23:25 EST.
The rain had begun to fall—a fine, freezing drizzle that slickened the winding gravel service roads along the lower Potomac River bluffs in Great Falls.
Tearing down the river corridor at eighty miles per hour, their red and blue high-intensity halogen flashers painting the wet oaks in sweeping arcs of emergency color, came our four armored military tactical vehicles!
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Ahead of us, rising against the dark Virginia sky, blazed the lower river boundary of the **Mercer Sovereign Homestead**—the five-hundred-acre timber tract surveyed by my grandfather eighty years ago.
Tonight, however, the peaceful river bluffs were under private military siege.
The decorative timber security gates had been ripped clean off their stone pillars by heavy steel tow straps.
Parked across my grandfather’s lower clover meadows were three heavy commercial crane trucks and two industrial drilling rigs bearing the private corporate logo of **Apex Strategic Demolition**—an offshore contracting shell registered in Vaduz, Liechtenstein!
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Around the open entrance of the old limestone carriage cellar—the primary surface cover for Valve Station Ten—eight private paramilitary contractors in sterile charcoal tactical nylon stood guard, their suppressed carbines held at low-ready!
From the depths of the stone cellar, the deafening, bone-shattering scream of industrial diamond-tipped core drills chewed through four feet of reinforced concrete:
*SKRRRRR-ROAR-GRIND.*
Thick plumes of gray pulverized slurry and cooling water sprayed across the grass!
Standing beside the drilling controls, wrapped in an eight-thousand-dollar cashmere greatcoat, his silver hair whipped by the exhaust fans, holding an open satellite terminal in his hand…
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Was eighty-year-old **Former Chief Justice Arthur Sterling-Vance**.
Beside him stood three Swiss factoring litigators, clutching leather briefcases, checking their watches as the midnight deadline ticked down!
“FLARE AND BREACH!” Admiral Mercer roared through the vehicle intercom.
Our lead armored BearCat did not touch the brakes.
It accelerated straight through the ruined timber gates at forty-five miles per hour!
*KABOOOOM.*
*CRASH-ROAR-SHATTER.*
The industrial security stanchions were obliterated inward, sheared off at their concrete footings, sending steel pipes and warning signs tumbling across the grass!
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The four tactical vehicles slid to an aggressive, synchronized halt in a semi-circle around the carriage cellar, their forty-thousand-lumen searchlights pinning Arthur Sterling-Vance and his contractors in blinding, incandescent daylight!
