Chapter 54 - The Strike on Blackwood Ridge
The dual blast of heavy deer slugs roared like a cannon shot inside the kitchen, the orange muzzle flash lighting up the room for a split second. Sixty yards down the slope, the bullhorn was torn from the speaker's hand with an explosive *clack* of shattered plastic and sheared aluminum, the man sprawling backward into the wet clover with a howl of shock.
"Down!" Toby shouted, pulling Marie-Hélène away from the window as a hail of submachine-gun fire ripped through the exterior clapboards, splintering pine siding and shattering the top three panes of the bay window.
Plaster dust fell like fine flour over the table, coating the antique gold coronet and settling onto the cooling tea. But the kitchen walls, built of double-coursed oak logs sheathed in thick limestone aggregate during the early nineteenth century, swallowed the high-velocity rounds with dull thuds. Not a single bullet penetrated the inner room.
"Stefan! Lucas!" Marie-Hélène snapped, her voice cutting through the gunfire with absolute imperial authority. "The lower tunnel! Bring the dispatch rider and the three cases of signal flares! Now!"
The two Swiss soldiers vanished down the cellar stairs with breathtaking speed.
Dorothy didn't reload immediately. She turned to Toby, whose face was pale but steady, his hands working the lever of his Winchester with mechanical precision. "Toby, do you remember what your grandfather showed you behind the dry-house when you were nine?"
The boy's eyes widened. "The drainage valve? The one tied to the retention pond on the upper terrace?"
"The very one," Dorothy said, snapping two more shells into her breach with a sharp, heavy *click*. "The Baron and his friends think they own the legal title to this water shed. Go pull the iron crank on the spillway. Let's see how well their city boots handle two feet of Blackwood mud."
The boy slid out through the back scullery door, melting into the shadows of the woodshed like an animal that knew every root, stone, and depression in the earth.
Marie-Hélène watched him go, then turned to Dorothy, brushing plaster dust from her fur mantle with an expression that was almost joyous. "Madame Miller, your son was an utter fool to marry that girl from town. But your grandson... he is pure granite."
"He's a Miller," Dorothy replied curtly, peering out through the splintered window frame. "He knows what dirt costs."
Below in the orchard, the tactical team was attempting to regroup behind the remaining two operational vehicles, their tactical lights cutting through the kerosene mist. But before they could advance five paces toward the porch, a deep, rumbling groan echoed from the upper ridge behind the house.
It was not thunder. It was the sudden release of eighteen thousand gallons of silted winter runoff from the high retention pond, surging through the drainage flumes Gerald had engineered into the hillside forty years ago.
A wall of brown, freezing mud and dead autumn brush poured down the natural swales of the slope, striking the side of the Suburbans with the force of an avalanche. The heavy four-wheel-drive tires lost all traction on the frozen turf, and within seconds, both remaining vehicles were spun sideways, their wheels buried up to the axles in thick, soupy Blackwood clay.
Shouts of panic erupted from the pasture as the men found themselves thigh-deep in freezing mud, their weapons fouled with silt, their tactical gear weighing them down like lead sinkers in a swamp.
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At that exact moment, the cellar doors at the rear of the barn burst open with a crash. From the dark mouth of the underground ramp emerged two magnificent black draft horses, their harness brasses gleaming in the dark, ridden by two more uniformed Swiss riders bearing long aluminum canisters.
With a high, whistling hiss, four military-grade white-phosphorus flares shot up into the low cloud cover above the pasture, turning the entire farm into an arena of blazing, magnesium-bright daylight that left the intruders completely blind and exposed.
