Chapter 5 - THE AMBUSH AT BLACK CREEK
The drive from Fort Moore to the Blackwood County Courthouse took me along State Route 28—a two-lane strip of cracked asphalt cutting through three hundred miles of dense Georgia pine timber and stagnant cypress swamps.
I was driving a customized 1998 Ford F-250 with a turbo-diesel engine, heavy steel cattle guards bolted to the frame, and four-wheel-drive low gearing that could haul eight tons through mud. In the passenger seat lay my tactical go-bag, containing four flashbang grenades, two spare magazines, a trauma kit, and an encrypted satellite radio linked directly to Marcus’s channel.
It was one-forty-five in the afternoon. The sky had turned the color of bruised slate, heavy with the suffocating humidity that precedes a severe Southern thunderstorm.
The radio crackled on the seat beside me.
"Sinclair, this is Evans. Over."
I tapped the push-to-talk button on the steering wheel. "Go ahead, Marcus."
"We're forty miles out from the Port of Savannah," Marcus said, his voice clear through the encrypted burst transmission. "Vance ran the port’s manifest through federal customs. The *Caspian Star* has moved its departure window up. They’re casting off lines at fifteen-hundred hours, not midnight."
"Catherine knows," I said. "She knows we pulled Rosalie out of Fairview. She’s accelerating the timeline."
"If that ship hits international waters, those containers are gone," Marcus said. "We’re going to have to breach the perimeter hot. No covert entry. We hit the gate, isolate Kane, and secure the manifests."
"Do it," I said. "Don't let that vessel clear the mouth of the Savannah River."
"What’s your twenty, Captain?"
"I'm ten miles south of Blackwood," I said, glancing in the rearview mirror. "Crossing the Black Creek bridge."
"Watch your six," Marcus warned. "Ward’s radio traffic on the county sheriff frequency went silent twenty minutes ago. The whole department just cleared their dispatch channels."
"Understood. Sinclair out."
I lowered the radio.
The Black Creek bridge was an old two-lane span constructed from rusty steel girders and rotting wooden timbers, crossing a swollen, black-water bayou two miles outside the town limits. Dense stands of tupelo and bald cypress trees grew right up to the edge of the road, their branches draped in thick, gray clumps of Spanish moss that looked like tattered burial shrouds hanging over the water.
As my front tires hit the metal expansion joint of the bridge, I saw it.
Two hundred yards ahead, parked diagonally across both lanes of the narrow exit ramp, was a heavy Mack commercial dump truck, its steel bed raised at a forty-five-degree angle, blocking the entire roadway.
I tapped the brakes.
In the rearview mirror, fifty yards behind me, an unmarked black Chevrolet Tahoe swerved out from behind the tree line, accelerating rapidly, its high-beam halogen lights flashing once, twice—a tactical signal.
A classic box ambush.
No civilian traffic for three miles. No cell phone towers for ten. A bridge with three-foot concrete guardrails on either side and thirty feet of alligator-infested mud below.
I didn't hit the brakes again.
I mashed the diesel accelerator flat against the floorboard.
The seven-point-three-liter engine roared, turbo whistling like an incoming mortar shell, eighteen hundred pounds of steel torque dropping directly into the rear axle. The F-250 leaped forward, tires screaming against the wet asphalt.
The dump truck was stationary, but its heavy steel bumper was pointed at an angle. If I hit it head-on, my engine block would be driven back into my lap, crushing both of my legs.
I didn't aim for the bumper. I aimed for the rear left tire assembly—the single weak pivot point of a three-axle chassis.
From behind the dump truck, two men stepped out.
They didn't wear police uniforms. They wore tactical nylon windbreakers, ballcaps pulled low, and carried semi-automatic 12-gauge shotguns.
*Jackson Vance and Derrick Kane’s private security muscle.*
The first man raised his shotgun.
*Crack-crack-crack!*
Three heavy copper-plated buckshot rounds slammed into my windshield. The reinforced safety glass spiderwebbed into an opaque white sheet, but the Kevlar-laminated film held.
I ducked my head below the dashboard, steering blind for two seconds, keeping the truck’s tires locked in the center crown of the road by the vibration through the steering column.
*BOOM!*
The heavy steel cattle guard of my F-250 slammed into the rear axle of the dump truck at forty-five miles per hour.
The impact was violent enough to pop the safety belts off their mountings. My forehead clipped the steering wheel, hot blood instantly welling up above my left eyebrow, but the six-thousand-pound truck did what it was built to do: the steel cattle guard sheared through the dump truck’s hydraulic brake lines, snapped the leaf spring shackles, and violently shoved the seven-ton truck twelve feet to the right, clearing a four-foot opening along the concrete guardrail.
My truck bounced off the bridge rail with a screech of tearing metal, sparks raining across the hood, tires blowing out on the right side, but the momentum carried me through the gap.
