Lang was deciding how well the observation would be received when Grumps leapt up from his customary spot under Manfred's chair and dashed toward the front door, barking.
'Another one of those big rats?' Gurt asked.
Lang was getting to his feet. 'Possums. No, I don't think so.'
He took a step in Grumps's direction. Through the window, the crescent moon was a diadem on the pond's black velvet. Lang thought he saw one, two, no, three shapes blot out the reflection and dissolve into the night.
What the hell?
The neighbors were definitely not the type to come calling uninvited.
But… Shit!
The cab, the fucking taxicab!
Someone had been waiting, knowing Lang would return to his condo sooner or later. All they'd had to do was follow the cab to the place he had met Gurt and then trail along behind until they were led here. Lang had never thought to look back to see if they had had a tail.
He had ignored agency training. He knew of more than one instance where the omission resulted in no chance to repeat the mistake.
Lang made a dive across the room, knocking the table onto its side among the clattering and shattering of dishes, glasses and silverware.
Gurt knew better than to take the time to ask questions. Instead, she snatched a bewildered Manfred from his chair and darted behind the overturned table as Lang joined them.
A hailstorm of bullets shook the frame house.
Splinters of wood, glass shards and bits of furniture flew through the air as though by the hand of an angry poltergeist. Sharp porcelain bits from the dinner dishes danced and hopped across the floor, all to the accompaniment of gunfire.
Lang snatched Manfred away from Gurt, shielding the child as best he could with his own body.
He alternately cursed himself for his inattention and was grateful to the cabin's prior owner for leaving the ugly but thick oak table.
The sheer helplessness was maddening. The closet where he kept the double-barrel shotgun he used to frighten off rather than harm deer marauding the summer vegetable garden was too far away. He'd never make it unharmed through the fusillade. Gurt's weapon was no doubt in her purse, useless in the bedroom.
It was quiet, the calm of a hurricane's eye, Lang was sure. The only sound was the terrified sobs of the little boy clinging to Lang as though he might fall into the abyss if he let go.
The stillness was more frightening than the storm.
Lang peeled the little fingers loose and handed the trembling child to Gurt. 'Try to keep him quiet. I'm going to try to get to the shotgun before they charge the house.'
She took her son, jiggling him gently. 'It is not likely you will make it.'
Gurt the optimist.
Lang was already on his way, crawling commando fashion across a floor littered with a forest of sharp objects. 'What else do you suggest, fighting them off with spoons?'
Lang stood and almost fell the last few feet, snatched open the door and was jamming shells into the twin barrels when the bullet-ridden door slammed open.
In a single motion, he swiveled and dropped into a squat, groaning at the pain the sudden movement caused.
He saw only a blur in the doorway framed by the night, a smudge of camo shirt and pants, white face and a weapon.
He pulled one trigger.
The image staggered backward as he was pulling the second.
The twin blasts rebounded from the enclosure of walls and set his ears ringing and his eyes watering from the sting of cordite.
The open threshold was empty. The riddled door moaned as it swung drunkenly on its remaining hinge.
Lang jammed two more shells into place, dragging his cast as he stumbled toward Gurt and Manfred.
Suddenly, the entire outside seemed to light up with a wavering orange glow.
Lang didn't have to guess what was coming. Molotov cocktails, bottles filled with gasoline, fumes compressed by gas-soaked rags for fuses. They would explode like napalm upon impact just as they had when used sixty years ago by Russian partisans against German tanks.
And this cabin was a lot more flammable than any Panzer.
Lang glanced around.
He saw no options.
VII.
Lamar County, Georgia
Five Minutes Earlier
Larry Henderson considered himself a farmer just like his daddy and his daddy's daddy.
In Grandpa's day, cotton had been the crop. He had come home from fighting the Germans to find a combination of boll weevil and long-fibered Indian cotton grown in Texas had pretty much put him out of business. Subsequent efforts at peanuts, soybeans and even a peach orchard had provided a subsistence living, mostly through government subsidies.
Then the BIG CORPORATIONS (Larry always thought of them in capital letters) had bought up thousands of acres on which to not plant anything and the bulk of the county's allotment shares went to them. Gave new meaning to the lines from that old song, 'He don' plant 'taters n' he don' plant cotton and them that does is soon forgotten.'
By the time Daddy come along, Grandpa had had to adapt. He and Daddy planted corn. Good, sweet corn that fermented in the crick that ran through the property. Boil off a gallon or two and Daddy always said it was the best white in middle Georgia, well aged if the customer got there late in the day.
Daddy sold enough to buy a secondhand Ford every other year to make the weekly run to Barnesville, Hawkinsville and all those other 'villes where the thirst for good white lightnin' was never quenched.
By the time Daddy passed away, the coalition of Baptist preachers and bootleggers wasn't as strong as it used to be and the county went wet. Folks stopped drinking white. Instead, they bought bourbon, vodka, scotch. Government whiskey with the stamp on the bottle's cap.
The corn business was as dead as cotton and it was time to adapt again.
That's when Larry learned about marijuana, that five-leaved devil's weed folks up in Atlanta paid good money for.
The crick nourished the plants the same as it had fermented the corn. And it didn't take half the tending to. It grew like a weed, mostly because it was a weed.
Problem was the trouble what went with it. In Grandpa and Daddy's day, the local sheriff would bust up a still every once in a while, particularly around election time. Oh, he'd let word slip out a day or so in advance so everybody could go hide in the woods and nobody got hurt. He even arrested Daddy a couple of times, before he let him go. After all, being jailed for making good whiskey wasn't a shame, not like breaking a real law.
But marijuana was different.
Folks did get hurt.
There were the dealers in Atlanta, the ones Larry sold wholesale to. Their big shiny cars might as well have a sign on them telling the world what they did for a living. He never could see their eyes, because of the sunglasses they wore day or night. How was a man supposed to do business when he couldn't see the other man's eyes?
Larry'd heard stories about how these men would kill someone over a few ounces. He hoped they were just rumors but something in his gut told him not.
And the damn DEA would come down from Atlanta and raise hell. Those stupid McCracken boys, down toward
