I’D BE LYING IF I SAID I hadn’t already felt uneasy—even before we rounded the bend and saw the big pickups. Deronda Drive was that kind of road: the kind that started normally but then began to twist and turn, and to narrow, climbing all the while, so that the houses on both sides (some nearly palatial while others seemed little more than glorified hippie shacks) closed in all around us. Add to that the fact that we’d run out of places to turn back, and you can imagine how on edge we (already) were when we saw the crashed gate and the occupied vehicles beyond it.
Nor had those occupants taken long to train weapons on us—about 4 seconds, by my count—snapping them out through side windows and an open door even as the men in the payloads (one of which was equipped with a large-caliber machi
