Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(40)

Rio pays close attention, but not so close that she does not spare a sideways glance at Jack. She had a dream about Jack, and though she does not remember any specifics, she woke with a nagging feeling that something improper had occurred—in the dream.

She resists the urge to draw Strand’s picture from her inner pocket and tells herself that dreams are just dreams, they don’t mean anything. If she could recall specifics they would probably be completely proper and innocuous; yes, almost certainly. No, certainly.

You’re working yourself up over nothing.

Rio refocuses, and after listening and watching for a while, she has a fair idea how to manage it. A bullet drops twenty inches in three hundred yards. To adjust for that you click the elevation knob so you’re forced to point the muzzle upward while sighting the target.

“In this way, the bullet actually leaves the muzzle heading over the head of the Jap or Kraut you’re aiming at. But if you’ve calculated your range, and you’ve adjusted your sights properly, that bullet will drop naturally until it hits the bull’s-eye.”

A man’s chest. Or neck. Or face.

The math is not complicated, though predictably Jenou struggles with it. The concept is familiar to anyone who has ever thrown a ball: you throw high in order to reach the catcher.

Windage is more complex, and many heads are scratched.

“There are some simple tricks to help you judge windage,” the enthusiastic instructor goes on. “Take something light enough to be blown by the wind, say some dirt or a blade of grass. While standing, toss it into the air and watch where it falls. Point at the place where it lands. Then estimate the angle between your arm and your body. Let’s say the angle is forty degrees. Now then, the rule is that you divide the angle under your arm by four—by four—in order to get the speed of the wind in miles per hour.”

He asks a GI up to act it out on the platform. The crowd loves audience participation and watches avidly, hoping to see embarrassing failure, as the soldier estimates that the wind is moving at about seven miles an hour.

Milking. They’d been milking one of the cows. That was the dream. The ginger Englishman had been sitting on a stool milking one of the cows while Rio laughed and giggled. There! Just as harmless as she’d suspected, nothing at all concerning. And yet the image doesn’t feel right. She has the feeling that if she talks about it to Jenou, Jenou will cast a troubling light on it.

Rio shifts position and tries to exclude Jack from her peripheral vision.

“An even simpler way is to raise your arm to level, which is ninety degrees. Then divide that into five segments. Imagine a clock hand jumping from minute to minute. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Each click, each segment, is five miles per hour.

“With this bit of information you can set the windage screw on the rear sight, so that even as you continue to aim the sights straight at your target, the muzzle will actually be aimed to the left or right of the Jap or Kraut. Then the wind will simply blow your bullet sideways until it hits.”

A chest. A neck. A face.

After an hour of this, and an hour of rehearsing the four firing positions—prone, seated, kneeling, and standing—they pile aboard trucks for the three-mile trip to the firing range.

“I’m amazed they don’t have us run there,” Jack says. “This is luxury!”

“We are truly being treated like movie stars,” Jenou agrees wryly, waving a hand around the open truck as it bounces with bone-jarring force over some dried-mud tire tracks.

They are split into two groups. One will stand in the deep trench beneath the targets and mark hits and misses while the other shoots. Then they’ll switch.

Additional instructors await, one for every three shooters, acting as spotters and offering helpful tips.

On command, Rio loads her rifle. Eight long brass cartridges lined up two-by-two in the metal clip, which she thumbs into the chamber.

“Check safeties!”

There follows some clicking and sheepish looks and everything is checked by the range instructors, who buzz around like capable bees, often physically manipulating soldiers into the right grip, the right stance.

Rio gathers a small handful of dirt as there are no handy blades of grass. She lets it fall and watches where the lightest bits land. Feeling ridiculous and self-conscious, she points with her whole arm to the spot. Rio does a rough calculation and decides on three clicks left windage.

“Take a prone position!”

This they have practiced many times. Rio lies flat, with her legs spread medium-wide and cocked to the left, making her body into a lazy L. The front sight has three elements: a left and right side, each about half an inch high and curved outward, a bit like goat horns. Between them is a simple square post half as tall as the sides.

The rear sight is a stubby steel cylinder with a hole in the center. It is this hole that must be adjusted for altitude and windage. Click, click, click.

Two hundred yards, that’s the range. But they’ve been taught to take a ranging shot first and see where the bullet strikes before adjusting for altitude on the range.

“Ready. Aim. Fire when ready.”

Rio lines the sights up. The target bull’s-eye appears to sit just on top of the center post of the front sight as seen through the hole in the rear sight.

Don’t jerk, squeeze.

BANG!

The rifle punches her shoulder and almost tears loose of her grip.