Chapter 6 - Night Visitors
They came at 2:00 AM on Thursday.
I was awake, my breathing shallow and slow. The motion sensors I had rigged outside sent a silent, vibrating alert to my smartwatch. Three men. They bypassed the reinforced front door and headed straight for the basement windows, exactly as I had predicted.
I heard the soft clink of glass being expertly cut, followed by the heavy, muffled thuds of combat boots hitting the cellar floor.
I slipped on my night-vision goggles. The world turned a crisp, glowing green.
I moved silently down the main staircase, stepping only on the extreme edges of the treads to avoid any creaking. As I reached the basement landing, I saw them. Three massive men, carrying suppressed submachine guns, moving with the careless confidence of predators who thought they were hunting a civilian.
They were wrong.
The first man stepped into the hallway. I dropped from the landing behind him. Before he could turn, I clamped a hand over his mouth, drove my knee into the back of his leg to collapse his balance, and applied a textbook sleeper hold. He thrashed violently for exactly six seconds before going completely limp. I lowered him silently to the ground.
One down.
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The second man heard the scuffle and swung his weapon around, turning on a high-lumen tactical flashlight that nearly blinded my night vision. But he didn't know the house. He tripped over a heavy, antique rug I had intentionally bunched up in the doorway. As he stumbled, I stepped forward, grabbed his weapon by the barrel, forced it upward, and struck him squarely in the throat with the heel of my palm.
He dropped like a stone, clutching his neck, gasping for air.
