Henry came to a decision. It's time to take the advice you've been giving people for over twenty years, fella. Strike back when you 're strong, and still have your wits about you, and the enemy isn't expecting it. Give them your teeth, not your belly. Henry's mind went into overdrive, trying to determine how to mount an effective defense against the six invaders. A plan was beginning to take shape, and Henry Bowman was completely focused on how to stop all six terrorists and stay alive in the process.

One of the white men was removing a gun from the case that the other had brought from the van, and Henry saw it was a long-barreled Remington 870 12-gauge. Doorbuster! Henry thought. He immediately knew what was going to happen next, and he had an idea of how to make it work for him.

Henry Bowman stripped the amplified earmuffs and the night vision goggles off his head, laid the goggles on top of a turret lathe to his left, and replaced the muffs. The Hi-Standard was tucked in his pants with the bolt still back. Henry ignored it and picked up the rifle he had brought from the far end of the shop. It was a Remington Model 37 .22, a boy's target rifle made in 1946. The magazine was missing, and to load the rifle Henry had to angle it downwards, take a cartridge out of his mouth, and manually insert the round into the breech without letting it fall into the magazine cutout. He took a step backwards, leaned against the turret lathe to make his position even more steady, and raised the .22 rifle to check his sight picture. The flashlight beam on the back door put all six of the intruders in stark silhouette.

"Prop the screen door open with something," agent Peter Hagedorn said as he looked at the main door to Kane's house. "You don't want to be standing there holding it." Agent Elena Martinez spotted a 5-gallon bucket in the yard and went to get it. As she did, Hagedorn examined the edge of the door carefully to determine exactly where he was going to shoot.

Henry Bowman lowered the rifle and took a step back. He put his finger in his mouth and rearranged three of the .22 rounds so they poked out between his lips, rims facing out. As he raised the gun, five of the six intruders backed up several steps away from the door. All but the white man with the 870 and the black man holding the M16 put their fingers in their ears. The man with the suppressed H&K submachine gun let the weapon dangle on its sling as he held his ears. One of the others held the flashlight trained on the left side of the door with one hand and covered one ear with the other.

From three feet inside the barn, Henry Bowman took careful aim at the man holding the M16 and placed the white bead of the front sight on the base of the man's skull. He squeezed the trigger with about a pound of pressure, which was as hard as he dared, and waited.

Peter Hagedorn raised the 870 to his shoulder. From a distance of about four feet, he took aim at the spot on the door that concealed the lower hinge, and pulled the trigger. As flame leaped out of the shotgun barrel and the slug slammed into the lower left edge of the hardwood door, Henry's finger tightened involuntarily on the Model 37's trigger, and the gun fired.

Twenty-two CB caps, such as the ones Henry had removed from the Hi-Standard's magazine and put in his mouth, are loaded to a velocity of about 800 feet per second. This is less than the speed of sound. Any bullet traveling below the speed of sound makes no sonic 'crack' as it passes through the air. The only real noise is the muzzle blast, which is why subsonic ammunition is preferred for suppressed weapons. A .22 CB cap, however, only uses about one one-thousandth of an ounce of propellant, which is completely consumed in the first 10" of barrel. When fired in a bolt action rifle with a barrel 24" long, a .22 CB cap round makes a trivial amount of noise compared to a 12 gauge shotgun. The report of Henry's single shot .22, fired from inside the barn, was inaudible. It was completely drowned out by the muzzle blast of the 870, the echoes of that muzzle blast bouncing off the barn, and the sound of the one-ounce slug tearing through the wood door and impacting the steel hinge on the other side.

Henry Bowman had already flicked the bolt open and ejected the fired case by the time the echoes of the larger gun had died out. He plucked a second round out from between his lips, bent forward sharply at the waist, and pushed the cartridge into the chamber without dropping the butt from his shoulder. As he prepared for his second shot, Henry's vision registered that his first target was down and that the shotgun man was taking aim again. He put the front sight on a spot behind the ear of the man with the MP5, tightened his trigger finger, and held his breath.

The five spectators had been watching the illuminated spot on the door, and Elena Martinez was the only one of the five who noticed Agent Levar Williams fall down. She logically assumed he had been struck with a slug fragment.

"Hey, I think Levar got-" she started to say, but Agent Hagedorn was concentrating on his aim, and his ears were ringing. The second blast of his shotgun cut off the rest of what Martinez was trying to tell them. This time, Agent Compton collapsed.

