By the time dawn broke over the tiny town of Glen St. Mary, Florida, the roosters on the farm just north of Claude Harvey Road had already been crowing for hours.

Court had known they would be. The ancestors of those roosters had been screwing with his sleep for as far back as he could remember.

To call this a farm at all was putting it charitably. It was fifty acres of mostly hard-packed sandy dirt, covered in trees and shrubs on the edges and flat as a pancake. There was a pond and a double-wide and a detached garage made of corrugated tin, and there were a few chickens in a coop and a few goats in a pen, but that looked like the full measure of the place if you were driving by on Claude Harvey, the only paved road in sight.

But a passing motorist wouldn’t be able to see the largest structure on the farm from the road. It was back behind the trees, two hundred yards off Claude Harvey, just this side of a fat man-made earthen berm that had long since become overgrown with thatchy privet and wild oak.

The structure was a two-story shoot house, a firearms training center, constructed like a fort out of railroad ties, old tires, plywood, Conex boxes, and other rusted metal. At over nine thousand square feet, it was massive, although it had never been fancy and had fallen into disrepair in the past fifteen years. Next to the old wooden structure, several firing ranges could still be detected in the underbrush, and old rusted steel man-shaped targets leaned haphazardly against the berm.

The owner of the farm and the shoot house was a sixty-eight-year-old native Floridian named James Ray Gentry. Gentry had served as a marine in Vietnam, a small-town cop, a large-city SWAT officer, and his department’s lead firearms instructor, and then, when he was still in his early thirties, he quit the force and opened his own private tactical training center for state and local law enforcement agencies. This was the early 1980s, when Florida’s cocaine wars put armed bad guys with automatic weapons on the streets, in the bars, and in the boats offshore. Cops and deputy sheriffs all over the state needed to learn how to transition from the days of six-shooters and minimal chance for danger to fighting protracted street battles with heavily armed men with little reluctance to kill or die to protect their millions in product.

And James Gentry taught most of the state’s SWAT teams right here on Claude Harvey Road. By the nineties he was training federal law enforcement and even some CIA units, as well, all of whom knew he had the abilities to show them how to clean and clear houses without subjecting large portions of their units to near-certain death.