The range master at Terror Town was slim, swarthy, bearded, and had a beaky nose and dark eyes. The name embroidered on his chest was Muhammad. A few sorry souls had made jokes around him with words like “towel head,” “camel jockey,” and “sand nigger.” They misunderstood his stance on racial epithets, because they thought that if he was working this range then Muhammad could not be either a devout Muslim or a true Arab. Of those sorry souls, the ones who were able to walk away from the range under their own steam were encouraged to pack their bags and go find a clue. The rest received the very best of emergency care in the T-Town infirmary.
Circe O’Tree had been there for one of those encounters. The whole thing was over in a second and a man much bigger than Muhammad lay in a fetal position, hands clutching his groin, faced screwed into a purple knot of silent agony. The sight had bothered Circe for weeks. But she could not find any fault with the range master. He never once started a fight; his view, however, was that even small hate crimes should be “appropriately addressed.”
Although she worked around violence all day and though she had logged hundreds of hours on the combat ranges and in the self-defense classes, Circe had never before been a witness to actual violence. Even so, threads of violence were sown through her life. Her mother and sister had died violently, her father was in one of the more ferocious departments of government service, and all of her friends were either current or former military or scientists like her, who studied war and conflict.
The relationship between Chief Petty Officer Abdul Muhammad and Dr. Circe O’Tree was complicated, its parameters unspoken. He cut her no slack, but he always gave her a little extra advice and encouragement. He also let her train in the late evenings after the teams had called it a night. Though most of the men at T-Town respected—or perhaps dreaded—Muhammad, they frequently forgot themselves when Circe was on-deck. She was a very beautiful woman with a figure that drew the eyes of normally focused shooters away from their targets. Range scores plummeted when she was on-deck.
And she found the whole thing exceptionally tiresome. She couldn’t change her genetics, and dressing down in shapeless clothes was an admission of defeat. After ignoring the testosterone-infused nonsense for months, she began coming later and later to the range. Now it was full dark and the sky above glittered with 10 billion diamonds. The August breeze off of Mount Baker was cool and soothing after hours spent with her computer.
“Your mind is not in the game, Doc,” Muhammad growled after she finished her last grouped shots.
Circe cleared and benched the gun. There was no one else on the range, but the proper etiquette had become ingrained. You earned a sharp rebuke only once from Muhammad, and you never forgot it. On her second day at T-Town Circe had stepped past the firing line before all of the other shooters had declared their weapons benched. Muhammad read her the riot act in front of everyone and he was thorough about it. Then he made her stay an extra hour and practice the rules of handgun safety, shouting out each step no matter who was firing. The lesson sank in.
She pulled off her ear defenders. “Lot on my mind tonight, Chief.”
“You haven’t scored this low since your first month.”
She looked downrange as the target moved toward her on a pulley. She had fired all fifteen rounds from a Glock 22. She was not a brilliant shooter, but she was a competent and consistent one, usually putting eleven rounds out of each magazine into the kill zone of a suspended target fifteen yards away. At twenty-five yards she lost a bit of her accuracy if firing fast, but in a slow fire drill she was a very good shot.
Muhammad folded his arms and leaned against the wall of the shooting stall.
“Why do you practice with a handgun?”
She almost sighed. This was one of the Chief ’s ritual questions.
“To save my life and the lives of those in my charge.”
“How do you accomplish this?”
“By hitting what I aim at with focus, speed, and commitment.”
“Uh-huh. So tell me, Doc, what part of that sounds like ‘I got too much on my mind’?”
“Nothing, Chief.”
“Very well. Bring your gear.”
When he said that it only meant one thing: the combat range.
Circe regretted coming out to the range this late. She had wanted to work off some nervous energy and blow holes in the wild theories that were forming in her mind. Bringing her problems to the range had been foolish.
She gathered up her gear, making sure to do each step of gun safety exactly the right way even though Chief Muhammad did not appear to be watching. She ran to catch up with him and followed him down a long and windy cinder-block corridor. The block walls were filled in with tightly packed dirt to catch ricochets, and the corridors smelled like a graveyard.
They came out into the maze of T-Town’s eighteen combat ranges. Each one was designed to allow operatives to train for different kinds of circumstances: city street, subway, airplane, airport, business, government office, house, and others.
Muhammad chose the shortest of the ranges, a mom-and-pop corner store. Circe knew that there were nine Pepper Poppers—metal silhouette targets that could be positioned throughout the range and operated by remote control. They were hinged at the bottom so that they could swing up on fast spring releases or fall back after being shot. At least four of the targets would be hostiles, the rest designated as “possible” noncombatants. The “possible” part was crucial, because in the War on Terror the enemy didn’t wear uniforms or team shirts.
“How many mags, Chief?”
Muhammad grinned. He took a magazine from her pack, thumbed four rounds out, and handed it over. “Eleven rounds. Best intel says four hostiles. Could be five. That gives you two per and three for luck.”
“I never did this with less than two full magazines.”
He shrugged. “Life sucks sometimes. What if a situation turned out to be bigger and badder than you expected? You want to read a rule book at a hostile? Think that’ll win the day, Doc?”
“No, Chief.”
“Now, you run this range and I don’t want to hear from jams, tripping over your shoelaces, or a text message from your friends. You run it like you know
She had never been in the military, but she snapped to attention. “I read you, Chief.”
“Then it’s time to go to work.”
Muhammad put a wooden matchstick between his teeth and walked off the range and into the steel observation bunker. There was a warning buzzer announcing a live fire exercise and the lights in the store came on.
Circe called, “Loading!” She slapped the magazine into the Glock and racked the slide, keeping the barrel pointed into the range, her finger along the trigger guard. Muhammad’s words from their very first training session echoed in her mind.
Muhammad’s amplified voice growled from a speaker, “Ready on the firing line!”
Circe could feel her heart hammering, but she took several deep breaths to relax her mind and muscles.
Muhammad spoke from her memories:
“Go!”
Circe kicked in the door and entered fast, sliding to one side and bringing her gun up in a two-handed grip, the sights level with her eyes.
A target pivoted toward her. A teenager in a Brooklyn T-Shirt and jeans, but he was pulling a pistol from his belt. Circe shot him in the chest and again in the face.
