I vaulted into the leather bucket seat, pulled the door shut against a hail of shrapnel, threw the heavy transmission into four-wheel-drive low, and slammed the accelerator.
The Escalade surged forward, its massive tires tearing through the wire fence flanking the hangar apron. I bypassed the main runway entirely, smashing through a rotten wooden cattle gate and hurtling into the dark, uncharted pasture that separated State Line Road from the river cut.
Behind me, the gunfire at the airstrip flared in a violent, continuous crescendo, but my eyes were locked on the southern horizon.
The dashboard clock ticked to 11:44 PM.
Sixteen minutes until midnight.
I switched off the Escalade's headlights, driving by the faint, pale glow of the overcast moon through the swamp grass, the steering wheel kicking violently in my hands as the heavy SUV tore through drainage ditches and muddy tractor ruts.
The foreign hit team at the airfield had done their job: they had pinned the FBI and eliminated Hoyt Vance before he could speak.
Now, the clean-up team was coming for the one man who had stood between them and the river bend for fifty years.
Marcus was alone at the homestead, holding a twelve-gauge shotgun and a tied-up deputy’s cousin, completely unaware that a foreign special-operations unit was coming out of the black water to put him in the earth.
Chapter 6: Blood on the Ocmulgee
The front bumper of the Escalade smashed through the boundary fence of the Hartwell north pasture at seventy miles an hour, splintering heart-pine posts into matchsticks.
I killed the engine fifty yards out from the tractor barn, letting the heavy truck coast through the deep mud on momentum alone before it ground to a halt against a berm of river clay.
The dashboard clock clicked to 11:53 PM. Seven minutes.
I grabbed the Colt carbine, slung the strap over my shoulder, shoved two spare magazines into my jacket pockets, and hauled the server caddy out into the damp, sulfurous air. The night was eerily still. The crickets along the drainage ditch had fallen dead silent, a universal sign in the swamp that foreign bodies were pushing through the underbrush.
I moved along the shadow of the hay shed, boots sinking soft into the soil.
Inside the equipment shed, Bobby Kessler was still chained by his waist to the iron tow-hitch of the John Deere, gagged with an oily shop rag. His eyes were wide with terror in the dark, straining against his bonds, his chest heaving. Marcus Hartwell wasn't standing guard over him. Marcus had already displaced.
A shadow detached itself from the ancient sweetgum tree near the pump house.
"You're making enough racket to wake the dead, Simone," Marcus's voice cut through the dark, dry as tinder.
He stepped into the dim moonlight, wearing his faded canvas hunting vest over his undershirt. In his left hand, he held his Remington 1100 shotgun; in his right, he carried a heavy spool of green military tripwire and three olive-drab canisters.
"They aren't county deputies coming down the lane, Dad," I said, crouching beside him behind the stacked cordwood. "Vance is dead. A foreign sanitization unit hit the airstrip with sniper fire and pinned the FBI. The group buying up this county is an offshore front for Russian intelligence. They have tactical watercraft coming up the Ocmulgee right now to take this riverbank."
Marcus didn't flinch. He slowly chewed on the corner of his lower lip, looking out toward the dark line of weeping willows that marked the river's edge, three hundred yards south across the lower terrace.
"Figured it was something like that," Marcus said softly. "No local land company spends eighty thousand dollars trying to run an old mechanic off sixty acres of swamp. How many?"
"Four to six on the ground, minimum. Elite contractor or state-level direct action. Suppressed weapons, night vision, thermal optics."
Marcus turned his head, pointing a calloused finger toward the low ground where the irrigation cut met the river channel. "The river's low this time of year. Sandbar extends twenty yards out past the bend. If they're coming in boats, they'll have to throttle down to clear the deadfalls, and they'll beach right at the old cattle wash."
He held up one of the canisters in his hand. It was an old M49A1 surface trip flare, Vietnam vintage, preserved in cosmoline and stored in his root cellar for forty years.
"I got four of these rigged along the high bank," Marcus said. "Strung the wire ankle-high across the willow run. If they trip the line, it burns at forty thousand candlepower for a solid minute. Turns that mud flat into high noon."
"If they have thermal, they'll see your heat signature through those boards," I warned.
"Not if I'm behind the root cellar's concrete wall," Marcus replied, his eyes flashing with the cold, unyielding grit of an engineer who had built combat perimeters under mortar barrages. "You take the high flank on the tractor roof. You got the rifle with the glass. When the light goes up, you take the shooters. I'll sweep anything that breaks toward the house."
"Marcus," I said, catching his shoulder. The rough canvas of his vest was warm against my hand. "This isn't a perimeter defense in the Delta. You don't have air support."
My father looked at me, his weathered face creased by deep lines carved by seventy years of southern sun and stubborn pride. He placed his heavy hand over mine.
"I survived Chu Lai, baby," he whispered. "And nobody runs the Hartwells off their own dirt. Get to your position."
We split without another word.
I scrambled up the iron ladder on the side of the equipment shed, pulling myself onto the corrugated tin roof. The metal was slick with dew. I lay flat on my stomach behind the low lip of the wooden false front, resting the Colt carbine across an iron bracket. I slipped the selector to semi-automatic, adjusted the holographic reticle to minimum brightness, and aimed down toward the black, winding ribbon of the Ocmulgee.
11:58 PM.
Through the mist rising off the water, the low, muffled hum of twin electric outboard motors broke the silence.
Two matte-black, rigid-hulled inflatable boats emerged from the river bend, running without navigation lights. They slipped through the blackwater like water moccasins, sliding over the shallow sandbar before their reinforced bows drove softly into the mud bank beneath the weeping willows.
Six figures stepped out into the knee-deep muck.