Marisol
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 18
The briefing came through Whitcomb rather than Lan’s network this time, a sign in itself that whatever was being planned sat above the level of anything Marisol had worked since Gouyan. Two NVA general officers, regimental-level command from two separate divisions operating in the Quảng Nam highlands, were confirmed meeting at a concealed staging area deep in the foothills west of An Hoa — a rare, fleeting convergence of exactly the kind of leadership targets that almost never presented themselves in the same place at the same time.
“Command wants both,” Whitcomb said, laying a hand-annotated aerial photograph across the table, “and no single shooter can take two men who won’t stand within killing range of each other for more than a few seconds at most. So there will be two shooters, on two positions, tasked separately, with no direct coordination between them beyond the timing window and the terrain itself.”
“Who else is working the second position?”
“That’s not your concern, and it isn’t mine either, not really. Someone already operating in the area, already proven, already trusted with exactly this kind of target.” Whitcomb didn’t elaborate further, and Marisol understood, without being told outright, that whoever held the other position would remain as much a stranger to her as she would remain to them — two names on two separate taskings, deliberately kept from ever needing to know the other existed.
The position Lan’s squad found for her sat on a brush-choked slope roughly nine hundred meters from the staging area, high enough to look down into the clearing where the meeting was expected to convene, far enough that the compressed geometry of the terrain made two shooters working the same target impossible without risking each other’s line of fire. Hanh and Mai moved her into position two days ahead of the expected window, and the three of them settled into the same discipline of stillness that had carried Marisol through every watch since she was fifteen years old.
The meeting convened on the second afternoon, later than expected, two staff cars and a scattering of escort troops arriving in stages until the clearing held perhaps a dozen officers gathered loosely around a folding map table.
Marisol found her target through the scope exactly as Whitcomb’s photograph had described him — a heavyset man in a khaki uniform, older than most of the others, deferred to in the small, unconscious ways subordinates deferred to rank even in the open air. She settled into the breath her father had taught her before she could read, and waited for the window Whitcomb’s timing called for.
The first shot came from somewhere else entirely — not her position, not a sound she’d fired herself, a single report rolling across the valley from a ridge she couldn’t place, followed within a half-second by the second general folding sideways at the map table, dead before the men around him understood what had happened to him.
She didn’t allow herself even a flicker of surprise. She fired in the same breath the chaos below her erupted, her own target taking the round center mass as he turned, reflexively, toward the sound of his colleague’s death rather than away from the danger that had actually caused it, and he went down across the folding table in a spray that scattered the map beneath him.
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