Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 039

The shooting range had become Howard's least favorite place in the world, and also the one he showed up to first every morning.

He stood at the firing line with both hands wrapped around the grip of the Glock 17, working through his stance with the careful deliberateness of a man who had been corrected on the same thing many times and was determined not to be corrected again. The shots came out evenly spaced, each one preceded by a small pause as he settled his aim. The form was still a little stiff, the movements not yet fully his own, but it was nothing like the first day, when pulling the trigger had made his whole hand shake.

The final round cracked out and the slide locked back on an empty chamber.

Howard dropped the magazine, pressed the slide release, racked it twice to confirm the g*n was clear, then laid everything down in the case on the bench with the same careful tidiness he brought to most things. He turned around with a mild grimace already forming.

A short distance behind him, Soren was sitting with one leg crossed over the other, tossing a chilled grape into his mouth, watching the open doorway with the relaxed attention of someone with nowhere better to be.

Outside, Evan stood in the yard with a small remote controller in both hands, making adjustments. The compact drone hummed overhead, cut a quick pass above the roofline of the range building, then descended and hovered steadily in front of him at eye level.

"Not bad," Evan said, tilting it left and right to check the response. "Feed's clean, no real lag. Stability's a little soft though — gets some shake when it holds position."

He caught it as it landed, turned it over to check the frame, and seemed satisfied that nothing had cracked. Then he looked over at Mark, who was working through a moving pre-aim drill a few meters away, an MP7 submachine g*n in hand, no magazine loaded. "Couldn't you have found a new one? Did it have to be secondhand?"

Mark lowered the weapon and looked back without much patience. "You're lucky there's a secondhand one to use at all. You know what it takes for a foreigner to buy a drone through proper channels here? The paperwork alone takes months. Some people wait half a year and still don't get cleared. And I'm not about to have this whole operation blown because of a piece of equipment with a registered serial number. It's a one-use item anyway — we run it, then we destroy it. Stop being precious about it."

He wasn't wrong, and Evan knew it. He grumbled for another few seconds on principle, then let it go.

Howard crossed to where Soren was sitting and offered a dry smile. "Twenty-five meters, fixed targets, twelve rounds — five hits. Same as yesterday. Still well short."

"You can fire the weapon without flinching," Soren said. "That's what matters."

He meant it. Howard and Evan weren't going to be the ones making entry. Cody, Mark, and Soren were the combat element. If the operation reached a point where the driver and the drone operator had to pick up guns and start shooting, it meant things had already gone badly wrong. The reason he'd put them through weapons training at all wasn't accuracy — it was composure. When the shooting started, he needed them steady enough to keep doing their jobs, not frozen by the sound of it.

Soren stood up and moved to the firing bench.

He pressed six rounds into each of the two magazines, slid one into the quick-draw holster on his left hip, and seated the other in the Glock. He racked the slide.

The round chambered with a clean, solid snap.

He holstered the pistol, let his right hand rest loosely over the grip, and fixed his gaze on the six human-silhouette steel targets standing at twenty-five meters. He drew a slow breath in through his nose, let it out through his mouth, and went still for just a moment.

Then he moved.

The Glock came out of the holster in a single fluid arc, front sight already tracking the first target before his arm was fully extended. Six shots in rapid succession, the reports overlapping, the muzzle climbing and resettling between each one in a rhythm that looked almost mechanical. On the sixth shot, his right thumb found the magazine release without looking, and the spent mag dropped free. His left hand was already pulling the second magazine from the quick-draw holster on his hip. The reload took less than a second. The slide snapped forward, and six more rounds went downrange in the same driving tempo, sweeping left to right and back again.

Twelve shots. Twelve hits. Every single one through the head of its target.

Level four Marksmanship didn't announce itself. It simply performed. Soren had reached a point where the weapon felt like an extension of intention rather than a tool he was operating — the kind of precision that put him in the same conversation as the clock tower sniper from the last Career Instance, and possibly past it. His level three Firearms Proficiency handled the rest: even an unfamiliar weapon with its own particular drift and quirks would give itself up to him within a few rounds, the deviation mapping itself into his adjustments almost automatically.

A low sound came from the doorway.

Evan was leaning against the door frame, arms folded. "That was fast," he said.

Mark had stopped his own drill entirely. He brought his hands together slowly. "Tell me you won an Olympic medal at some point, because that was unsuppressed, no optics, moving reload, fixed targets — and I barely saw anyone pull that off even back in the service."

"If I'd won an Olympic medal, I wouldn't be here," Soren said.

He dropped the magazine, set the Glock down on the bench, and flicked a spent brass casing off the shooting mat with one finger. It spun through the air and rang off the floor with a bright, clean note.

"Call Cody," he said. "Find out where he's at."

________________________________________

Crownline Royal Hotel, fourth floor casino.

Cody looked the part completely. The suit was well-fitted, the hair combed back, the posture easy — the whole picture of a man who had money and had come here to spend some of it. He sat at one of the card tables near the center of the floor, turning a green chip slowly between his fingers as the dealer flipped the final cards.

"Player's best hand, pair of kings. Banker shows three aces. Banker wins."

The last of his chips were swept from the felt. Cody watched them go without expression, then flicked the green chip he'd been holding onto the table and pushed his chair back. "Seven hands," he said flatly. "Seven straight losses. You sure this place runs clean?"

The dealer maintained her smile with practiced ease. "We're a fully licensed establishment, sir. We don't operate that way." A brief pause. "Please visit the front desk to exchange any remaining chips. Thank you for playing."

Cody gave a short, cold laugh, stood up, and walked away without looking back. He didn't bother picking up the low-value chip he'd left on the table — the small, telling gesture of a man who had just lost his last stake and was too proud to be seen scraping it up, but not so broke that it actually hurt.

It was a performance he had refined over the past several days.

Soren had given him a daily budget of five thousand dollars and a single instruction: lose it, blend in, and pay attention. The Crownline Royal Hotel casino saw dozens of men like the one Cody was playing every day — gamblers on a bad run, working through money they could technically afford to lose. Nobody watched them closely. Nobody remembered their faces. It was the perfect cover for a man who needed to move through the space repeatedly without drawing interest.

And in that time, Cody had learned a great deal. He had mapped the positions and approximate counts of every visible surveillance camera inside and outside the casino floor. He had identified the security team's primary coverage zones and the gaps between them. He had located the weapons storage room. He had noted which hours of the day brought the thinnest foot traffic.

His phone buzzed against his thigh. He glanced at the screen and answered. "Howard."

"How's it looking?" The voice on the other end was Soren's.

"Ah — Soren. You were right about today. Something's different. Normally there are at least thirty security personnel working the floor and the perimeter combined. Today I count maybe ten inside. But when I came in, I passed through the underground parking structure, and there were three cargo vans down there I haven't seen before. Twenty-plus security personnel standing alongside them." He checked the time. "Today's the 30th. Tuesday. Banks are open."

He left the rest unsaid. On the other end of the line, the silence told him Soren and the others had already reached the same conclusion: today might be a transfer day, the casino moving its cash reserves out under cover of a normal banking window.

What they couldn't yet confirm was whether the schedule was fixed or variable. Every Tuesday? Every 30th? Every end of month?

"We might need another week of observation to be sure," Soren said after a moment.

"Probably. Although —" Cody stopped mid-sentence.

Something had caught his eye at the far end of the corridor leading to the private rooms.

A group of men in black emerged from one of the suites, moving in tight formation around two figures at the center.