Chapter 7 - Safe Harbor Shattered
The assault was instantaneous and overwhelming.
The stuttering roar of suppressed automatic weapons shredded the quiet of the salt marsh. Glass exploded from the narrow viewports, raining down like frozen diamonds. Wood splinters whipped through the air like shrapnel.
"Floor!" Bennett yelled, diving across the room and using his body as a shield over June and Willa.
Koda was already low, pressed flat beneath the heavy oak table, his ears flat, a ferocious, guttural snarl vibrating in his throat.
Three tactical flashlights cut through the rain outside, casting dancing beams of harsh white light through the bullet holes in the walls. They were flanking the boardwalk—two men on the dock approach, one circling through the marsh water to cut off the rear window.
Bennett rolled off June, his movements devoid of panic. He had survived ambushes in the Korengal Valley; he had breached compounds in Ramadi under heavy mortar fire. This was his element. This was where the monsters of the world discovered that there were worse things waiting in the dark.
"Stay down!" Bennett commanded.
He raised the Remington 870, aimed at the wooden door where the lock was about to be breached, and fired.
*BOOM.*
The heavy blast of 12-gauge 00-buckshot ripped through the center of the pine door. Outside, a scream of agony echoed over the wind as the first breacher took nine lead pellets to the chest rig, the kinetic impact launching him off the wooden boardwalk and into four feet of freezing marsh water.
Bennett pumped the slide—*clack-clack*—and pivoted toward the rear viewport.
A silhouette appeared in the opening, raising an MPX submachine gun. Bennett fired again. The heavy blast blew the second operative out of the window frame, sending him crashing into the mudflats below.
"One left," Bennett muttered, dropping the empty shotgun and drawing his P226. "Cross."
A sudden, terrifying silence fell over the marsh. The smell of sulfur and vaporized cordgrass was suffocating.
From the shadows near the corner of the shack, a voice drifted through the wind—deep, mocking, gravelly.
"You're good, SEAL," Declan Cross called out from the darkness under the pilings. "Just like your file said. Fast hands. Good instincts. But your wife... she wasn't fast at all. When I pushed her, she didn't even scream. She just looked at me with those big, pathetic eyes."
Bennett felt a searing, incandescent rage ignite behind his ribs, but he did not move. He did not step into the open. *A sniper wants you angry. A hunter wants you blind.*
"Daddy..." Willa whimpered from beneath the table, her hands over her ears.
June was holding her tight, whispering fiercely into the girl’s ear, shielding her completely with her own body. June looked up at Bennett, her green eyes wide with terror, but she nodded once. *I have her. Do what you have to do.*
Bennett dropped into a combat crawl, slipping toward the floor hatch in the corner of the sorting room—the access hatch used by oystermen to hoist baskets directly from the skiff beneath the pilings.
He lifted the iron ring silently.
Beneath the shack, the black water of the bay surged against the cypress pilings, churned to a frothy brown by the storm. And standing waist-deep in the water, three feet from the access ladder, was Declan Cross.
Cross was holding a tactical blade in his left hand and a suppressed pistol in his right, looking up toward the floorboards where he expected Bennett to be standing.
Bennett didn't drop through the hatch.
He leaned over the edge, inverted, and fired three rounds straight down through the opening.
Cross was fast—impossibly fast for a man his size. He dove sideways into the deep channel just as Bennett’s rounds pierced the water where his head had been. The emerald snake on his neck flashed under the muzzle flash.
Cross surfaced five yards away, near the bow of the docked skiff. He fired two wild shots upward through the flooring. One round zipped through the meat of Bennett’s left shoulder.
A bolt of white-hot agony flared across Bennett’s collarbone. The impact spun him back against the wall of the shack.
"Bennett!" June gasped.
"Stay down!" Bennett snarled through clenched teeth, clamping his right hand over the wound. Blood, hot and sticky, poured through his fingers. Flesh wound. High on the deltoid. No bone, no major artery.
Down below, an outboard motor suddenly coughed, sputtered, and roared to life with a frantic, metallic whine.
Declan Cross wasn't staying to finish the fight. He had realized the ambush had failed, two of his men were dead, and the target was armed and lethal.
The skiff tore away from the pilings, its wake churning the marsh reeds as it sped into the vast, dark waters of Back Bay, vanishing into the storm.
Silence crashed back over the shack.
Bennett slumped against the timber wall, his breath coming in ragged, steaming gasps. The adrenaline was beginning to ebb, replaced by the dull, throbbing torment of the bullet wound.
June was beside him in an instant. She didn't hesitate. She ripped the bottom hem of her cotton blouse with her teeth, tearing off a long, clean strip of fabric, and pressed it hard against the bleeding wound.
"Hold that," she commanded with fierce authority, her hands steady despite the blood coating her fingers. "Bennett, look at me! Look at my eyes!"
Bennett focused on her green eyes. They were wide, fierce, and entirely alive.
"I’m here," Bennett grunted, his jaw tight. "I’m good."
Willa crawled out from under the table. She didn't cry. She walked over to her father, knelt in the blood and wood shavings, and placed her small, warm hand over June’s hand, pressing down against the wound.
"Mommy said you’re invincible, Daddy," Willa whispered, her blue eyes clear and unwavering. "Are you invincible?"
May you like
Bennett looked at his daughter, then at June, whose face was streaked with soot and rain, holding his life together in the ruins of her family's shack.
"With you two?" Bennett managed a faint, bloody smile. "Yeah, bug. I think I am."
