Chapter Ten #2
Megan worked the bolt and fired again. A contractor who'd been climbing from the truck bed fell back into it.
"I told you," she said, not taking her eye from the sight. "I never miss."
Levee stared at her for half a second—this ink-covered woman with wild hair and a dead man's rifle, defending his compound like she'd been born to it—and felt something in his chest that he didn't have time to name.
"Hold this position," he said. "I'm going after Pryor."
"Go." She chambered another round. "I've got this."
He believed her.
Levee took Hollow and two brothers out through the basement—a reinforced tunnel that connected the old cotton gin to an equipment shed fifty yards south, an escape route Cottonmouth had built years ago that Pryor's intelligence hadn't found.
They emerged into the predawn gray behind the assault force's position, the sounds of the firefight covering their movement as they circled wide toward the Millard property.
The water tower rose against the lightening sky like a skeletal finger.
And at its base, exactly where Levee had predicted, sat a black SUV with its engine running and a communications antenna mounted on the roof. Through the vehicle's open window, Levee could hear the clipped transmissions of a man coordinating a battle that was slipping away from him.
"—Alpha team, reposition south. Bravo team is pinned on the access road. Charlie, what's your status on the north breach—"
Dennis Pryor. Lean, precise, exactly as described in Levee's intelligence—a former military logistics officer running a firefight from his command vehicle the way he ran everything: by the numbers, by the schedule, by the operational plan that assumed his enemy would behave predictably.
The plan hadn't accounted for a man who thought in structures.
Because a man parked on high ground with no cover was a structure begging to come down.
Levee stepped out of the tree line.
Pryor saw him too late. The logistics officer's hand went for the weapon on his console, and Levee shot it off the dashboard before his fingers touched metal.
"Tell your men to pull back," Levee said.
Pryor's face was tight with pain—not the weapon hand, but close enough to feel the heat of the round. His eyes were calculating even now, running numbers, assessing options. The operations man to the last.
"They won't listen," Pryor said through clenched teeth. "They're committed. The assault—"
"The assault is over." Levee moved closer, Hollow and the brothers fanning out to cover the vehicle.
"Eight of your men are dead on my access road.
Your flanking team is pinned. Your north breach failed because my woman put a rifle round through your driver's skull at forty yards.
" He let that land. "Your operation is a structure with no supports left.
And I'm very good at taking down unsupported structures. "
Something shifted in Pryor's expression—the cold recognition of a professional who understood he'd lost.
"Brandt will send more," he said. "He's got Tully. He's got money. This doesn't end because—"
"I know what Brandt has." Levee raised his weapon. "And I know what he just lost."
Pryor's jaw tightened. The logistics officer who'd coordinated a two-year campaign of arson and intimidation without leaving a pattern looked at the armorer who'd dismantled his operation in a single night and understood, finally, that operational planning meant nothing when the target could read your structure better than you could.
"Tell Brandt—"
"I'm not telling Brandt anything." Levee's voice was quiet. Conversational. The voice of a man stating a structural fact. "He'll figure it out when you don't answer your radio."
The shot was clean.
Dennis Pryor, operations coordinator for Brandt Development Group, died in his command vehicle with his communications array still broadcasting to teams that had already broken and run.
Hollow checked the body. "Clean hit."
"Clear the vehicle. Take his comms equipment, his phone, anything with data." Levee was already turning back toward the compound. "Pryor kept records. A logistics man always keeps records. That's how we find Tully."
They rode back to the compound as the sun cracked the horizon, painting the Delta in shades of copper and blood.
The damage was visible from a quarter mile out—bullet holes stitching the east wall, shattered windows on the ground floor, the north fence torn where the truck had tangled in the wire.
But the building stood. The compound stood.
Brick and iron and the structural integrity of a converted cotton gin that had been reinforced by a man who spent his life making sure things didn't fall down.
Megan was on the front porch.
She had the rifle across her knees and someone else's blood on her boots and a look in her eyes that said she'd crossed a line tonight and wasn't going back.
Levee walked straight to her. She stood, and he pulled her against his chest without a word—one arm around her back, his face in her hair, breathing her in while the adrenaline drained from his system and left something raw and shaking in its place.
"Report," Cottonmouth said from the doorway.
Levee didn't let go of Megan. "Pryor's dead.
His assault force broke when we hit the command vehicle—survivors scattered south.
I count eleven hostiles down, at least four wounded and fled.
" He finally pulled back enough to look at the president.
"Brandt just lost his operations man and his security chief in the same week.
He's got Tully left. One contractor. One layer between him and us. "
"Casualties?"
"Two brothers with minor wounds. A prospect took a graze to the shoulder." Levee paused. "The storage depot and fuel cache are gone."
"They can be rebuilt." Cottonmouth's river-mud eyes swept the compound—the bullet-scarred walls, the broken windows, the brothers moving through the aftermath with the grim efficiency of men who'd defended their home and held it. "This can't be replaced."
"No," Levee said. "It can't."
Megan's hand found his—the left one, the scarred palm with her ink still healing. Her fingers laced through his and held on with the grip of a woman who'd just killed a man to protect something worth keeping.
He held on back.
Across the Delta, Karl Brandt was waking up to a phone that wouldn't ring and a campaign that had just lost its brain. The businessman who'd hired soldiers was running out of soldiers to hire.
One support left.
Then the whole structure comes down.