PART 1

The Arizona sun doesn’t just shine; it hammers you. It beats against the concrete and steel of the testing range like a physical weight, pressing the air out of your lungs until every breath tastes like hot dust and kerosene.

I woke up at 0400, just like always. No alarm. The internal clock doesn’t stop just because you’ve been retired from the front lines for three years. My name is Captain Emily Brooks, and if you look at my file today, you’ll see “Logistics.” You’ll see “Supply Chain Management.” You’ll see a woman who counts bullets rather than firing them.

I brewed my coffee black in a dented steel pot—no sugar, no cream, just rocket fuel—and knocked out fifty push-ups on the icy barracks floor. Then came the ritual. I pulled the battered rifle case from under my bunk. An M2010, officially retired, officially off the books. I broke it down and put it back together in four minutes flat. Click. Slide. Snap. It’s not practice; it’s meditation. It’s the only time my hands stop shaking from the memories I don’t talk about.

By 0600, I was crossing the training yard. I’m not invisible, but I make myself that way. I keep my hair in a tight, severe knot. I wear a uniform with zero unauthorized patches. No “Sniper” tab. No “Ranger” scroll. Just the boring, essential gear of a logistics officer.

“Hey, Coffee Girl! Any donuts today?”

The whistle cut through the morning air. It was a squad of young guys—fresh fades, loud mouths, overflowing with the kind of confidence that hasn’t been tested by enemy fire yet.

“Inventory Princess,” another one sneered, high-fiving his buddy.

I kept walking. My boots crunched the gravel in a steady rhythm. I didn’t turn. I didn’t glare. But I saw them. I saw the hitch in the third guy’s left knee—he’s favoring it, probably an ACL tear waiting to happen. I saw the way the fourth guy was babying his right shoulder. I saw the wind fluttering the flags at exactly 4 miles per hour, shifting East-Northeast. I calculated the distance to the range based on the echo of the practice rounds.

I don’t just see the world; I disassemble it.

I reached the ammo depot and found a rookie panicking. He’d dropped a crate. Thousands of rounds—7.62 and .338 Lapua—spilled across the dirty floor. A nightmare of mixed calibers and grains.

“Damn it,” the kid whispered, looking like he was about to cry.

I dropped to my knees beside him. I didn’t say a word. My hands moved on their own. Brass. Steel. 175 grain. 250 grain. Match grade. Ball. I sorted the chaos into perfect, neat piles. Thirty seconds. The rookie stared at me, his mouth hanging open.

“How did you…?” he stammered. “That was… physics?”

“Physics,” I said simply. I stood up, brushed the dust off my palms, and walked away.

Staff Sergeant Lopez was watching from the doorway. He’s a barrel-chested man, a lifer, the kind of guy who thinks war is a boys’ club. He saw what I did. He saw the speed, the precision. But he didn’t see a soldier. He saw a parlor trick.

Later that morning, I sat in the back of the briefing room. Major Powell was clicking through slides for the “Phantom Program.” They were looking for shooters for an experimental extreme-range trial. 4,000 meters. Two and a half miles.

“Combat billets only,” Powell said, his eyes scanning the room but skipping right over me. “No support officers.”

I nodded. I didn’t fight it. But outside the room, Lopez cornered me.

“Brooks,” he rumbled, stepping into my personal space. “I saw you with the ammo. Good logistics skill. But don’t get any ideas. The 4,000-meter trial isn’t about counting beans. It’s about the killer instinct. You don’t have the stomach for the math when the wind tries to rip the barrel off your shoulder.”

He leaned in close, his voice dripping with condescension. “Leave the impossible to the professionals, Coffee Girl.”

I looked him in the eye. I didn’t blink.

“Sergeant,” I said, my voice calm, cold, and terrifyingly level. “The stomach for the math is the only thing that separates a shooter from a gambler. And my math is perfect.”

I walked away, leaving him staring at my back. He thought he put me in my place. He had no idea he just challenged a ghost.

PART 2: THE GHOST IN THE HEAT

The Arizona desert at noon was not a place for the living. It was a sterile, hostile geography where the sun didn’t just provide light—it prosecuted everything beneath it. The heat rising from the valley floor created a thermal inversion so severe that the distant mountains looked like they were melting, dripping into the horizon like wet oil paint.

