Two time zones to the west of DC, Mary Potter whispered, “Dana?”
Hearing his wife’s voice in his earbud, Potter jerked awake, saw the hillside and the valley floor below in a pale gray light. A rooster crowed.
“Shit,” he said. “Time is it?”
“Time to get ready,” she said. “There’s lights on in the hacienda.”
Twenty minutes later, the winter sun crested a hillside to the east and behind them. Warmth swept in over them and continued across the valley to the terrace they’d watched two days before.
It was broad daylight before the first person appeared, a young man wearing a sweater and apron who laid out dining service at the four tables on the terrace. He also switched on a tall portable heater. They could see the steam rising off the top of it through their scopes.
“Let’s go hot,” Potter said. He extracted from his pocket three 6.5mm Creedmoor cartridges that he fed into the magazine of his rifle and a fourth that he seated in the chamber before closing the bolt and engaging the safe.
Only then did he reach in his pack for the signal jammer. The device was anodized black, about the size of a paperback, and made of some light alloy. Potter didn’t know where the jammer had come from or how it worked, and he didn’t much care. It had been with their briefing package in the ranch house when they arrived.
He set it in front and to the left of the Ozonics, where his forward hand could reach it in a hurry. Eight minutes later, the first to breakfast, a polished, fit blonde in her late thirties, came out onto the terrace wearing dark sunglasses and canvas bird-hunting gear that she made appear stylish.
Potter reached into a side pants pocket, retrieved his cell phone, and thumbed it on. No service. Excellent.
“Here comes my baby,” Mary sang softly. “Here he comes now.”
Her target, a man in his sixties wearing canvas pants, a vest, and a ball cap, walked to the now-seated woman, engaged in some pleasantries with her, and then moved on to a table closer to the heater. He settled into a chair facing the length of the valley.
“Green,” she said. “Five hundred and nine meters. The right ethmoid bone.”
The ethmoid bone. The perfect aiming point if you meant to shatter a skull and drop a man in his tracks. Or in his chair, as the case may be.
“Adjust your turret four clicks and stay right there,” Potter said. “No drift in this tailwind.”
They waited fifteen minutes while five more people, all middle- to late-middle-aged men, came slowly streaming onto the terrace for breakfast. Two sat with the polished woman. Two sat by themselves. One sat to the left of Mary’s target.
He was peach-skinned, heavyset, and gregarious. Mary’s target seemed to enjoy the man’s presence and threw back his head to laugh twice.
Then a tall woman in her forties, big-boned with short dark hair, appeared. She was wearing a green down vest over her canvas jacket.
“That’s the missus,” Mary said. “You’re on deck.”