I stepped into the lane behind the squad car, grabbed the heavy five-gallon steel emergency flare cannister sitting in the open trunk well, and brought the flat iron base down with all my weight across the cruiser’s auxiliary roof light bar.
The thick polycarbonate casing shattered with an explosive crack. High-voltage wiring snapped, showering bright blue sparks across the wet trunk lid as the high-intensity red flasher shorted out directly into the vehicle's secondary electrical bus.
Garrett whipped around, his service pistol clearing leather before his boots fully pivoted.
"Step off!" he roared, his weapon coming up to center mass.
"Shoot me, Garrett, and you trip the federal crash relay on my breast transponder," I said, holding the heavy steel cannister at my side, my boots planted firmly in the center of the asphalt. "You know the protocol. The moment an advance officer’s locator drops to zero telemetry within five hundred yards of a presidential route, the lead Suburban initiates immediate emergency evasive braking."
His finger hovered on the trigger guard. The rain ran in dark rivulets down the brim of his county campaign hat, dripping onto his collar.
"You're bluffing, Miller. You don't have an active relay. Your dash unit is dead."
"The unit on the dash is dead," I answered, keeping my voice hard and flat against the rising scream of the approaching sirens. "The secondary transponder in my left boot sole is hard-wired to the district dispatch board in Philadelphia. The moment you cut the line or put a round through me, the lead driver gets a red abort light on his heads-up display. He won't hit this bridge. He'll throw the convoy into an immediate J-turn at the culvert."
Garrett’s jaw tightened. He glanced down at the mud caking my boots, then up toward the bend where the sweep of white headlights was already illuminating the tops of the hemlocks.
"Vance owns the route," Garrett hissed, his voice dropping into a desperate, furious rasp. "The county board approved the maintenance bypass. You think Philadelphia cares about an advance scout who couldn't keep his paperwork straight with the sheriff?"
"Philadelphia doesn't care about the paperwork," I said, stepping forward until the barrel of his sidearm was less than four feet from my chest. "They care about the forty-two-ton weight limit on this arch. Vance told you this was a tactical containment maneuver to reroute the President into a private interrogation zone at the quarry. He lied to you, Garrett."
The officer’s eyes flickered toward the dark bridge deck behind him, where the two massive flatbed trailers sat silent across the crown.
"He didn't lie," Garrett said, but the muzzle of his pistol dipped half an inch. "We're holding the convoy until the state committee confirms the detour jurisdiction. It’s an administrative hold."
"Those flatbeds are loaded with twelve tons of scrap pig iron each," I said, pulling the carbon inspection sheet from my pocket with my free hand and holding it open in the glare of his headlights. "Add the presidential armored carrier, and you're putting seventy tons on a forty-year-old span designed for half that load. The moment the lead vehicle touches that concrete, the expansion joints are going to shear. You aren't holding the motorcade, Garrett. You're the detonator."
The distant roar of the supercharged engines suddenly shifted pitch, the sound echoing off the rock cut as the convoy cleared the final turn before the straightaway. The high beams of the lead vehicle—a massive, blacked-out Suburban with heavy steel push bumpers—burst into view two hundred yards down the asphalt, its high-intensity strobes cutting blinding paths through the fog.
Garrett stood frozen in the glare, his silhouette pinned against the running cruiser.
Behind him, the dark bulk of the trailers blocked the road entirely, an immovable wall of steel waiting above the gorge.
If I couldn't get the carrier frequency open in the next ten seconds, the driver of that lead vehicle would assume Garrett’s cruiser was a standard county escort escorting them onto the bridge, and he would accelerate straight into the trap.
CHAPTER 3: The Flare On The Asphalt
The twin beams of the lead tactical Suburban cut through the curtain of rain, washing the wet asphalt in blinding white. The engine roar shook the guardrail cables against my ribs. In three seconds, the driver would register the unlit bulk of the flatbed trailers spanning the deck. In four, eighty thousand pounds of steel, armor plating, and human cargo would slam into an engineered deadfall designed to drop sixty feet into the Blackwood Gorge.
Garrett’s weapon stayed pinned to my chest, his finger white on the guardrail of the trigger. His eyes darted between me and the oncoming headlights, caught in the vacuum of his own orders.
I didn't wait for his doubt to turn into a trigger pull.
I pivoted on my left heel, swung the five-gallon emergency flare cannister around with both arms, and hurled it through the open front passenger window of Garrett’s idling patrol car. The heavy iron base struck the auxiliary relay box mounted under the dashboard.