General Ryan Carter stood with his boots planted wide on the scorched concrete of the observation deck. He wasn’t sweating, or at least he refused to let it show, but his eyes were narrowed behind his aviators, scanning the “impossible” lane.

Four thousand meters. Two and a half miles.

It wasn’t just a long shot. In the world of precision ballistics, it was a violation of natural law. At that distance, the Coriolis effect—the literal rotation of the planet Earth—became a major variable. The bullet would be in the air so long that the world would turn underneath it, shifting the target right. The humidity pockets would drag the velocity down. The mirage, that shimmering curtain of heat, would displace the optical image of the target by up to four feet, lying to the shooter about where the steel actually sat.

“Next shooter,” Carter barked, his voice dry as sandpaper.

The mood on the firing line had shifted from confident swagger to a sullen, terrified silence. Ten shooters had already gone. Ten of the military’s most lethal operators. Men who had taken heads off insurgents in Fallujah, men who had held ridges in the Hindu Kush against hundreds.

And the desert had humiliated every single one of them.

Captain Diaz was up next. He was the golden boy of the trial. Rumor had it he was being groomed for a cover on Soldier of Fortune magazine. He carried a custom-built .408 CheyTac Intervention, a rifle that cost more than a mid-sized sedan and looked like something ripped out of a science fiction movie. Diaz didn’t just walk to the mat; he prowled. He adjusted his scope caps, wiped a speck of non-existent dust from the objective lens, and lay down with the slow, deliberate movements of a man who knew an audience was watching.

“Wind check,” Diaz snapped at his spotter, a nervous Lieutenant named Parker.

“Wind is… uh…” Parker squinted through his spotting scope, struggling against the violent shimmer of the heat. “I’m reading four miles per hour at the muzzle, full value left to right. But Captain, downrange at the two-mile marker, the flags are dead. And at the target… I think it’s reversing. It looks like a right-to-left push.”

“You think?” Diaz hissed, his cheek pressed against the stock. “I don’t pay you to think, Parker. I pay you to read the damn trace.”

“It’s the mirage, sir. It’s boiling. I can’t get a clean read.”

“Amateurs,” Diaz muttered. He dialed his elevation turret. Click. Click. Click. The sound was sharp in the heavy air. He was confident. He trusted his ballistic computer, a wrist-mounted unit that calculated firing solutions based on barometric pressure and laser rangefinding.

The crowd of spectators—support staff, washed-out candidates, and high-ranking brass—held their breath.

Diaz exhaled. He paused at the bottom of his breath, the “natural respiratory pause” where the body is most stable. His finger, calloused and steady, squeezed the trigger straight back.

BOOM.

The muzzle brake vented gasses sideways, kicking up twin clouds of dust. The rifle roared like a dragon clearing its throat.

Now came the wait. At 4,000 meters, the bullet flight time was an eternity. One second. Two seconds. Three. Four.

The bullet, a 419-grain solid copper projectile, was screaming through the atmosphere. But halfway to the target, it hit a pocket of superheated air rising from a dry riverbed. The air density plummeted. The bullet lost stability, yawing microscopically. Then it hit the crosswind that Parker hadn’t seen—a funnel of air twisting through a canyon gap.

Five seconds.

“Impact,” Parker called out, but his voice was weak.

Everyone looked at the massive digital screen displaying the target feed.

“Miss,” the range officer announced, his voice devoid of sympathy. “Impact detected seventeen feet low and twelve feet left. Round impacted the dirt.”

Seventeen feet. It wasn’t just a miss; it was a different area code.

Diaz stood up, his face flushed a deep, angry crimson. He looked at his rifle as if it had betrayed him, then he turned on Parker. “You gave me bad dope! You didn’t account for the density altitude shift!”

“I gave you what the Kestrel read, sir!” Parker defended himself, stepping back.

“The Kestrel is garbage! The range is rigged!” Diaz shouted toward General Carter. “General, this is a farce. The atmospheric instability is beyond ballistic capability. You’re asking for luck, not skill. A mortar team couldn’t hit that plate today!”

General Carter didn’t move. He simply stared at the target screen. “Luck is a skill, Captain Diaz. If you don’t have it, get off my line.”

Diaz stormed off, throwing his gear bag onto a bench. The morale of the unit broke right there. If Diaz couldn’t do it with a $20,000 rifle, nobody could. The remaining two shooters went through the motions, but they were defeated before they even pulled the trigger. Miss. Miss.

