Chapter 17 - The Stand at the Cabin
The night air outside the log cabin was freezing, the wind howling through the tall Virginia pines as five veteran Marines took up defensive positions along the reinforced stone perimeter wall. We didn't need thermal night-vision goggles to know where Julian’s hired hit squad was moving; decades of combat experience in dense foliage allowed us to track the snapping twigs and rustling leaves with pinpoint accuracy.
"Remember the rules of engagement," I whispered over our short-range tactical radios as I crouched behind a cord of stacked firewood, my Colt .45 trained on the tree line. "We want Vance alive to face the federal judge. Cripple his shooters, neutralize the threat, but keep the primary target breathing. Execute on my command."
Out of the shadows stepped six armed contractors clad in black tactical gear, moving toward the front porch with suppressed carbines raised. Waiting thirty yards behind them, safe near the treeline, stood Julian Vance himself, wearing a heavy winter coat, his face contorted with manic, desperate fury as he watched his men close in on the cabin.
"Now," I said into the radio.
The night exploded into blinding light and deafening sound. Marcus triggered the high-lumen tactical flash-bang array mounted along the cabin’s roofline, instantly bathing the yard in ten thousand lumens of blinding white light accompanied by concussion blasts that knocked the lead mercenaries off their feet.
Before they could recover their night vision or raise their weapons, we struck with clinical, overwhelming violence. Rossi fired a non-lethal beanbag round from his Remington that struck the lead shooter dead in the solar plexus, folding him onto the frozen grass like a wet blanket. I vaulted over the firewood stack, moving with a speed that belied my age, intercepting the second shooter before he could shoulder his carbine.
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I drove the butt of my pistol into his jaw, disarming him instantly before sweeping his legs and pinning him to the ground with a zip-tie restraint around his wrists. To my left, Marcus and two of our Force Recon brothers dismantled the remaining contractors with ruthless close-quarters efficiency, using the terrain and darkness to systematically disarm and neutralize every single hired gun without firing a single lethal round.
Within ninety seconds, Julian Vance’s fifty-thousand-dollar hit squad was lying face down on the freezing grass, groaning in pain, completely immobilized by five retired Marines who had been fighting wars since before the contractors were born.
