The river burns. The hunt begins.
Chief Boatswain's Mate Ray Miller counts his men four or five times an hour. He has done it since the day he arrived. He does it in daylight, in the dark, mid-conversation, without deciding to — and he has always got four.
Streetwalker has three men and four gun stations, which means two of Miller's guns are always pointing at nothing, and he is the only one aboard who seems to feel that as a wound.
Then a hamlet chief is shot dead on his own landing in daylight, twenty yards from Streetwalker's guns, in front of two hundred people. The killers did not need the man dead in private. They wanted the hamlet to watch an American gunboat do nothing.
Miller is given the man behind it — a political enforcer nobody has ever seen, known only as the Tax Collector. And he discovers that the hunt is bookkeeping: thirty-one hamlets, standing assessments, arrears carried forward line by line in one man's hand. Beside three names is a mark that is not a number.
His gunner has the shot. Miller refuses it, and pays for the refusal in exposure and fuel and a hole through his helmsman's arm, and cannot explain to anyone why a man so afraid of losing people would spend them like that.
He has always got four. That is the part he has never let himself think about.
River Hawks, Book 1.
