Chapter 24 - The Perimeter Checked
Damon did not return to Mrs. Gable’s water heater. Instead, he drove three miles beyond his home, pulling off into a dense thicket of spruce trees along an access road that overlooked the entrance to his subdivision.
He shut off the engine, cracked the driver’s side window half an inch, and retrieved a pair of compact 10x42 military binoculars from under the seat. For two uninterrupted hours, he watched the crossroads.
His training was methodical. He cataloged every vehicle entering the residential development: the yellow school bus, the mail truck, two sedans driven by elderly women, and a local landscaping pickup. Nothing out of the ordinary. Yet Kowalski was not an amateur. If Kowalski was in the area, he would not mount a brazen daylight assault on a residential home unless he had established complete dominance over the local grid.
At 1:15 PM, Damon fired up the truck and drove home via a serpentine route, checking three separate turnaround points to confirm he was not being tailed.
When he pulled into his driveway, the house stood peaceful under the midday sun. The wind chimes on the porch clinked gently in the breeze. Evan was at school until 3:00 PM; Sarah was downtown at the community library where she volunteered three afternoons a week.
Damon stepped out of the truck, leaving the driver’s door unlocked. He did not go straight to the front porch. Instead, he walked the perimeter of the half-acre lot.
He checked the soil near the rear crawlspace vent: undisturbed.
He checked the hairline thread of invisible monofilament he had rigged along the back fence gate four years ago: intact.
He checked the electrical meter on the side of the house: the small strip of gray tape he kept across the latch was unsevered.
Nothing had breached the perimeter. Yet.
Damon entered through the garage, sliding the heavy bolt shut behind him. He walked straight to the wooden workbench, reached behind the row of hanging pipe wrenches, and depressed a hidden brass catch. A false panel dropped open, revealing a steel safe embedded directly into the concrete foundation.
He dialed the four-digit mechanical combination without looking. The heavy door swung out with a muted click.
Inside lay the remnants of Ghost-Six: an HK416 compact carbine with an integral suppressor, eight thirty-round magazines loaded with subsonic armor-piercing rounds, a thermal imaging scope, three flashbang grenades, and two encrypted tactical transceivers.
Damon did not pick up the carbine. He stared at it for a long, quiet minute. The metal gleamed under the fluorescent tube light, sterile and merciless. Bringing this steel out meant opening the door to hell. But Kowalski was already knocking.
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He picked up a handheld frequency scanner, set it to sweep local UHF/VHF bands, and plugged it into a charging port. If Kowalski’s strike team moved into the valley, their encrypted comms would leave an electromagnetic ripple. Damon intended to catch the wave before it broke against his home.
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