Chapter 9 - Ambush in the Reeds
""Down!"" Maya screamed, lunging across the table and driving her shoulder into Julian’s ribs.
The window shattered in an explosion of tempered glass and high-velocity lead. The heavy timber wall behind Julian splintered where his heart had been a fraction of a second before. A suppressed gunshot thumped outside—a subsonic round designed for quiet executions.
Clara moved with the terrifying speed of an old dock hand. She swept the ceramic mugs off the table, kicked the iron stove door open, and threw a handful of dried saltpeter into the burning embers. A blinding hiss of white smoke and choking sulfur billowed out into the room, obscuring the interior in a dense, chemical fog.
""Out the back cellar hatch!"" Clara yelled, coughing into her sleeve, already pulling a rusted twelve-gauge shotgun from beneath the floorboards.
A second round tore through the ceiling plaster, sending white dust raining down on them. Julian grabbed Maya by the jacket collar, hauling her toward the narrow wooden trapdoor beneath the kitchen counter. He didn't ask questions; his instincts had completely taken over.
""What about you, Clara?"" Julian shouted through the smoke.
""I’m seventy-two years old, Julian! They aren't here to kill an old woman; they're here for the two people who can sign a corporate injunction!"" Clara cocked the shotgun with a heavy, mechanical clack that resonated through the smoke. ""Go to the slipway! Now!""
Julian dropped through the hatch into the knee-deep mud of the tidal culvert below the boathouse, pulling Maya down after him. The damp chill hit them instantly, the smell of marsh gas and rotting sea grass filling their lungs. Above them, Clara fired both barrels through the front window—the deafening roar of the shotgun shaking the pilings.
Julian and Maya waded through the thick mud, staying beneath the low wooden overhang of the pier. Twenty yards ahead, hidden beneath a canopy of dead cattails, sat Clara’s flat-bottom aluminum skiff, its small electric trolling motor already hooked to a bank of marine batteries.
""They tracked the car,"" Maya whispered, her teeth chattering from the cold mud. ""They must have had an electronic beacon on Clara’s bumper.""
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""It doesn't matter how they found us,"" Julian said, his voice flat and lethal. He reached into the skiff, pulling out an old iron mooring pin—eighteen inches of rusted, heavy steel. ""It only matters who makes it to the ship first.""
Behind them, the boathouse erupted into flames as a tactical incendiary grenade tore through the cedar shingles, casting long, jagged shadows across the black water of the marsh.
