The air was sixty-four degrees, smelling of sun-cured cedar shingles, lake spray, fresh-baked blueberry scones, and the clean, honest ozone of an un-broken American sky.
The historic five-hundred-acre Mercer estate—and the memory of that suffocating combat gym fourteen months ago—had been completely transformed.
On the cleared site where Arthur Vance’s proposed private corporate factoring annex had once been planned along the shoreline bluffs, the Department of the Army and the Department of Defense had installed a permanent geodetic monitoring monument; surrounding it now, occupying forty acres of protected shoreline parkland, stood The Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Mercer, Damon & Evan Sovereign Lineal Sanctuary, its state-of-the-art forensic auditing archives, youth athletic defense legal clinics, and world-class specialized geodetic civil engineering academies training four hundred young trade apprentices, female combat officers, and treasury investigators every year in commercial contract defense, sovereign estate law, and constitutional property protection.
Across the state line in Iowa, the Iron Ridge Combat Academy had been shut down and seized under federal admiralty decree, re-opened as a free youth boxing and martial arts academy overseen by retired veteran Harold Vance, teaching children real discipline, sportsmanship, and constitutional rights without charging a single dollar.
