The singing stopped on half a word, and the dark past the north treeline started moving. Camp Ridge stood to inside its fourth silence with the enemy's loaded yard mapped on the table and the pencil still touching the paper, and what comes out of that treeline is the thing the whole season has been scheduling. Not a probe. Not six men spent to read a defense. The read, acted on, coordinated, at night, at scale.

Everything the camp built gets asked the same question at once. The dummy works raised in plain sight beside the real ones. The stores moved to deep cellars by dark. The drilled sectors, the fallback routes, the reserve counted to the round, two hundred fifty-two rifle, forty buckshot, sixty thirty-ought-six, an arithmetic the walls must fight the whole night inside. And the people, tested hardest of all, because the Smiths and the M ...