So instead of doing it that way, as FirstShot allowed, he laboriously filled in the blanks of data from his own Kestrel there at the range. Tedious, but tedium was a material snipers trafficked in. Wind speed, direction, altitude, temperature, humidity, and other subtleties of weather reality that only meteorologists knew, stuff so arcane, no TV guy even bothered with it.

He took his shot.

Better, but not good enough. The first one hit about fifteen yards shy. And although he dispatched target number two on the second shot, on The Day he would not be allowed a ranging shot. It didn’t work that way in the real world. He had to know he was on with the first press of the trigger.

There was really only one thing to do: check the precision of the scope clicks and do the math. So the next day, instead of shooting at a mile, he shot at a hundred yards, at benchrest targets.

The exercise: five targets vertically arrayed a hundred yards out, stapled to blank cardboard and mounted in a frame. But the hundred yards itself was not simply lased for distance, it was hand-measured—again, not from the muzzle of the rifle but from the elevation knob of the Schmidt & Bender—for the most accurate possible hundred yards. He started at the bottom, fired a three-shot group. He moved the elevation knob up one click and fired three more at the second target. Then the third, the fourth, and the fifth, in the same one-click increments. Of course, for every click, the three-shot cluster moved up a bit. But how much? Was it the one minute-of-angle Schmidt & Bender’s brilliant minds said or was it more? Or less? Working the target sheet with calipers, he determined that each click produced a rise in strike of not 0.552 inch, as per specs, but 0.489. It was so tiny an increment, it would have meant almost nothing out to three hundred yards, but with each leap in distance, it grew larger and larger. Thus, he was able to reconfigure FirstShot algorithms so that the click measure was 0.489.

Target number three: first shot, via FirstShot, was an ankle hit. The man—large, black, and dissolute—slid down, screaming, his lower leg shattered. Not good enough. Juba corrected a click, fired again, and eternally stilled him.

Target number four: close—closest yet—but low stomach. Probably not survivable, but given the speed of arrival of emergency personnel and the sophistication of trauma medicine, survival could not be ruled out. He had to hit the chest, destroy the heart and both lungs, sever all arteries and veins converging at the nexus of the heart. That hit, with a thousand pounds of energy and a sharpened missile more than a third of an inch wide, was the only guarantee.

Target number five.

Target number six.