Chapter 8 - The Ambush at the Mill
Marek instantly drew his sidearm, gesturing toward the timber staircase leading to the ground level. ""Footsteps. Three men, moving tactically.""
""They traced the Humvee’s emergency transponder,"" Elena whispered furiously. ""I should have pulled the fuse.""
""Doesn't matter now,"" Marek replied, checking the magazine of his sidearm. ""We take them here, or we die in this basement.""
Above them, the old floorboards creaked in slow, deliberate rhythms. Cole’s operatives were clearing the mill room by room. Elena pointed toward the iron machinery of the mill's water turbine on the far side of the cellar—a rusted access tunnel led directly out into the rushing river flume behind the building.
""We flank them,"" she mouthed.
She moved silently across the damp earth, slipping into the turbine chamber. Marek positioned himself at the base of the stairs, deliberately kicking an empty tin can across the concrete to make noise.
The bait worked. A contractor in tactical gear moved down the stairs, carbine raised, sweeping his weapon toward Marek's position.
Elena lunged from the turbine shadow, driving her combat knife through the gap in the operative's tactical vest beneath his armpit. The man gasped, collapsing into her arms as she stripped his suppressed weapon and extra magazines in one fluid motion before his body hit the dirt.
""One down,"" she whispered.
Above, hearing the scuffle, the remaining two operatives opened fire through the floorboards. Heavy 5.56 rounds tore through the dry timber, showering Elena and Marek with wood splinters. Marek fired three rounds upward through the ceiling, following the muzzle flashes. A scream followed, accompanied by the heavy thud of a body falling upstairs.
""Move! To the tunnel!"" Elena yelled, dragging Marek toward the flume.
They scrambled into the stone culvert just as a concussion grenade bounced down the wooden staircase. The explosion blew the basement stairs into jagged toothpicks, the shockwave throwing Elena and Marek face-first into the freezing, rushing waters of the mill stream.
They washed out into the pine forest half a mile downstream, bruised, soaked, but alive. In the distance behind them, the Old Mill was engulfed in roaring orange flames. Vance’s body was gone, cremated in the fire of his own sanctuary.
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Elena stood on the muddy riverbank, wringing the water from her hair, her eyes burning with an icy, lethal resolve.
""We need a commercial flight to Zurich,"" she told Marek.
