Jackson Ford - Random Sh*t Flying Through the Air

Burr turns away from Annie and me, pulling a radio off his belt. “Control, this is Delta One Commanding Officer Kyle Burr. We are on site, awaiting contact. Confirm Deltas Two, Three and Four are in position and timeline is still as discussed, over?”

“Delta One, control, copy that. Mission parameters unchanged – you have a green light. Over.”

“Copy, Delta One out.” He looks to Annie and me, as if noticing us for the first time.

“Your name is Kyle?” I say.

He ignores me. “OK, ladies. Head on over where Okoro and Garcia went, and I’ll just need your passports and credit card details to get you checked in.”

“Uh… yeah, what exactly is the plan here?” I say.

“Don’t worry about it,” Burr says, scanning the edge of the forest. “Just do what I tell you, you’ll be fine, freak show.”

Anger flickers across Annie’s face. I get there first. “Number one,” I tell Burr. “You call me freak show again, and I will find a way to break every finger I missed last time. Number two: you idiots wouldn’t even be here if we hadn’t blown the whistle. So let’s cut the need-to-know shit.”

“Little touchy there,” Burr says, still smiling. But he doesn’t call me freak show , and there’s a very slight wariness to his words.

“So? How about it?” says Annie, spreading her arms.

Burr rolls his shoulders. “If this kid wants to get to the main pressure zone or whatever it is, he’s gotta hike a little way into the park. Not all that far –” he points at the trees, to the northwest “– but still a couple of hours. This camp right here is the easiest way in – or at least, the closest entrance to his target area. It lets him cover the majority of the distance by road, which is what we assume he’s doing, especially if he has a parent with him.”

“If we know what road he’s coming in on, why hit him here?”

“Sure, we’ll just open fire on a public road. Nobody’ll notice.”

Ugh. Fine. “What happens when he arrives?”

“Only one approach.” Burr nods to the road, curving away behind the trees. “Santos’ll give us a heads up if there’s anybody coming. Grayson and De Robillard have the area covered from the trees. The three of us will be in the main building, with Garcia and Okoro as a secondary team.”

Which is when I understand. This isn’t a camp any more.

It’s a sniper’s alley.

“After both of you positively identify the target,” Burr says, yawning. “Okoro executes.”

“So, what,” says Annie. “You want us to be spotters?”

Burr raises an eyebrow. “You? Please. You don’t have the training. No, you and the fr—” He catches my warning look. “You’ll both be alongside the team, with your own scopes. You both give a verbal OK, we’ll do the rest. If we’re wrong, and he hits one of the other locations, then I’ll have a video feed running for you to eyeball. Any questions, class?”

Annie says nothing. Neither do I. I’m still trying to process the insanity of this situation. And trying not to think about what happens if he decides to go somewhere other than the four spots Tanner picked out.

“Good.” Burr nods, eyes back on the forest.

“That wasn’t so tough, was it?” I mutter.

His expression hardens, his eyes cold in the dawn light. “Know why I didn’t want to tell you? Go on. Take a guess.”

“Because you’re a giant tool?”

“Cute. No, I didn’t tell you cos I wanted to keep things as simple as possible. I wanted you to have exactly one thing in your minds at any one time, so your pretty little heads wouldn’t get confused.”

“Oh, fuck y—”

“ Because ,” he says, talking over me, “the entire success of our operation depends on you positively identifying the target. We get exactly one shot at this, and I am not going to let it get screwed up because a couple of civilians got ideas above their station.”

“Like what? What is it you think we’re going to do?”

“Don’t know. That’s the thing about having non-military personnel involved: you haven’t been trained to think under pressure. We have. So how about you let us do the thinking, and you two just do exactly what you’re told?”

“I bet you say that to all the girls.”

His eyes are narrow slits.

“I got family in Seattle, ” he says slowly. “I’ve seen what you can do, moving shit all over the place, so I’m ready to believe there’s a kid out there who can cause earthquakes. I am not about to let what happened in LA happen over here. Now: you got two options. You can either shut the fuck up and follow my orders, or you can shut the fuck up and follow my orders. Are we clear?”

In the silence that follows, a flock of birds rise up from the distant lake, cawing in the still air.

“Good.” He jerks his chin at the camp building. “Get inside.”

I read somewhere once that the life of a soldier is all about long periods of waiting, followed by short bursts of terror.

I don’t know if it’s true for all soldiers, or for all missions. If I asked Burr, he’d probably make a bad joke about how I’d never understand it, on account of not being a real soldier boy. But judging by my limited experience of military operations – i.e. this one – it’s a hundred per cent accurate.

It’s now around 3 p.m. We’ve been in the camp building for hours , doing absolutely zip. The rain outside has stopped, but the air is freezing cold, even inside. I’ve had nothing to eat but a few rock-hard strips of beef jerky, and I am starting to get mighty antsy.

And with every minute that goes by, every moment without sight of a car or a person at the bottom of the drive, my nervousness ratchets up. The little voice in my head gets louder and louder. They got it wrong. He’s not coming. He’s going somewhere else. They got it wrong. He’s not coming .

The inside of the building doubles as a general store, with racks full of camping supplies, sleeping bags, rolled-up foam mattresses and trail mix. There’s a wooden counter, a chalkboard behind it covered with an untidy grid detailing trail conditions. An ancient computer – the kind with a monitor that extends back at least a foot – sits on the counter, a keyboard and well-worn mouse on a pad beside it. I got a look at the pad when I came in – it’s one of those custom printed jobs, with two grinning little girls on a beach somewhere, both wearing floppy hats. Grandkids, maybe. Everything is covered in dust, the place long since shut up for the winter.

Whoever owns the campground had taken in three or four wooden picnic tables from the front deck, stashing them in a corner. Garcia and Okoro wasted no time in dragging them to the windows and setting them up so they could lie prone on top, looking out.

Okoro’s rifle is surprisingly low-tech, with a flimsy grip and a thin barrel that looks as if it would blow away in a stiff breeze. But it’s got a no-fucks-given vibe to it – kind of like Okoro herself. Whoever made it didn’t give a shit about looking cool. All they wanted to do was make it easy to kill someone.

Garcia cracked the window very slightly, letting the barrel poke out. He and Okoro spent a while debating how to disguise what they called their nest, talking in murmurs. They settled on placing the tables at an angle, so they’re exposing as little of themselves as possible while still getting a good line of sight.

Okoro’s had her eyes to the scope for hours, Garcia lying alongside her. Neither of them have moved. Not a muscle. Occasionally, Garcia will mutter something to Okoro about wind direction, or temperature, or MOA and DOPE, whatever those are, which Okoro always acknowledges with a barely audible grunt.