Thirteen shooters. Thirteen failures. The target remained pristine, a mocking white square in the distance, untouched by American lead.

The silence that settled over the range was thick, suffocating. It was the heavy quiet of failure. General Carter looked at the ground, grinding his jaw. He had staked his career on the Phantom Program. He needed a new breed of sniper for the wars of the future—wars fought at distances where the enemy never even heard the shot. But maybe the critics were right. Maybe 4,000 meters was simply a bridge too far for human physiology.

“Pack it up,” Carter whispered to his aide. “Scrub the trial. We look like idiots out here.”

“May I have a turn, sir?”

The voice was soft, cool, and utterly out of place in the testosterone-fueled despair of the firing line. It cut through the heat like a blade of ice.

General Carter turned. The crowd parted.

Walking out from the logistics supply tent was a woman. She was of medium height, her brown hair twisted into a severe, regulation-compliant knot at the base of her neck. Her uniform was clean, pressed, and completely bare of any combat patches. No Ranger tab. No Sapper tab. No Sniper designation. Just the standard-issue insignia of the Logistics Corps.

It was Captain Emily Brooks. The “Coffee Girl.” The “Inventory Princess.”

Lieutenant Parker, still stinging from Diaz’s rebuke, let out a short, incredulous laugh. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Logistics? What are you gonna do, throw a clipboard at it?”

A ripple of laughter spread through the exhausted men. It was a relief, really—a target for their frustration. If they couldn’t hit the target, at least they could mock the non-combatant who thought she could.

“Captain Brooks,” General Carter said, his voice weary. “This is a live fire range for Tier One operators. It’s not a carnival game. Go back to the supply depot.”

Emily didn’t flinch. She didn’t look at the laughing men. She didn’t look at Parker. She kept her eyes locked on General Carter.

“You asked for a shooter who could hit the target, General,” she said. Her voice wasn’t loud, but it had a strange, resonant quality that carried over the wind. “You didn’t specify their MOS. You didn’t specify their gender. You specified results.”

“I specified professionals,” Carter snapped.

“And you just watched thirteen professionals miss by the length of a bus,” Emily countered. “If the result is failure, the pedigree doesn’t matter.”

The silence returned, but this time it was sharp. Dangerous. You didn’t talk to a General like that. Not unless you were crazy or you knew something nobody else did.

Captain Diaz stepped forward, his ego still bruised and looking for a fight. He looked Emily up and down with a sneer that would have withered a lesser soldier.

“Let her shoot, General,” Diaz said, his voice dripping with malice. “Seriously. Let her shoot. She’s right. We all missed. Let’s see the supply clerk show us how it’s done. But here’s the problem, sweetheart…” He stepped into her personal space, towering over her. “You don’t have a rifle. And I’m not letting you touch my gear. It’s tuned for a shooter, not a bean counter.”

Emily looked up at him. Her eyes were a startlingly clear hazel, and for a second, Diaz felt a cold prickle on the back of his neck. There was no fear in those eyes. There was only a flat, terrifying calculation.

“I don’t need your gear, Captain,” Emily said. “But since my M2010 is retired and currently disassembled in my quarters, I will need a weapon. I’ll use the spare pool rifle.”

“The pool rifle?” Parker choked out a laugh. “The beat-up Remington in the shed? The barrel on that thing has shot out three years ago. It’s a jagged pipe.”

“It will suffice,” Emily said.

General Carter studied her. He was a man of instinct, and his instinct was suddenly screaming at him. There was something about her stance. The way her weight was perfectly distributed on the balls of her feet. The way her hands hung loose at her sides, ready but relaxed. It was a posture he hadn’t seen in years. Not since…

He shook the memory away. “Fine,” Carter said. “Get the pool rifle. One round. You miss, and I’m writing you up for conduct unbecoming and wasting government resources. Do you understand, Captain?”

“Perfectly, sir.”

A corporal ran to the shed and came back with a long, black hard case. He opened it on the mat. Inside lay an older model Barrett MRAD. It was dusty. The finish was scratched. It was a weapon that had been abused by dozens of trainees.

Emily knelt beside it.

The transformation was instantaneous. The moment her fingers touched the polymer stock, the “Inventory Princess” vanished. In her place was something ancient and predatory.

She didn’t just pick it up. She flowed into it. She cycled the bolt—clack-clack—listening to the sound of the metal. She pulled the magazine, checking the spring tension. She ran her thumb over the objective lens of the scope, wiping away a smudge of grease.

