Marcus Vance lunged across the floor, shielding the cylinder beneath his chest against the concrete foundation, his tactical sidearm clearing leather in the dark.
"They didn't come to negotiate, Harold!" Vance yelled over the deafening crackle of splintering wood. "That's von Hauff's private tactical recovery team! They're using thermal imaging sights from the high tree stands!"
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I didn't cower in the sawdust.
The seventy-year-old mountain timberman inside me took over with cold, mechanical clarity.
I rolled behind the colossal, ten-foot cast-iron carriage of our 1952 Corinth commercial circular saw—a twelve-ton assembly of solid steel that had stopped falling red oak logs for fifty years. Beside my hand sat the heavy master lever for our steam-driven auxiliary emergency generator—an ancient Caterpillar diesel engine fed by two thousand gallons of heating oil stored in an elevated tank beneath the sawdust silo.
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Chapter 1My husband looked me in the eyes and said, “You wanted to be a mother, so act like one,”..."Thomas!" I yelled through the din of the automatic fire. "The mill race flume! Open the secondary drain gate!"
Thomas scrambled across the floorboards on his belly, reaching the cast-iron valve wheel of the water flume. He seized the iron spokes, hauling clockwise with every ounce of muscle in his shoulders.
SCREEECH-CLANG!
A hundred thousand gallons of diverted mountain river water erupted through the timber sluice beneath the sawmill floor, roaring down the steep gravel flume into the yard, turning the driveway into a raging, two-foot-deep torrent of mud, freezing slush, and rolling granite boulders that instantly washed the front tires of the attackers' two armored Mercedes G-Wagens fifty feet down the ravine!
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A high-pitched, furious scream in German echoed from the tree line as the lead SUV rolled forty degrees onto its side into the creek bed.
"Move!" I barked, grabbing the heavy Winchester shotgun from behind the Corinth frame.
