may very well be the toughest job in the world and it makes us immensely proud that you wouldn’t make it five minutes in our world.
While we didn’t need to seek out and wait for the best shot on our current target, it still took us around twenty minutes to prepare for the shot. Another few minutes and four impatient operators later, we were ready to take the shot.
“Target established, fire for effect. Fire. Fire. Fire.”
My affirmation that our checklist was complete, Helena had the go ahead to shoot. I heard her take three slow and deep breaths, holding it on the third. A half second later, she squeezed the trigger, handling the weapon masterfully. I had wondered if the recoil of the shot would be too much for the thin woman to handle, but it seemed as though she possessed a hidden strength few could pull off.
It took a while for the projectile to reach its mark, which it did successfully in an explosion of watermelon. Our audience cheered, thankful their sniper was more than fully competent. I even saw Bordeaux wipe a hand across his forehead in mock relief, before he turned back to the others as their conversations resumed.
I was impressed as well.
I’d taken that shot many times as a SEAL, but even for the best snipers, it was never guaranteed one hundred percent of the time.
I rolled off Helena’s leg onto my back, stretching as many muscles as I could. Doing so relieved the stresses accumulated while lying completely immobile since we got on the mat.
“A fine shot, Lieutenant, you definitely deserve to be here.”
“Thanks. To be honest, I haven’t made very many cold bore shots with the fifty, but every successful one I perform makes me feel that much better.”
She shifted onto her left side, to take the strain off of her right shoulder, which the rifle had rested against for the past hour. She used her left hand to kneed some feeling back into her shoulder. “And I have to admit, having you spot for me was refreshing.” She paused. “It also calmed my nerves. Doing it in a controlled environment is one thing, but in the field is totally different. If I have trouble here, what’s to say things won’t be worse when it matters?”
I rubbed my eyes before I turned to look at her, for once not finding anger and annoyance there. Why was she doubting herself? She may the least experienced operators here, but her mere presence automatically made her one of the best.
“Helena, you’re a fine sniper. You just proved that. Trust me, you can handle anything out there. And don’t worry. I’ll be by your side every single time.”
She smiled. “Thank you, Jacob. I’m not used to having someone to rely on, and frankly, it’s a bit overwhelming. It’s almost like being in a…”
I frowned. I knew where she was going with that thought as she trailed off. It’s exactly like being in a relationship or a family. Most sniper pairs were men, and therefore, brothers. Trust had to pass equally and unequivocally between them, because each relied on the other for everything. A business company may do team building exercises where individuals fall backwards off a ladder in the blind hopes of being caught by their peers. They did this to build trust and cooperation to create a more efficient work environment. The equivalent exercise for a sniper pair was to perform such an exercise while blindfolded in a monsoon, during an artillery barrage, with a nuke going off in the background and zombies closing in on all sides. You think Joe Blow from human resources is going to stick around and catch you during that?
It wasn’t likely.
Helena and I needed to trust each other. She needed to be my brother. My sister. I had to know she wasn’t going to buck under pressure and run away when I needed her support, and I couldn’t have her lying to me. I couldn’t trust her if she did. Santino had said she’d just ended a relationship so serious she threatened to kill the next guy who pissed her off, yet here she was talking like she doesn’t even know what the word relationship even means.
“Helena, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”
She hesitated, but nodded. “We need to be honest with each other, of course.”
My thoughts exactly. “Your experience not having a spotter is understandable, but the way you speak of not having someone to rely on, well, sniper pairs utilizes the same kind of trust as relationships do. You should know that. Yet, you say you’ve never had anyone to rely on almost like you’ve never had anyone at all, but that’s not the story I got from the guys…”
I let my last statement trail off, hoping the point would sink in before things got more awkward than they already were. Her silence only confirmed my suspicions that the story I got from Santino wasn’t the whole one. I decided to go easy on her.
“Look. I’ll understand if you don’t tell me what’s going on now. We have time to get to know each other more before…”
She rolled onto her back and took a deep breath. “No, you’re right. You’ve obviously heard the story from one of the other guys about why I reacted to your arrival, but what I told them wasn’t completely true. I was betrothed, yes, but it wasn’t out of love. It was an arranged marriage agreed upon before I was born forced upon me by my father, as my fiance’s father did upon him.”
As far as I was concerned, arranged marriages were all but extinct, but I did know in some societies they were still common. I had no idea the Germans practiced it, but in the high class society I assumed Helena was from, it was probably more prevalent than most thought.
She took another deep breath before continuing.
“He was a nice,” she continued, a small smile tugging at her lips before it just as quickly vanished, “and as children we were rather close, but there was never anything between us deeper than friendship. I was trapped by an agreement, and Papa watched me like a hawk. We tried being intimate with each other but it didn’t work. It just didn’t feel right. It felt forced and unnatural. It’s why I eventually joined the military. I thought that I could just run away from my problems without ever having to face them.”
She paused, but I didn’t interrupt.
“He was killed in a car accident not too long ago. He was drinking, and wasn’t paying attention, and ran off the Autobahn colliding with a tree. He and his passenger were killed instantly.” She sniffled, before her voice rose angrily. “He was with another woman! A prostitute. Meanwhile, there I was, a perfect little angel, while he was off doing whatever the fuck he wanted while no one said a thing about it!”
I noticed her eyes were moistening with tears of sadness and rage. I could feel the anger in her voice.
“If you two were so distant, why are you so sad and angry, and why did you tell the guys that story about being cheated on, and nothing more?”
She stayed silent awhile as she pondered her answer, and I thought she was about to clam up completely. I suddenly felt like an ass pressuring her to tell me something that I guess wasn’t exactly relevant to our professional relationship. It was something we would need to talk about sooner or later, but I shouldn’t have pushed her. Even so, I put a hand on her shoulder reassuringly.
“Helena, you can trust me.”
“God damn it, Hunter, I’ve known you all of an hour and it’s scary I’m telling you anything. Trust me. I’m not used to that.”
I looked at her with a neutral expression. I didn’t want to offer her a reason to give up more than she was ready for, but I didn’t want her to stop either.
She took another breath and continued, releasing years of pent up frustration. “He didn’t deserve to die, and we were still, if anything, friends. He may have been cheating on our relationship, but there wasn’t much of one anyway. I told the guys the story about being cheating on because I wanted to fit in. Everybody has a story like that, except me, and what were the chances that the next guy who walked in would look even remotely like him and immediately do something to make me feel like I did with him?”
“Pretty good I guess.”
“Yeah, pretty good.”
“I am sorry for that.”
She sighed. “It’s okay.”
“So, do I really remind you that much of him?”
She looked away before answering. “Yes and no. I was so focused on shooting that when I saw you, I didn’t