Then, she reached into her pocket. She didn’t pull out a ballistic computer. She didn’t pull out a laser rangefinder.

She pulled out a small, leather-bound notebook. The spine was cracked, the pages yellowed and swollen with water damage and sweat.

“She’s going analog,” someone whispered. “She’s literally using a diary.”

Emily opened the book. It was filled with dense, frantic handwriting. Tables. Charts. Drawings of mountain ranges. Mathematical formulas that looked less like arithmetic and more like sorcery.

She stood up and closed her eyes.

She turned her face into the wind. The heat beat against her skin. To anyone else, it was just hot air. To Emily, it was data.

Temperature: 104 degrees Fahrenheit at the firing line. Mirage index is severe.

She felt the sweat evaporating on her left cheek faster than her right. Wind is shifting. It’s not a crosswind anymore. It’s a quartering tailwind coming from the 7 o’clock position. That’s going to push the bullet right and lift it. High and right impact if I don’t compensate.

She listened. The faint, rhythmic thump-thump-thump of a heavy generator running at the mess hall, two miles behind her. The sound was traveling faster than it should. Air density is lower than standard atmosphere. Sound moves faster in thin air. The bullet will retain velocity longer. Less drop.

She opened her eyes and looked at the flags. They were lying. The flags at the firing line were limp, suggesting no wind. But 2,000 meters out, a single tumbleweed was rolling slowly across the range. It was moving against the direction of the flags.

Valley shear, she thought. There’s a subterranean wind tunnel effect happening at the midpoint.

“Are you gonna shoot or are you gonna meditate?” Diaz heckled from the bench.

Emily ignored him. She lay down behind the rifle. She settled the stock into her shoulder pocket. She didn’t force the weapon; she let her body become the heavy sandbag that anchored it.

She looked through the scope. The target was a dancing ghost. The mirage was terrible, making the square steel plate look like a bubbling puddle of mercury.

Most snipers try to fight the mirage. They turn down their magnification. They squint. Emily did the opposite. She dialed the magnification up. She wanted to see the boil. She watched the waves of heat rising. They weren’t going straight up; they were canting slightly to the left at the top of the boil.

Wind at the target is pushing left. Hard.

So, the equation was: Tailwind at the shooter (push right) + Valley shear (push unknown) + Target wind (push left).

It was a chaotic, three-dimensional puzzle. A ballistic computer couldn’t solve it because a computer couldn’t “feel” the texture of the air. It assumed the air was a uniform block. It wasn’t. It was a living, breathing ocean.

Emily adjusted the turrets. Click-click-click-click. She dialed 28 mils of elevation. Then she touched the windage turret. She dialed 4 mils left.

“Whoa,” Parker whispered, looking at his spotting scope. “She’s dialing left? The flags are showing a right push. She’s dialing into the wind. She’s gonna miss by a mile.”

“Let her embarrass herself,” Diaz grinned.

Emily settled. Her world narrowed down to a single reticle dot.

Inhale. Expand the chest. Oxygenate the blood. Vision sharpens. Exhale. Halfway out. Pause.

The reticle hovered over the dancing target. But she didn’t aim at the center. She aimed at the top left corner of the white steel, holding off into empty space. She was aiming at nothing, trusting that the invisible hand of physics would push the bullet where it needed to go.

Heartrate. Thump… thump…

She needed to shoot between the beats. The systole and diastole of her own heart vibrated the rifle just enough to throw a shot at this distance.

Thump… (Now).

Her finger applied 2.5 pounds of pressure.

CRACK.

The rifle surged backward. The recoil was heavy, but Emily absorbed it, her body rocking back and resetting instantly so she could see the trace.

“Shot out!” she whispered to herself.

The bullet left the barrel spinning at 200,000 RPM. It was a supersonic drill bit tearing through the sky.

Time slowed down.

In her mind, Emily was riding the bullet.

0 to 1,000 meters: The bullet slashed through the hot air of the firing line. The tailwind gave it a push, lifting it slightly above the calculated trajectory. It was flying high.

1,000 to 2,000 meters: The bullet entered the valley shear. The invisible river of air grabbed it. The projectile shuddered as it crossed the density barrier. It began to drift right, just as she predicted. It was now ten feet off target to the right. If she had aimed center, she would have already missed. But she had aimed left. The wind was pushing it back toward the center line.

