That was odd. In conditions like this, you’d want to maintain your position and let the perp come to you. To a preselected spot where you and your backup team could most safely control the situation.

Speaking of which, where the hell was the backup team? In the chopper hovering over the cabin? No team leader in his right mind would handle it that way.

There were a number of spotlights set up out there, but no other headlights. No trooper cruisers. Christ, if there was one, there ought to be a dozen.

Gurney picked up his Beretta off the table and watched from the window.

It was hard to see much of the vehicle creeping forward on the causeway, with all its lights pointing straight ahead. But one thing was evident: The position of the headlights made it too wide to be a cruiser. The NYSP did have a variety of SUVs—but the thing on the causeway was too wide to be any of them.

It was, however, just wide enough to be Clinter’s Humvee.

Meaning that the chopper overhead wasn’t NYSP either.

What the fuck?

Sterne was out on the causeway now, hands still raised, about twenty feet from the approaching vehicle.

Gurney stepped out of the cabin, holding the Beretta in his jacket pocket, and looked up. Despite the downward glare of the chopper’s searchlight, he easily recognized the giant RAM logo on its belly.

The searchlight swept along the causeway, first illuminating Sterne, then the vehicle in front of him—which did in fact appear to be Clinter’s Humvee. There was something mounted on the hood. Maybe some kind of weapon? The chopper’s light swept out over the water, back over the cabin, and back toward the causeway.

What the hell was going on out there? What was Clinter up to?

The answer came with a hideous shock. From the contraption on the hood, a stream of fire shot forward, instantly engulfing Sterne from head to foot in a billowing orange blaze. The man began reeling, shrieking. The helicopter made a steep pivot, coming down closer, but the rotor downdraft intensified the swirling flames, and the craft swung away, rising steeply.

Gurney sprinted from the cabin out onto the causeway path. But by the time he got close to Sterne, the man had already crumpled to the ground, blessedly unconscious, engulfed in a fire raging with the blinding heat of homemade napalm.