Surgeon General Emeritus of the United States Navy.
Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Mercer Senior’s surviving younger brother.
Beside Admiral Mercer walked **United States Attorney Marcus Cooper**, Chief Federal Prosecutor and Special Admiralty Master, holding an unsealed, four-hundred-page federal grand jury indictment stamped with the raised red-wax dry seal of the **DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY // SPECIAL ADMIRALTY CHANCERY**.
And trotting through the doorway onto the crimson runner, his massive golden head held high, his amber eyes scanning Ryan Vance’s throat with silent, predatory discipline…
Advertisement
Was Barnaby.
An eighty-pound retired military working dog. A Belgian Malinois whose dark muzzle bore the jagged white scars of combat operations across sixty miles of subterranean bedrock.
Barnaby trotted straight down the center aisle, passed the paralyzed guests, mounted the three limestone steps of the chancel, stopped directly beside where nine-year-old Amelia stood in her velvet dress, sat squarely upon his haunches in textbook mechanical symmetry, and let out a soft, contented sigh as his heavy golden tail gave one single, definitive thump against the floorboards:
*thump.*
Amelia lowered the microphone, reaching her small hand down to bury her fingers into the thick golden fur:
“Good doggie, Barnaby,” Amelia whispered softly:
“The watch holds true.”
Vice Admiral David Mercer stepped to the center of the altar steps.
The seventy-four-year-old four-star Admiral snapped his polished leather bridge shoes together with an audible *CRACK* against the limestone, looked at the trembling groom groveling at the communion rail, turned forty-five degrees toward where I stood in my rain-soaked denim jacket at the rear of the church, and brought his white-gloved right hand up to an unyielding, razor-sharp military salute:
“**Chancellor on deck!**” Admiral Mercer boomed across the chapel.
His voice was sixty decibels of mountain quarry explosive, reverberating through the stone arches like heavy naval artillery:
“Annie Eleanor Mercer.”
“Master Trustee, The 1944 Mercer Sovereign Lineal Charter.”