"Hagedorn!" Agent Martinez screamed. "Stop shooting! Williams and Compton are hurt! I think your slugs are ricocheting! They may be hurt bad!" This time the man heard her, and he lowered his shotgun and started to turn towards the other agents. Agent G.G. Jackson was shining the light on the corpse of Levar Williams, and Elena Martinez was still screaming about ricochets when Henry Bowman's third shot hit Peter Hagedorn a half-inch to the left of the bridge of his nose.

The human mind can only process a finite amount of information in a given amount of time. When the brain is expecting to receive one set of inputs and gets something entirely different, the process takes several times longer. Supervisory Agent Blair and Agent Jackson had been watching their companion fire a shotgun at the door of a house whose owner was known to be almost two thousand miles away. They had been fully expecting to see the door sag on its remaining hinge.

Instead, Blair and Jackson found themselves staring at two bodies on the ground, and listening (with ringing ears from two shotgun blasts) to Agent Martinez screaming about ricochets. When their minds had grasped the fact that two of their men were hurt, their brains were overwhelmed with the new data, and the common phenomena of auditory exclusion under stress occurred. Neither Wilson Blair, G.G. Jackson, nor the nearly hysterical Elena Martinez had been able to hear the first two soft sounds from the direction of the barn. With Martinez's increasing volume, the jarring sight of the two men on the ground, and the onset of auditory exclusion, they did not notice the third.

As Agents Blair, Jackson, and Martinez stared openmouthed, Agent Hagedorn dropped the Remington 870 pumpgun on the concrete pad just outside the back door to the house and collapsed on top of it. The three agents who were still on their feet looked around wildly, but it was dark, and their night vision was nonexistent from staring at a white door illuminated by a flashlight.

"Weapons out!" Blair finally yelled as he dropped his briefcase and drew his 9mm Beretta. He was about to give the command to run for the cover of the vehicle when night turned into day. Henry Bowman had switched on all four of the halogen spotlights mounted on the roof of the barn. The three ATF agents that were still functioning stood frozen in the blinding light.

"Drop your weapons!" Henry Bowman yelled as he drew his 5" .44 Magnum and cocked it as he brought it to bear on the center figure. His voice was loud enough that it activated the circuitry in his hearing protectors, shutting off the amplifier. Henry's words sounded muffled to him, then the electronics cut back in and the night sounds were once again amplified.

The three intruders squinted in the bright light, and Henry saw that the pudgy black one was female. She was the only one of the three who obeyed Henry's command. The other two still gripped their 9mm Berettas. The man was holding his hand out in front of his face as if to shield his eyes from the light. With his amplified earmuffs, Henry heard the man whisper to the two women.

"On my signal, we break for cover," Wilson Blair instructed softly. "Martinez, you go for the van, Jackson, you get around the side of the house." Henry Bowman heard the command in his amplified earmuffs, saw the two women turn their heads reflexively towards their superior, and made a quick decision. It's still three to one. They split up, they can get me in a whipsaw. The leader's the one I want to talk to. He took aim on the woman nearest the van, put the front sight of his N-frame on the hinge of her jaw, and squeezed the trigger.

G.G. Jackson watched in horror as Elena Martinez's head seemed to burst, and the black woman's bladder let go involuntarily.

Wilson Blair, who had been steeling himself to give the command to run, flinched at the sound of the highpowered revolver discharging sixty yards away. He heard the sickening thwack of the bullet striking home, and at the edge of his vision he saw Martinez's body collapse in the grass. Blair let go of his Beretta as if it were radioactive. It fell next to his briefcase.

"Much better," Henry Bowman yelled. "Now, both of you-hands on top of your heads. Good. Now turn around and face the house." Blair and Jackson obeyed. Against the floodlit back wall of Allen Kane's house the two agents saw the shadow of one man approaching with a pistol in his left hand and a bag of some sort in his right. Wilson Blair found his voice.

"We are agents of the United States Government," he said, his words wavering at first, then beginning to gain strength.

Yeah, right Henry thought when he heard the man's claim. And I'm Santa Claus. He looked at the body nearest him. The black man's eye was open and a trickle of blood ran from the base of his skull where Henry's first round had struck its mark.

"The Treasury Department, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms," Blair continued. What a moron Henry thought immediately. If you 're going to pretend to be a cop, pretend to be a real one.

Henry had left his amplified hearing protectors in the shop. He held his 5" Smith in his left hand as he stood twenty feet from the two invaders. The barrel of the Hi-Standard .22 was in the right pocket of his blue jeans with the gun's action and grip protruding. The pistol had a round in the chamber and the safety was on.

