I spent four days preparing Thanksgiving dinner in my own home, only for my daughter-in-law to hand me a plate and order, “Dorothy, take this to the den—we need your seat,” while my own son looked down and said nothing—but when I returned to that table without my apron, every smile disappeared. / Chapter 44 / 75

Chapter 44 - The Siege of Blackwood Ridge

Kevin lay belly-down in the freezing mud beneath the rotting framework of the old logging trestle, cold water soaking through his denim jacket and numbing his ribs. Twenty yards to his left, the dry cedar post he had passed seconds earlier had been splintered into matches by three supersonic rounds.

He could hear the tracker moving through the underbrush—slow, methodical, the soft *shuck-shuck* of tactical ripstop fabric sliding against mountain laurel leaves.

"Subject is pinned beneath the flume footing," a voice spoke into a throat microphone, twenty feet above Kevin on the embankment. "He carries an iron tube, dimensions match the target cylinder. Commencing recovery."

Kevin clenched his fists in the mud. He had no weapon. In his panic to draw the trackers away from his mother, he had brought only his pocket knife and the steel canister filled with Gerald’s ledger scraps. He looked down at the canister. *I was supposed to be the man of this family,* he thought bitterly. *For four years I let Beatrice tell me my mother was backward, that the farm was a millstone around our necks, that we needed modern prestige. And here are the men of prestige, hunting me down for sport.*

He heard the gravel slide on the bank above. A black combat boot appeared over the edge of the cribbing.

Kevin coiled his legs, preparing to lunge with his pocket blade the moment the man dropped down—a suicide charge, he knew, but better than taking a bullet in the back of the neck like a cow in a slaughterhouse chute.

*BOOM.*

The roar of a 10-gauge shotgun tore through the morning fog like a cannonade. The concussion shook the timber footings, showering Kevin with rotted splinters.

The tracker on the embankment shrieked as an entire charge of heavy goose shot ripped through the cedar boughs, shredding his tactical vest and hurling him sideways into the blackberry tangle. Before the echo of the blast could fade against the granite face of the ridge, a second roar split the air, demolishing the wooden rail where the man had been aiming his carbine.

Through the white gunsmoke that hung low in the cedar hollow, Dorothy Miller marched forward.

She broke the smoking shotgun over her arm, ejected two massive brass shells that landed in the mud with twin wet plops, and jammed two fresh green cartridges into the smoking chambers with hands that did not tremble by a fraction of a millimeter.

"Get up, Kevin," she commanded, not breaking her stride.

Kevin scrambled out of the mud, wide-eyed, staring at his sixty-seven-year-old mother as if she had descended from the storm clouds. Behind her, Laurent emerged from the spruce cover, leveling an M1 Garand he had hidden beneath a dry rock shelf decades ago during his youth.

The fallen tracker was groaning in the brush, clutching his shattered shoulder, his carbine lying out of reach in the running water of the flume.

Dorothy walked up to the downed man. Her work boots stopped six inches from his masked face. She raised the heavy double-barrel and pointed it squarely between the lenses of his protective goggles.

"Whose bird is in my sky?" Dorothy asked. Her tone was conversational, the voice she used when asking a neighbor if they needed an extra jar of strawberry preserves.

The man wheezed, blood bubbling through his teeth. "You... you old peasant... you don't know what money is behind this..."

Dorothy pulled the left hammer back to full cock. The mechanical *clack* was the loudest sound in the forest. "I know what things cost, young man. I know the price of a bushel of apples, I know the price of winter kerosene, and I know the price of blood spilled on my grandfather's dirt. You have ten seconds to tell me which frequency Von Lange uses, or I will turn your kneecap into red porridge."

The tracker swallowed hard. The arrogance in his eyes dissolved into primal terror. He reached down with trembling fingers, unhooked the encrypted handset from his chest rig, and pressed the orange broadcast button.

"Baron," the tracker whispered into the mic. "The... the targets are armed. The extraction point is compromised."

Dorothy bent down, took the handset from his fingers, and brought it to her mouth.

"Baron Von Lange," Dorothy said evenly. "This is Dorothy Miller. You are trespassing on parcel twelve of the de la Tour patent. If you want this ledger, bring your helicopter down in the lower paddock where the ground is flat. Because if you send another boy into these woods, I will send him back to your black bird in a grain sack."

She released the button, smashed the handset against a granite outcrop, and turned to Laurent. "They have three minutes before they realize their tracking squad is broken. Where is the old dynamite from the quarry excavations?"

Laurent stared at her, his mouth slightly open, before a wide, fierce grin spread across his sun-baked face. "In the dry magazine behind the forge, Dorothy. Five crates of DuPont 40-percent, untouched since 1968."