2,000 to 3,000 meters: The bullet was slowing down. It was transitioning from supersonic to transonic. This was the “danger zone.” As the bullet slowed past the speed of sound, the shockwave trailing behind it would catch up, destabilizing the flight. Most bullets tumbled here. But Emily’s spin calculation was perfect. The gyroscopic stability held. It wobbled, but it stayed true.

3,000 to 4,000 meters: The final leg. The bullet was dropping like a stone now, falling out of the sky. Gravity was claiming it. It plummeted toward the earth. At the same time, it hit the target wind—that violent leftward push she had seen in the mirage.

The wind slammed into the side of the bullet, shoving it hard to the left.

It was a violent correction. The bullet, which had been drifting right, was now being slapped back toward the middle.

The spectators watched the screen. Nothing happened.

“told you,” Diaz started to say. “It’s a m—”

CLANG.

The sound wasn’t a ting. It was a deep, resonant bell tone that seemed to come from the earth itself. It arrived nearly six seconds after the shot.

On the giant screen, a black mark appeared.

Not on the edge. Not on the corner.

Dead. Center.

The bullet had impacted the “X” ring with such precision that it looked like someone had walked up and drilled a hole with a power tool.

For three seconds, nobody breathed. The silence was absolute. It was a silence so profound that the sound of the wind sounded like a scream.

Lieutenant Parker dropped his spotting scope. It clattered onto the concrete, the glass shattering. He didn’t notice. He was staring at the screen with his mouth hanging open, his face the color of old ash.

“No way,” Diaz whispered, his voice trembling. “No. Way. That’s a glitch. The sensor is broken.”

“Check the backup camera,” General Carter ordered, his voice hoarse.

The screen flickered and switched to a high-speed optical camera view. The footage played back in slow motion.

There was the target. Pristine. Then, a ripple in the air. Then, the copper jacket of the bullet flattening against the steel, exploding into a perfect flower of lead and copper fragments right on the center cross.

It was the most perfect shot General Carter had ever seen in thirty years of service.

Emily Brooks didn’t celebrate. She didn’t pump her fist. She didn’t scream.

She simply opened the bolt of the rifle, ejected the spent brass casing, and caught it in mid-air. The brass was hot, searing her skin, but she held it tight. She placed the empty casing in her pocket, right next to the other one—the silver one she always carried.

She stood up, brushed the dust from her knees, and picked up her logbook.

“Rifle is zeroed, General,” she said calmly, her voice returning to the flat, professional tone of a supply officer. “Though the barrel harmonic is slightly off. I’d recommend replacing the recoil lug.”

She turned to leave.

“Halt!” General Carter shouted.

He didn’t walk toward her; he marched. He stopped three feet in front of her, ignoring the stunned officers around him. He looked at her—really looked at her—for the first time. He looked past the bun, past the logistics insignia, past the tired eyes.

He saw the predator beneath the skin.

“How?” Carter asked. “That shot… the math required… you’d need a supercomputer to calculate the coriolis and the spin drift in real-time. You did it in ten seconds. How?”

“I didn’t calculate it, sir,” Emily said softly. “I felt it.”

“Felt it?”

“The wind isn’t math, sir. It’s fluid dynamics. It’s a language. If you listen, it tells you exactly where to put the bullet.”

Carter narrowed his eyes. A memory was clawing at the back of his brain. A briefing from years ago. A classified after-action report from a disastrous operation in Kandahar. A team pinned down in a valley, saved by a ghost.

“Kandahar,” Carter said. “2016. Operation Silent Guardian.”

Emily flinched. It was microscopic, a tiny tightening of the muscles around her eyes, but Carter saw it.

“I was a Colonel then,” Carter said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “My team was pinned in the Arghandab Valley. We were taking fire from three ridge lines. We were dead. We had said our goodbyes. And then… the heads started popping.”

He stepped closer.

“They dropped one by one. Enemy gunners at 1,800 meters. 2,000 meters. Shots coming from a position that was supposed to be empty. We called in air support, but they said there were no friendlies on the ridge. We thought it was a drone. But drones don’t time their shots between wind gusts.”

Carter’s voice trembled with emotion.

“The Intel boys called the shooter ‘Viper 1.’ They said it was a myth. A Phantom. They never found a shooter. Just a pile of spent brass and a depression in the dirt where someone had lain for three days without moving.”

