Free Lethal Expedition (Short Story) by James M. Tabor Page B

was not a regular churchgoer. She found her higher power in mountains and caves and oceans and, sometimes, in other people. But medieval cathedral builders had spun magic from stone and glass and light. Their designs had guided the creation of this cathedral, as well, and the passing centuries had diminished that magic not one bit. She felt good here, felt like she did in those other places, her mind clear, heart open, at peace
.
    Because of her work and her nature, Hallie usually dressed in jeans, running shoes, and old shirts. Today, she wore a white silk blouse, a pale yellow jacket and skirt, and low-heeled ivory pumps. After all, jeans would hardly have been appropriate for someone seated next to the president of the United States
.

About the Author

    James M. Tabor is the nationally bestselling author of
Blind Descent
and
Forever on the Mountain
and a winner of the O. Henry Award for short fiction. A former Washington, D.C., police officer and a lifelong adventure enthusiast, Tabor has written for
Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post
, and
Outside
magazine, where he was a contributing editor. He wrote and hosted the PBS series
The Great Outdoors
and was co-creator and executive producer of the History Channel’s
Journey to the Center of the World
.
    His much-anticipated debut novel,
The Deep Zone
, will be published by Ballantine Books in April. He lives in Vermont, where he is at work on the next Hallie Leland thriller.

 
    Read on for an excerpt from James M. Tabor’s
    The Deep Zone

 
    THE BULLET HIT FATHER WYMAN BEFORE HE HEARD THE AK-47 report. No surprise, that. Haji’s AK rounds traveled a mile in two seconds,
way
ahead of their sound. You never heard the one with your name on it. So to Father Wyman’s way of thinking, only fools and ground pounders ducked and flinched in firefights. When they were Oscar Mike, he stood tall in his up-armored Humvee turret, head on a swivel, hands on his fifty-cal’s oak, cigar-shaped grips, thumbs on the butterfly trigger.
    Father Wyman was not a priest. He was a heartland patriot less than three years out of high school, but he loved to read his Bible and to hold prayer meetings for the other troopers, so that was what the men in Viper Company at Combat Outpost (COP) Terok had taken to calling him. Wyman’s was not a foxhole conversion. He’d inherited from his father and mother an unshakable belief in the Book’s literal truth. It was not an ancient tome of mystic parable,but practical wisdom by which they lived their lives, day by day. They trusted it as farmers trusted their land and wealthy people their money. They read it more often than newspapers. They had no faith in soiled politicians and godless scientists. Anyone with eyes to see and a mortal soul knew that the Bible had survived centuries of sin and dark horror to bring them light. Why would God have saved it for them otherwise? When they touched their Bible, opened it, read from it, its power was as real as wind and fire.
    Wyman was as big as he was devout, six-three and 210 pounds. His machine gun was bolted to a wheeled carriage that rolled around the circular track of his Humvee mount, so he could easily man the gun one-handed. He had seen the muzzle flash two hundred meters out. The haji fired—a good shot, considering the AK-47’s notorious inaccuracy—and dropped down behind a washing machine—sized boulder, no doubt thinking himself safe.
    Too bad for you, Mr. Haji
. Viper Company was equipped with “Badass”—that was what they called the new boomerang anti-sniper detection system (BADS), which used passive acoustic detection and computer-signal processing to locate a shooter with pinpoint accuracy. Badass’s developers, like those who created audible aircraft-crew cockpit warnings, knew that the male brain responded best to a female voice. So, while he was still running on adrenaline, in his earpiece Father Wyman heard a sultry young woman say, “Target bearing one-nine-one.