"Keep your hands on top of your heads, and turn around slowly." The white man and the black woman did as they were instructed. Henry Bowman was a dark silhouette standing between them and the bright lights.

Henry glanced at the four bodies on the ground. The man with the M16 was a clean kill, and the woman he had head-shot with his .44 was obviously dead also. But I can't see any blood on the shotgun guy, and he and the MP5 guy are both lying on top of their weapons. He considered the two sprawled forms that might still be alive. Shotgun's the biggest threat Henry decided. Then the MP5. He saw that the man who was staring down the muzzle of his Smith was licking his lips, getting up the nerve to speak.

"I am Supervisory Agent Wilson Blair of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms," Blair said as Henry dropped the canvas bag and drew the Hi-Standard. "And I demand that you-"

Blair stopped in mid-sentence as Henry Bowman pulled the trigger on the .22 and sent a bullet into the center of the crown of Peter Hagedorn's facedown corpse. The gun spat like a loud air rifle. Before it registered on Blair what had happened, Henry had swung the muzzle onto his second target.

The inert form of Ralph Compton was no longer inert. When Henry had shot him earlier, Compton had been moving slightly and the 29-grain bullet from the old .22 target rifle had hit the back of his head at a shallow angle. It had glanced off his skull, chipping the bone slightly and tearing a gash in the skin without doing any real damage. Compton had initially been stunned by the blow to the back of his head, and had ended up lying chest-down, with his face turned away from the man who had stopped their raid. Compton had heard every word his enemy had said, and now correctly estimated that he was about ten feet away. The agent tried to roll over and bring his weapon to bear on the man who had shot him.

At ten feet, Henry Bowman didn't need to use sights. In nine-tenths of a second he put three rounds into a three-inch circle immediately in front of Ralph Compton's right ear.

"I'm afraid I outrank you, Mister Blair," Henry continued in a conversational tone as he put the HiStandard's safety back on and slid the barrel of the weapon back in his pocket. "And I have to say, I don't hold much respect for you guys in F Troop. None of us do." He saw that the black woman had closed her eyes and was clenching her teeth.

"Who sent you? What are you doing here?" Wilson Blair was starting to become hysterical, and he hated it when other feds referred to ATF as 'F Troop'. "We had this all set up!" he yelled, then managed to calm himself.

"You don't know what you've meddled in," he went on. "We're going to get Kane, Millet, and Bowman all at the same time, and now you people are mixing in." Bowman! Henry thought. He felt as if he had been hit with an electric prod at the mention of his own name, but he remained silent.

"Call out the rest of your squad, and let's get our stories straight about what happened here," Blair said beseechingly. "And, uh, what agency sent you?" he added as he lowered his hands.

"Put your hands back on top of your head," Henry Bowman instructed as his mind furiously tried to accept the implications of what the man was saying. What the hell is going on here? Henry asked himself. The great relief he had felt at still being alive, healthy, and in control had been replaced by a feeling of dread. What's this guy talking about? He really does believe I'm a fed. But he's not afraid I'll arrest him-he wants us to get our stories straight, for Christ's sake. And that can only mean... Henry looked over at the black woman.

"What's your name?" he demanded.

"Special Agent G.G. Jackson," the woman snuffled.

Oh, fuck thought Henry Bowman, and then he remembered the old saying common to both resistance fighters and criminals The first one's expensive, but after that, they're all free He sighed inaudibly I guess I'll figure out what I'm going to do while she's taping him up Suddenly, Henry remembered something from many summers ago, before he was old enough to drive What was that kid's name, that I let go? Nat, that was it The barest beginnings of a plan were starting to form in his mind Maybe I can use what he and his cousin were fixing to do, before I came along and broke up their party Got a lot of stuff to get done before I start in on that, though he told himself. Then he smiled "Well, Special Agent G G Jackson," Henry Bowman said brightly as he reached into the canvas bag and pulled out a roll of duct tape "You've just received a temporary interagency lateral transfer"

Part Four.

WAR.

That he which hath no stomach to this fight,

Let him depart His passport shall be made.

And crowns for convoy put into his purse.

We would not die in that man's company.

That fears his fellowship to die with us..

This day is called the feast of Crispian

He that outlives this day and comes safe home

Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is named

And rouse him at the name of Cnspian,

He that shall live this day and see old age

Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors

And say, "Tomorrow is Saint Cnspian "

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,

And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's Day "

Old men forget, yet all shall be forgot.

But he'll remember with advantages

What feats he did that day Then shall our names,

Familiar in his mouth as household words,