Chapter 10 - Poison in the Vineyards
The trap was set, but war rarely follows a neat script.
While the digital snare was being woven inside Wallace Maritime’s Hamilton servers, an unexpected strike hit closer to home. At four o'clock in the morning, an alert flared through the Lakeview Manor agricultural monitoring grid. The irrigation reservoirs feeding the three-hundred-acre estate vineyard—currently nurturing an eight-million-dollar rare ice-wine vintage slated for European distribution—showed an unprecedented surge in chemical contaminants.
Caleb and Donald raced to the pump house near the southern ridge of the estate.
The security lock had been torched with an industrial thermite cutter. Inside the dimly lit concrete bunker, fifty-gallon drums of industrial herbicide lay tipped over, their toxic fluid inches from draining directly into the primary subterranean aeration manifold.
"Freeze!" Caleb roared, throwing the door open, flashlight beam cutting through the shadows.
A figure clad in black tactical gear whirled around, holding a high-voltage conduit flare. With a snarl, the intruder hurled the flare directly at Caleb’s head and lunged with a heavy steel wrench.
Caleb ducked instinctively, feeling the searing heat of the flare scorch past his ear, and tackled the attacker into the concrete floor. The two men rolled into the chemical slurry, wrestling violently. A year earlier, Caleb would have frozen or fled, paralyzed by indecision. But the docks had forged iron into his bones. He absorbed a vicious blow to his ribs, locked the attacker’s wrist with a combat grip he’d learned from the marine loaders, and slammed the man’s arm against the concrete until the wrench clattered away.
Donald rushed in, pinning the saboteur’s legs with a tactical baton.
Caleb ripped off the intruder’s balaclava. He gasped, spitting blood from a split lip.
It was Bradley Thorne—the former best man from Caleb’s wedding, the very man who had laughed when Shelby slapped Kathy, and whose family held substantial investments in Marcus Sterling’s venture fund.
"You Wallace bastards think you own this province," Bradley spat, his face purple with rage. "Marcus Sterling is going to turn this dirt farm into a luxury golf resort! You’re finished, Caleb! You and your pathetic peasant parents!"
"My father built this with his bare hands, Bradley," Caleb said between heavy breaths, wiping blood from his cheek. "And you just committed industrial terrorism on federal agricultural land."
Jerry Wallace stepped into the doorway of the pump house, completely unruffled, holding an encrypted satellite phone to his ear. Behind him stood four officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
May you like
"Take him," Jerry said calmly to the Mounties. Then he looked at the phone. "Director Sterling? I believe your contractor has just encountered a minor scheduling delay."
***
