Shannon rose to his feet, slipped the knife into the sheath at his waist, and jogged down the path toward the plantation, a mile south. He hadn’t noticed a chopper on today’s schedule, but that didn’t mean anything. His father had probably drummed up something special for Uncle Christian.

Shannon covered the first half-mile at a fast run, taking time to judge his footing with each long stride. Another, harsher sound joined the beating blades and Shannon slid to a stop, a hairline chill nipping at his spine. The sound came again—a whine punctuated with a hundred blitzing detonations. Machine-gun fire!

A chill erupted and blew down Shannon’s spine like an arctic wind. His heart froze and then launched him into overdrive. His legs carried him from standstill to a blind sprint in the space of three strides. He streaked over the path and covered the last quarter mile in well under a minute.

Shannon burst from the jungle fifty yards from the two-story Victorian house his father had built fifteen years earlier when they’d first fled Denmark for this remote valley. Two images burned into his mind, like red-hot irons branding a hide.

The first was the two adults who stood in the front lawn, their hands lifted to the clouds—his father and Uncle Christian. The image threw abstract details his way. His father wore khakis, as always, but his shirt was untucked. And he wore no shoes, which was also uncommon. They stood there like two children caught at play, facing west, wide-eyed.

The second image stood in the sky to his right. An attack helicopter hovered fifty feet from the earth, a stone’s throw before his father, motionless except for the blur of blades on its crown. A round cannon jutted from its nose, stilled for the moment. The thing hung undecided, maybe searching the ground for a landing point, Shannon thought, immediately rejecting the notion. The whole lawn below was a landing pad.

Warning klaxons blared in Shannon’s skull—the kind that go off an instant before impact, the kind that usually render muscles immobile. In Shannon’s case his tendons drew him into a crouch. He stood on the edge of the jungle, his arms spread at his hips.

And then the helicopter fired.

Its first burst shifted it to the rear a yard or two. The stream of bullets cut into his father’s abdomen, sawing him in two with that first volley. Shannon watched his father’s upper torso fold at the waist, before his legs crumpled below him.

A high-pitched scream split the air, and Shannon realized it was a woman’s scream—his mother screaming from the house—but then everything was screaming around him. The engine hanging in the sky, screaming; that nose-mounted chain gun, screaming; the jungle to his rear, screaming; and above it all his own mind, screaming.

His uncle whirled and ran for the house.

The helicopter turned on its axis and spit a second burst. The slugs slammed into Uncle Christian’s back and threw him through the air, forcing his arms wide like a man being readied for the cross. He sailed though the air, propelled by the stream of lead—twenty feet at least—and landed in a heap, broken.