TEN

MOUNT RUSHMORE NATIONAL MEMORIAL

BLACK HILLS REGION, SOUTH DAKOTA

 

 

 

 

 

USING THE SPOTTING SCOPE, the man scanned the trail-way and each of the scenic outlooks in turn. Nothing: a handful of couples and children, in who he had no interest.

Trained to observe not what he should see but what he shouldn’t—a glint of sunlight off metal, a splash of color, a shift in shadow, a rapid movement at the corner of the eye—the man scanned the length of The Presidential Trail running along the base of the mountain. He paid special attention to a patch of Ponderosa Pine to the west rising vertically from the path along a massive stone formation whose mottled surface resembled the skin of a dead elephant, near to the exit at the Heritage Village.

Here, he spotted a chipmunk and a red squirrel foraging along the pathway. Under cover of brush, a trio of mule deer grazed, scratching the stony soil for wildflowers, shrubs, and tree bark.

Just as he was planning to reconsider his options, the man reacquired the target through a gap in the trees. He watched as the dirty-blonde-hair girl with the athletic physique skittered cat-like up a near-vertical path of loose stone, visible one moment, gone the next.

Eventually, she came to a place where trees meet rock at the base of the three-hundred-foot tall stone monolith. Here, standing fully exposed, the target paused—either to rest or to calibrate her options. He didn’t know which.

The man reached for the CheyTac M300 he’d set down beside him. Shouldering the weapon, the man chambered a round. He sighted the target in the cross-hairs of the Leupold Mark 4. The man inhaled and exhaled, breathing evenly. Continuing to breathe normally, the man relaxed. He steadied his nerve.

As was his custom, he would press the trigger after the second release of breath, for him a five-second window of calm occurring between respiratory cycles. Known as a natural respiratory pause, for many shooters it’s considered The Window.

But, unexpectedly, before he could release, the target was on the move scampering along a stony ledge of stair-like rock leading from the base of the monolith to its peak. It was an unmarked, untended, potentially hazardous trail.

Stealthy, moving like an Afghan insurgent in Tora Bora, the girl climbed.

The man smiled, impressed.