridge her commanders had sworn was empty, the man on the machine gun took his first breath of what he did not know was his last morning on Earth.

The shot left the barrel at 0521 hours, and it sounded like God snapping a bone.

Kirsti didn’t hear her own rifle the way a bystander would have heard it. She heard it through her bones, through her jaw, through the small percussion in her chest where her heart was doing its job. Her eyes stayed on the optic. The gunner—the calm young man who had just settled his shoulder against the grips—stopped being calm. Stopped being young. Stopped being a man at all. The shape in her glass went slack and slid sideways off the seat, and the machine gun, unmanned, pointed at the sky.

For one full second, the entire ridge did nothing.

Then the world came apart.

Kirsti worked the bolt. The brass case flicked out and bounced off the sandbag. She loaded the next round. A second man was already climbing onto the technical, scrambling for the grips, his face twisted with a kind of terror Kirsti recognized—because she had just felt it herself. She breathed out. She held.

0521. Eighteen seconds. The second man went down.

Behind her, the base was waking up. She could hear the alarm building—a slow mechanical groan rising into a wail. Boots on hard ground. Men shouting. Captain Kowalski’s voice somewhere in the distance, sharp with sleep and confusion, bellowing her name.

“Duncan! Duncan! What in the name of God are you doing?”

The radio in her hut was screaming. She ignored it. She had one job, and the job was the ridge, and every second she did her job was a second Robert Evans stayed alive.

She worked the bolt. She ranged the third man, who had thrown himself flat behind the wheel of the technical, trying to find the grips by feel while keeping his head below the chassis. She waited. She was not going to waste a round on a man she couldn’t see.

He showed her the top of his head. 0521. Forty seconds. Three rounds, three men.

The ridge went quiet in a way that was not natural. The rest of the squad up there had done the math. They’d watched three of their own die in under twenty-five seconds, and they had not seen a muzzle flash—because the rising sun was behind her and the flash was eaten by the glare. They didn’t know where she was. They didn’t know how many of her there were.

For one more second, she owned them.

Then the door of her hut banged open so hard it nearly came off the hinges.

“Duncan! Get your hands off that weapon. On the ground—right now.”

Sergeant Elias Davies was standing in the doorway in his undershirt and trousers, boots half-laced, sidearm pointed at her head. His hand was shaking. Kirsti did not turn around. Her eye was on the optic.