Chapter 27 - The Master Craftsman’s Trap
The surface of Vance Ridge had become a field of fire and raining embers.
Through the two remaining cameras, I watched the foreign strike team—clad in white-and-gray alpine camo—advance toward the ruins of the main house. They moved with textbook military discipline, clearing the rubble with flashbangs and short bursts from their suppressed bullpup rifles.
They reached the open hole where the living room floor had collapsed.
Their lead scout, a massive operative carrying a thermal imaging scope, crouched beside the exposed edge of the limestone shaft. He raised his hand, signaling the rest of his team to converge on the opening. They were preparing to drop an industrial-grade shaped demolition charge down the throat of the well.
"Watch the camera on the well house," Arthur murmured, holding a brass electrical key in his left hand.
"What did you put in the walls, Grandpa?" I asked, mesmerized by the cold efficiency of his preparations.
"Black powder is messy," Arthur whispered. "Dynamite gets unstable after ten years. But forty tons of pressurized grain dust from the old silos, mixed with liquid oxygen conduits run from the medical storage locker?"
He jammed the key into a wall-mounted slot and turned it clockwise ninety degrees.
"That's just good carpentry."
On the monitor, the vents surrounding the foundation didn't explode—they hissed. A dense, blinding cloud of fine white particulate matter billowed out of the basement windows, wrapping the entire perimeter of the house in an opaque, swirling fog.
The foreign operatives halted, their laser sights scattering harmlessly against the dense cloud. Their leader shouted into his radio, his men backing up toward the tree line.
Then Arthur picked up a flare gun from the desk, pulled the trigger on the wall intercom, and addressed the men on the surface.
"Welcome to Vance Ridge," Arthur said softly.
He pulled the lever that fired a single magnesium flare directly into the center of the dust cloud from an automated roof-mounted tube.
The explosion was silent for a fraction of a second. Then the entire screen flared into blinding, pure-white fury.
The atmospheric blast wave tore the remaining walls of the 150-year-old Vance family manor into matchsticks, launching pine timbers, granite fireplace stones, and galvanized roofing sheets two hundred feet into the air. The shockwave rattled the bunker beneath our feet like a toy inside a tin can.
When the dust began to clear on the infrared camera, nothing was left standing above ground. The tractor shed, the barn, the porch where I had learned to whittle—all of it had been erased. The bodies of the foreign strike team lay scattered across the clearing like broken mannequins, thrown against the trunks of the smoking pines.
Arthur let out a long, slow breath of cigar smoke.
May you like
"That clears the yard," he said, turning back to face the room. "Now let's go see what's left in the basement."
***