He pointed a trembling finger at Emily.

“You. You are Viper 1.”

The revelation hit the crowd like a physical blow. Staff Sergeant Lopez, the man who had told her to “stick to counting boxes,” looked like he had been punched in the gut. He looked at the woman he had mocked—the small, quiet supply clerk—and suddenly saw the monster that had saved American lives from the shadows.

Emily didn’t deny it. She couldn’t. The shot she had just taken was her signature. It was undeniable proof.

“I was strictly overwatch, sir,” Emily said, her voice tight. “The mission was classified. My involvement was… erased. To protect the team’s dignity. They didn’t want it on record that they were saved by a female attachment.”

“Dignity?” Carter roared, spinning around to face the stunned platoon of men. “You talk about dignity? You just schooled the ‘best’ shooters in the military with a range loaner rifle! You think I care about the gender of the finger on the trigger?”

He turned back to her, his face softening.

“We looked for you, Captain. After we got out. I wanted to put you in for the Distinguished Service Cross. But you vanished. You buried yourself in Logistics. Why?”

Emily looked down at her boots. The adrenaline of the shot was fading, replaced by the old, familiar ache.

“Because I missed one, sir.”

The silence stretched.

“Corporal Quinn,” she whispered. “The wind shifted. Just like today. A sudden gust from the valley floor. I compensated… but not enough. The bullet hit his vest plate, not his head. He had time to fire an RPG before my second round dropped him. The RPG hit the lead Humvee. We lost Sergeant Reed and Specialist Wong.”

She looked up, and her eyes were wet, but her voice was steel.

“I don’t shoot for trophies, General. I don’t shoot for patches. I shoot to keep people alive. And when I failed, I walked away. I figured if I couldn’t be perfect, I shouldn’t be the one deciding who lives and dies.”

General Carter stood there, stunned by the weight of her confession. He realized then that she hadn’t been hiding because she was weak. She was hiding because she cared too much. She carried the weight of every bullet she had ever fired.

He reached out and took the logbook from her hand. He opened it. He saw the obsession. The dedication. The thousands of hours of calculations.

“You think that was failure?” Carter asked gently. “Captain, in that valley, you saved fourteen men. Fourteen families have fathers today because of you. You focus on the two you lost. I focus on the fourteen who came home.”

He closed the book and handed it back.

“Captain Diaz,” Carter barked, not turning around.

“Sir?” Diaz squeaked.

“Give Captain Brooks your rifle case.”

“Sir?”

“You heard me. You aren’t fit to carry it. That weapon is a precision instrument, and you are a blunt object. Give it to her.”

Diaz, humiliated and pale, walked over and placed the expensive hard case at Emily’s feet. He couldn’t even look her in the eye.

“Captain Brooks,” General Carter said, his voice echoing across the range. “I am reactivating the Phantom designation effective immediately. But it’s not going to be a solo act anymore. I need a commander. I need someone to take these arrogant, blind children,” he gestured to the thirteen men, “and teach them that shooting isn’t about the gun. It’s about the physics. It’s about the discipline. It’s about the cost.”

He extended his hand.

“Will you take the command, Viper 1?”

Emily looked at the rifle case. Then she looked at the men. She saw the fear in their eyes now. But she also saw respect. For the first time in three years, they weren’t looking at a girl. They were looking at a teacher.

She thought of Quinn. She thought of the empty casing in her pocket.

Precision is mercy, she thought. If I teach them, maybe they won’t miss.

She straightened her spine, snapped her heels together, and delivered the sharpest salute the Arizona desert had ever seen.

“I’ll take the command, sir,” Emily said. “But things are going to change. First rule: No electronics. We learn the math first. If the battery dies in a firefight, you don’t die with it.”

Carter smiled. It was a genuine, predatory smile.

“Carry on, Commander.”

As General Carter walked away, Emily turned to the thirteen men. They were terrified.

“Alright,” she said, her voice dropping to a low, dangerous register. “Form up. The 4,000-meter target is still standing. Nobody leaves this range until you hit it. If it takes all night, if it takes all week. You will learn to read the wind, or you will melt in it.”

She picked up the logbook and tapped it against her leg.

“My name is Major Brooks. But out here, you can call me Ma’am. Class is in session.”

The sun beat down, but the heat didn’t seem so oppressive anymore. It just felt like fuel.