On twelve the clock strikes midnight and the finger squeezes the trigger.
I looked at the invaders through my sights, and on the exhale I fired.
Seven shots later I lowered the rifle, realizing my ears were ringing and my shoulder stung from the recoil. Captain Sergienko lowered his binoculars, looking at me. “You got the rear officer with your third shot, and the front officer with your fourth—even though they were off the porch and scrambling fast by then.”
“I saw.” My voice seemed to be coming from very far away. I realized my hands were trembling and gripped the rifle’s stock harder. When I looked at the captain, his face was still overlaid with the lines of my sights, as though it had burned itself inside my eyes.
The captain looked through his binoculars at the Romanian staff headquarters again. There seemed to be quite a lot of activity swarming that porch now. “Good shooting.”
“Not really.” My face burned. “It should only have taken me two bullets.”
“But you still downed both men.” Sergienko looked reflective, retreating from the farmhouse now and beckoning me with him. The Romanians might calculate where my shots had come from and fire back on this position. “I’ve got feral Siberian boys who can put a bullet through a squirrel’s eye at half a kilometer, but when I asked them to show me what they could do, they all froze when it came to firing on a man for the first time. You know the science of it—ballistics, trajectories, all that. More important, you knew how to let the science carry you through when it came to fire on a human target. You might have missed, but you didn’t hesitate. That’s rare in new recruits.”
“It’s just training,” I said. “I’ve had some already; the others haven’t. That’s all.”
“Training? Not instinct?”
Sergienko was a smart man, but even he （like many, as I was soon to learn） was inclined to be fanciful about a sniper’s instinct, about feeling it in the blood, about how it was all in the gut. Rubbish. I was a good library researcher because I’d learned how to file, catalog, and organize; I was a good shooter because I’d learned range calculation and distance estimation, and knew how far a rotating bullet would drift laterally from muzzle to target. I could do this not because of some inborn instinct, but because I had studied and drilled and practiced until training became instinct. I was a good sniper because I was a good student. “Training,” I repeated, with a belated salute.
“And you can do it again? I can use long-distance shooters.”
“I can do it again.” Even after five missed shots, I knew I could. Because I’d trained to be perfect, and perfection had become a habit too strong to allow missteps. Life so rarely allowed a woman to be perfect, much less a mother, much less a single mother, much less a single mother in the Soviet Union, which was a beautiful place but not precisely a forgiving one . . . so when I was lashing myself inside for missing an exam question or a chance at a student conference, I could at least go to the range and know that there, I wouldn’t miss a thing.
And that compulsion not to miss was so strong, I’d put two live targets down today without hesitation.
I hadn’t stopped to examine the enemy faces through my sights, but their features must have made an impression despite me, because I saw them now in my mind’s eye with sickening clarity. The first officer had been close-shaven, hawk-nosed; the second had been swarthy with the beginnings of a paunch. Enemies—but perhaps they had also been husbands, fathers. All the quirks and talents, weaknesses and foibles that made up two unique human lives, extinguished in seconds by two bullets.
Suddenly I wanted to put my head between my knees, but I couldn’t do that in front of my commanding officer. I swallowed the bile rising in my throat and took a glance over one shoulder toward the building I’d targeted—a building now swarming, so I imagined, with panicked Romanian officers. Invaders, I reminded myself again. And despite my moment’s queasiness I knew that the next time I fired on my enemies, I wouldn’t miss.