A rifle fires once out of four hundred yards of green bank and kills a coxswain at the precise moment he stands up to hold his boat against the tide. Then it fires twice more. Both times at men whose hands are full and whose backs are turned.
Ray Miller works out what an entire river section has missed for a year. The shooter is not aiming at boats, or even at men. He is aiming at jobs — at the handful of evolutions that force a sailor to hold still in a place anybody could name in advance.
The better the crew is trained, the more perfectly predictable they become. Every drill that keeps them alive is also a schedule the enemy can read.
