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while to relocate. The original indicator had been a jiggle of movement on a crest line way off, where movement shouldn’t have been. Sliding the rifle to his shoulder, popping the lens caps, he settled into a steady prone as he cantilevered over the hump of the crest line, poking the rifle barrel through some vegetation for clearer vision. He found his spotweld, which yielded his perfect eye relief, and his fingers flew to the focus ring of the crude Chinese tube. He checked to makesure the sun had no angle to bounce off his lens in give-away reflection, played with the focus, twisting this way and that, wishing he had Marine Corps–issue 10× magnification instead of ChiCom 4×, cursed the elaborate reticle with its goofy ranging system that blocked out too many details, and reoriented on the suspect area, letting the substandard lens of the Chinese optics resolve into finite detail all that could be resolved.
    Nothing.
    I know I saw something.
    He decided to give it a few seconds.
I would have seen them on a crest. Now they’re behind the crest. They’ll be on top of another crest and—
    He watched them come over, emerging headfirst, then disappearing as they scattered down the slope of the rill they’d just crossed. Khaki clad, bloused boots, burnooses obscuring their features, bearded men with necks wrapped in shemaghs in the green-black pattern so beloved by many. Bandoliers loaded with mags crisscrossed on their chests. Wait, one guy wore a baseball cap, khaki or sage, and he was the one with the heavy .50 Barrett, that monster rifle just at the limits of luggability, a twenty-five-pound ordeal as awkward as an iron cash register, and good for one thing only, nailing Johnny Pashtun at a long way out. The others were AK-ed up, standard for this part of the world, and one had a couple of RPGs over his back.
    It was the guy in the ball cap who gave it away, even to the 4× of the Chinese scope. Yes, he was bearded, yes, he was nut brown from the cruel Afghan sun, yes, he moved with the wiry, wary grace of the Pathan warrior who’d haunted these climes for a thousand years, mixing it up with Alexander’s spear chuckers, assorted Hindu invaders, and then troops from a Victoria, a Mikhail, a George W., and now a Barack. Yes to all that, and yes to one other thing as well: he was white.

UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM
    ZABUL PROVINCE
    SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN
    2035 HOURS
    We don’t have much light left, Mick,” said Tony Z.
    “Hey, I don’t want to hear that. What I want to hear is, Mick, let’s push harder, goddamnit.”
    “Mick, let’s push harder, goddamnit,” said Crackers the Clown.
    “Not funny, Crackers.”
    The team saw just hills, hills, hills before them in the fading light. At last report the guy was less than half a mile away, and they were closing. But the shot at a daylight takedown, much hoped for, was rapidly disappearing. Mick didn’t want to do a night thing. Guys shooting, flashes, bad vision, only one set of night vision goggles between them, no long shots, no, you couldn’t tell what might go wrong and very little ever went right at night.
    On the other hand, if the guy saw them, he might set up and start picking them off from far out with his long gun. Then, assuming he wasn’t the first to go, Mick might have a chance at taking him down with the motherfuckingseventonsofagonybullshit .50 Barrett he carried with him. You could do a guy at a mile with the thing, and Mick had done enough of it to know.
    Which set him off again: Aghh! He had the sniper team cold-bore dead zeroed and yet he missed, maybe a little puff of breeze edged the first 750-grainer that way or this and only blew goats into the air; the second freight train missed too, goddamnit, and then he found the stroke and blew one guy thirty feet in the air, cranked to the other as he was disappearing and blew him aloft like a Frisbee sailing across a college lawn. Then he worked the beaten zone with the rest of the mag,blowing