Cold Blooded Killer
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 13
Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, February 2014
She heard it on the radio in the FOB.
Paterson’s voice, flat and controlled the way it got when things were bad and he was managing them. Team pinned down on the eastern approach, three clicks out. Designated sniper down. Single shot, no warning, no muzzle flash anyone had located. They hadn’t moved in eleven minutes.
She was already pulling on her kit before the transmission finished.
Nobody told her to go. Nobody had clearance to tell her to go — this wasn’t a tasked mission, wasn’t a briefed operation, wasn’t anything that would appear in any document afterward. She picked up the CheyTac and the night optics and went out the back of the FOB into the Afghan dark alone.
No radio. No comms. Ghost mode.
Just her and three clicks of broken ground between her and whatever was on that eastern ridge.
She took the western ridgeline instead.
It added distance and time and gave her the angle she needed — the entire eastern ridge laid out below and across from her position, readable from elevation the way a firing line was readable from the scorer’s table. She went to ground in a natural depression near the crest and set up the CheyTac and settled behind the night optics and waited.
The eastern ridge was dark and still.
She swept it slowly. Section by section, the way she’d been taught and the way she’d refined beyond teaching. Rock formations. Shadow patterns. The negative space between boulders where a patient man with a rifle would choose to be.
She found three candidate positions and watched all three simultaneously the way a sniper watches everything — not focusing, just receiving, letting the picture build.
Eleven minutes.
Fourteen.
Seventeen.
At nineteen minutes and forty seconds the shooter moved.
Eighteen inches to the right. She almost missed it — almost, which meant she didn’t. The quarter moonlight found his barrel in the movement, the thinnest possible suggestion of reflected light, gone before she’d consciously registered it. But she’d registered it.
She studied the position. Let her eyes work the shadow until the shadow gave her something. The line of a right shoulder. The geometry of a man lying prone behind a weapon on a cliff face three clicks from where Brad Simmons had died with a single shot through his temple.
She ranged him.
1,411 meters.
Fourteen hundred and eleven meters in quarter moonlight on a twenty-five degree downward angle with a barrel reflection and a shoulder shadow as her only references.
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