Three hundred meters in front and forty meters below his perch on the rock ledge meandered a dry riverbed. The landscape was nothing but rock, sand, and snow, except for a few small bushy plants growing at the base of some of the larger rocks that were along the center of the riverbed. Another three hundred meters beyond the scruffy plants, the opposite side of the riverbed rose to the same height he was. Beyond that the ground faded into the featureless hills in the distance. Nobody went too far beyond the riverbed; it was the territory of the nomads.
Timo had picked this spot an hour before daylight. Now, after four hours of lying motionless, the granite rock underneath him that had seemed so smooth and flat when he first swept away the snow and lay prone on it, felt like it was covered with sharp ridges. Even through the leather mat and his parka they jabbed him. Next to him lay his wife, Alyd, looking through the eyepiece of her spotting scope, its magnification much greater than a rifle’s scope and its optical lens much larger. She could see the opposite canyon side crisply. She was the same age as Timo, shorter than him by seventeen centimeters and weighing a very fit fifty kilograms. She had short blonde hair under a brown knit cap, an ivory smooth complexion with a natural blush over high cheekbones and brown eyes behind the spotting scope. They had known each other from school but had never met until they each were accepted into sniper school. The attraction sparked immediately. She liked his boyish face, light complexion, muscular build, and tousled brown hair. He liked every centimeter of her. Their romance lasted through the 240 days of sniper training. They married fifteen days after graduation.
A camouflaged canvas, stained to look like the rocky terrain around him, lay over them. It was anchored by rocks they placed on the under-folded edges and propped up with sticks to create a small cavern with an opening to the front that allowed a clear view. The canvas helped block the wind and mitigated the chill. Timo’s sniper rifle rested on a bipod, the very end of the suppressor barely sticking out the opening.
Timo looked at the snow that the wind piled against rock near him. At least the cisterns were full, he thought. When the snow came, after an abnormally dry autumn, everybody scraped the snow from every elevated surface, placed it in containers, and stored it in their dwellings. They couldn’t gather the snow from the rooftops; it was forbidden. An elaborate drainage system existed for rain, but for snow, workers would come and scrape it into carts and deliver it to the neighborhood cisterns.
After adjusting the padded leather pillows under his elbows, he began again, scanning with his rifle scope from his left to his right, and near to far.
Alyd leaned her shoulder into Timo as she adjusted her position and removed a stick of dried meat from a side pouch. Without his eye leaving the rifle scope, he matched her pressure to give her support, making it easier for her to complete the task.
“Want some?” she asked.
“Just a bite,” he replied. “But no water yet. We still have three more hours before we’re relieved.”
“Who’s our relief?”
“Masi and Reetu,” Timo replied.
“Good. They’re never late.”
“Team-three hourly check,” Lieutenant Risberg’s voice came through the walkie-talkie.
Alyd picked it up to get the foot-long antenna somewhat vertical and pressed the transmit button on the side. “Team-three clear,” she responded and laid the radio back down.
“Too bad we can’t use this thing to call my mom to tell her to heat up a bowl of soup for us,” Alyd said.
“And have her bring it to us,” Timo added.
Alyd scanned a ravine on the opposite slope. “You’d have my poor mother come over six thousand meters outside the wall, in this weather, just to bring you soup?”
“I guess not—not just soup. Have her bring beer.” Timo grinned behind the rifle scope.
“If she had beer, I’d make her come too!” Alyd nudged him hard with her elbow.
Like most days, when the patrol shift ended, they planned to go to Alyd’s mother’s dwelling, bringing her anything she may need from the market, if the market had it, while she heated supper. After the meal it would be a dark and chilly six-block walk to their dwelling.
Both of them thought about the warm meal waiting for them. With some luck there would be bread too. Neither of them liked the thought of the long trek back against the wind. Dreading the return as the wind got colder in the late afternoon, knowing soup waited for them made it more bearable. They didn’t speak for the next hour.
Timo leaned back from the scope and rubbed his tired eyes. He watched Alyd methodically working her spotter’s scope from ravine to ravine, painting each one with her view through the scope. She never quits and never misses anything, he thought. Something made her stop. He could feel her tense up, even though they weren’t touching—just a slight change in body position.
“I think I see something,” she said.
Timo looked through his scope. “Where?”
“Second ravine, near the center. There was movement. Actually it’s just outside the ravine, about one hundred meters past the two bushes; it’s a large rock.”
Timo increased the magnification to maximum on the rifle scope and swung over to the second ravine.
“Is it moving now?” Timo asked.
“No.”
They waited. The wind howled through the riverbed. That’s when he saw it. The surface of the large rock rippled with the wind, shifting and tightening.
“There!” Alyd said.
“I saw it. I’d say that rock is a meter tall,” Timo said.
“I agree. What the hell is a scout doing in this sector?”
“It’s two-point-three mils tall,” Timo said.
Alyd scribbled on the cloth-like paper in a notepad for a minute. “Okay, math whiz, what is it?”
“Four-hundred-thirty-four-point-seven-eight meters,” Timo said.
She looked through the spotting scope again. “I don’t know how you do that skíta in your head…to two decimal places no less.”
“Do you want the third decimal place?”
“That’s why I married you, baby, for your very large brain…well, your brain and your typpi.” Alyd grinned.
Timo removed the glove from his right hand with his teeth. “Call it in,” he said.
Alyd picked up the walkie-talkie. “Command, this is team-three.”
“Go, team-three,” Lieutenant Risberg responded.
“We have single contact, 435 meters in the north ravine.”
The radio was silent for thirty seconds. “Clear to engage. Surrounding teams have been notified.”
Timo’s breathing slowed. Flow with the wind, he said to himself.
Timo clicked the rifle’s safety off. He felt the wind with his mind, anticipated when it would gust and when it would lull; it had a rhythm to its breathing. He slowly exhaled full lungs of air through his nose, and the skin of his bare index finger put light pressure on the cold metal of the trigger. He felt the wind’s breath subside.
The rifle’s report sounded like a sack of wet cement had been dropped to the ground from the roof of a hut. A man standing over one hundred meters away wouldn’t hear it at all.
The rock jolted and the camouflage cover came off as the man underneath rolled and got up on his elbows to crawl for the protection of a nearby boulder. Timo worked the bolt on the rifle, ejecting the hot, spent casing and ramming a new round into the chamber in a single motion. He settled the crosshairs of the scope on the correct elevation and windage offset to the man’s