I slammed the transmission into park, grabbed the tactical go-bag from the seat, kicked the driver’s door open, and rolled out onto the wet asphalt behind the cover of the rear tire.
Behind me, the black Tahoe screeched to a halt twenty yards back.
Three men jumped out, their handguns drawn.
The shooter with the shotgun—a thick-necked man with a shaved head and a scar running from his ear to his lip—racked another round into his 12-gauge, stepping around the wreckage of the dump truck.
"Sinclair!" he screamed, his voice carrying over the sound of the rain starting to drum against the metal girders. "You should have stayed in the sand, boy! Catherine Miller pays two hundred thousand for your head today!"
I didn't answer with words.
I pulled a flashbang grenade from the side pocket of my vest, ripped the safety pin out with my teeth, cooked the spoon for one second, and banked it off the underside of the dump truck’s fuel tank.
The grenade detonated with an ear-splitting, one-hundred-and-seventy-decibel crack, accompanied by a six-million-candela burst of blinding white magnesium fire.
The man with the shaved head shrieked, dropping his shotgun, his hands flying to his ruined retinas as the concussive shock wave blew out his eardrums.
I broke cover.
I didn't fire from the hip. I raised my Glock 19 in a standard two-handed Weaver stance, stepping forward with smooth, balanced strides.
*Two rounds to the chest. One to the pelvic girdle.*
The shaved-head shooter dropped like an empty coat, his body hitting the asphalt before his shotgun stopped bouncing.
The three men from the Tahoe opened fire.
Nine-millimeter rounds snapped through the air around my ears, tearing through the fiberglass fender of my truck, pinging off the steel frame.
I dropped behind the dump truck’s rear wheels, slid under the chassis through a puddle of diesel fuel and rainwater, and emerged on the blind side of their vehicle.
One of the shooters—a younger man wearing a sheriff’s department duty belt without a badge—was leaning over the Tahoe’s hood, squinting through the rain, trying to see through the smoke of the flashbang.
I rose behind him.
My left arm wrapped around his throat in a tight, vascular rear-naked choke. My right hand clamped over his mouth, swallowing his scream. I rotated my hips, took his balance backward, and drove him head-first into the steel edge of the Tahoe’s open door.
The sound of his skull fracturing against the frame was sharp, final. He went limp in my grip.
The remaining two shooters panicked.
"Where is he?" one yelled, backing away toward the bridge rail, his gun sweeping wildly across the empty road. "Where the hell did he go?"
I stepped out from behind the open door of the Tahoe.
The rain was falling in sheets now, cold and heavy, washing the blood from my forehead down into my eyes. My tactical vest was soaked, but my hands were completely steady.
"Drop the weapon," I said.
The shooter on the left—Jackson Vance, the dishonorably discharged Marine—turned toward me, his face twisted in a feral snarl, bringing his weapon up.
I didn't wait for his finger to find the trigger.
*Double-tap.*
Two 124-grain hollow-point rounds punched through his sternum, blowing out his fourth and fifth ribs, severing the ascending aorta. He stumbled backward four steps, hit the low concrete guardrail of the bridge, and flipped backward, tumbling thirty feet down into the churning, black water of Black Creek.
A heavy splash echoed up from the bayou. Then silence, save for the steady hiss of the rain.
The last man—a local private security guard no older than twenty-two—dropped his gun onto the wet asphalt. He fell to his knees, his hands held high above his head, his teeth chattering so violently he could barely form syllables.
"Don't... don't shoot! Please, man, don't shoot! I was just paid five hundred bucks to drive the truck! That's all! Just drive the damn truck!"
I walked up to him, my boots sloshing through the red-stained rainwater.
I kicked his discarded handgun over the edge of the bridge into the swamp below.
I grabbed the collar of his windbreaker, hauled him to his feet, and slammed him against the side of the Tahoe.
"What time does the conservatorship hearing start?" I asked.
"Three... three o'clock!" he sobbed, tears mixing with the rain on his cheeks. "Courtroom 3B! Judge Hollister’s private chambers! Amanda and Catherine are already there! They brought the paperwork!"
"Where is Hannah?"
"They... they locked her in the county holding cell in the basement!" the kid cried. "Catherine found out she talked to you at the hospital! They took her phone, and Amanda told Ward to hold her on a bogus charge until the papers were signed!"
I checked my watch.
It was two-fifteen.
Forty-five minutes.
I shoved the kid into the back seat of the Tahoe, pulled two heavy plastic flex-cuffs from my go-bag, and strapped his wrists securely to the steel child-seat anchors in the floor.
"If you move before the state troopers get here," I said, "I'll come back and throw you over that rail after Vance."
I slammed the door.
The keys were still in the Tahoe’s ignition. The engine was running, the dashboard navigation display glowing blue through the gloom.
May you like
I climbed into the driver’s seat, dropped the transmission into drive, swerved around the shattered wreckage of my old truck, and accelerated north toward the Blackwood County Courthouse at ninety-five miles per hour.
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