Before Vance could set the cylinder into his padded courier case, the power lines humming overhead along the highway access road died with a sharp, concussive electrical POP.
Advertisement
The incandescent bulbs inside the sawmill extinguished simultaneously, plunging the vast, timber-scented room into absolute, pitch-black darkness.
Through the cracked pine boards of the western wall, two high-intensity, seventy-thousand-lumen xenon searchlights ignited from the timber ridge forty yards above our yard, pinning the sawmill doors in a blinding, incandescent cage of white brilliance.
TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!
A volley of suppressed, armor-piercing 7.62x51mm rifle fire tore through the dry hemlock siding, chewing through three-inch oak planks like dry cardboard, throwing a blizzard of white wood splinters and shredded insulation across our heads.
Advertisement
"Down!" First Sergeant Ray roared, diving flat onto the sawdust floor, his carbine spitting three-round bursts through the window openings as a second volley punched through the metal chimney of our woodstove.
