Page 63 of Faultline

"I'll be there before dawn. Rhys, I need Marc on the highway approach. If these vehicles are staging out of Palmer, they're using the bridge road. Marc's got the best vantage from the department lot."

Rhys agrees. The call ends the way calls end between people who've already planned for the worst.

The phone goes on the porch rail.

My land sits in a hollow between two ridgelines, the natural depression that drew my grandfather to this ground. Protected from wind, old-growth spruce dense on the south slope, the clearing ringed by birch and second growth. Invisible from the road until you're past the last switchback.

For generations, that geography meant shelter. Privacy. A quiet that doesn't exist in places where the land belongs to someone who's never stood on it.

Now the geography means something else. The hollow that shelters the cabin also limits sight lines. The ridgelines that block the wind also create dead ground where an approach stays invisible until the last hundred yards. The spruce on the south slope is dense enough to conceal movement on foot.

The birch screen that used to block the view north toward the staging area burned with the equipment shed. The north approach is exposed now.

The creek crossing that feeds the eastern drainage is the only natural choke point. A single obstacle there would stop vehicle traffic without stopping foot traffic.

The notebook with the crude defensive map is still on the shelf beside my father's final log entries. Drawn after the brake lines, when the combat engineer surfaced long enough to assess the ground and then went back to sleep.

That assessment was theoretical. A reflex, triggered by tampered equipment, mapping vulnerabilities because the training demands it. Filed and forgotten because the threat was still manageable within the framework of property crime.

A severed padlock and fresh tire tracks at dawn change everything.

The notebook comes off the shelf. Clean page. The pencil moves with a certainty I haven't allowed myself in years, laying down the land in plain view with the deliberate hand of someone who learned to read contour maps before he learned to read a profit-and-loss statement.

Three access points. Each one gets a symbol I haven't drawn since I was wearing a uniform.

The main road from town: gated, cattle guard, post-and-wire fence. Four seconds to defeat at vehicle speed. I write the number and circle it. Four seconds is the gap between a perimeter and a suggestion.

The service road: gate compromised. The cut lock proves the chain and padlock are delay, not deterrent. Useless against anyone willing to go around on foot through the second-growth timber that flanks both sides.

The north ridge trail: foot access only. Connects to the sold property. From there, logging roads to the highway.

This is the weak point I've been watching since Frank signed the papers. The two SUVs on my service road this morning confirmed what I've suspected since the corridor pattern emerged on the assessor's plat map. They're not planning around one approach. They're mapping all of them.

I spend the morning on the ground with the chainsaw and the truck.

The first thing I do is drop three spruce across the service road at intervals, angling the trunks so they block the lane without closing the road entirely.

A vehicle can't pass. A man on foot has to climb over. Every obstacle is a delay, and every delay is information. If someone moves those trees, I'll know about it before they reach the overlook.

The north ridge trail gets a different treatment. I don't block it. Blocking a trail tells whoever finds the block that someone's thinking about defense. I don't want that information moving up the chain until I've finished the rest.

Instead I rig a tell. Two dead branches positioned across the trail at a natural angle, resting on a fallen log where the path narrows between alder thickets. Light enough that a boot will knock them aside without the walker noticing. Specific enough that I'll know they've been disturbed the next time I check, and which direction the disturbance came from based on where the branches land.

The main road gets the most attention. I rebuild the gate. The cattle guard stays. The post-and-wire panel gets replaced with a steel-pipe gate I weld from scrap pipe and equipment rails salvaged from the staging area.

Heavy enough that nobody gets through it without making noise and doing damage. Ugly enough that anyone who looks at it will understand the message.

The sound of boots on gravel reaches me before I see her. Tosh is picking her way down the switchbacks from the cabin with a thermos in one hand and the expression she wears when she's been watching me work for longer than I've been aware of her. She must have heard the welder from the porch.

"You've been at this since dawn," she says.

"I've been at this since the tracks."

She pours coffee into the thermos cap and holds it out. I take it with the hand that isn't holding the welding torch.

The metal handle is warm from her grip. The contact travels through my fingers with a specificity that has no business existing alongside a conversation about perimeter security.

"Harlow called me," she says. "She's coordinating with the state troopers on the rental vehicle data. Marc's logging every rental plate he spots from the department lot. Rhys filed for the GPS warrant."