Chapter 8 - Into the Lion's Den
Three hours before dawn.
The rain had settled into a steady, freezing drizzle that blanketed the industrial port of Newport News in a shroud of yellow-tinted smog. Giant gantry cranes stood like prehistoric metal beasts against the low-hanging clouds, their cables groaning in the ocean wind as they loaded twenty-ton containers onto outbound cargo vessels.
At Pier 14, behind three rings of razor-wire fencing and private security checkpoints, sat the primary logistics facility of Harrow Maritime Systems.
Two miles away, in the dry, heated basement of an abandoned Methodist church June had directed them to—a sanctuary whose retired pastor had been a friend of her father—June finished securing the field dressing over Bennett’s shoulder with medical tape.
"You can barely lift that arm, Bennett," June said, her voice tight with suppressed anger and fear. "You're bleeding. You haven't slept in thirty-six hours. You can't assault a fortified shipping terminal alone."
Bennett stood up, testing the range of motion in his left arm. The pain was vicious, a white-hot spike driving down into his chest with every movement, but the joint was intact. He had fought through worse in the mountains of Kunar.
"I’m not assaulting the terminal, June," Bennett said, pulling a dark, heavy wool watch cap over his short hair and checking the loadout of his remaining magazines. "I’m infiltrating the primary server hub in the dockmaster’s tower. That’s where Hales coordinates the off-manifest loading. The micro-SD card Elise left has the encryption cipher, but it needs an on-site local terminal to execute the master broadcast to the Federal Maritime Commission."
"And if Cross is there?" June asked, stepping closer to him. Her eyes were dark with worry.
"Cross will be there," Bennett said simply. "He failed twice. Men like him don't leave town with an open contract. He has to kill me, or Hales will kill him."
He turned to look at Willa, who was sitting on an old church pew wrapped in a dry quilt, Koda lying across her feet like an eight-hundred-pound anchor of fur and muscle. Willa had eaten a bowl of warm soup June had found in the church pantry. Her hair, though cut short in the back where June had freed the knots, was clean, brushed, and shining in the yellow lamplight.
Bennett knelt in front of her. He reached out with his uninjured hand and gently touched her cheek.
"Willa," he said.
"You're going to finish Mommy’s riddle," she said. It wasn't a question.
"I am," Bennett said. "And when I come back, we’re going to buy you two pairs of shoes that match. And we’re going to plant those sunflowers in the backyard that Mommy bought the seeds for. Deal?"
Willa leaned forward and threw her small arms around his neck, pressing her face into his collar. "Deal, Daddy. And don't let the snake man bite you."
"He won't," Bennett murmured, kissing her hair.
He stood up and looked at June. For a moment, the distance between the hardened combat veteran and the coastal hairdresser vanished. June reached out, her fingers brushing the lapel of his jacket.
"You come back to this church, Bennett Shaw," she whispered, her voice fierce with emotion. "Do you hear me? You don't get to save this little girl only to leave her an orphan. You come back."
Bennett held her gaze. "I will."
Ten minutes later, Bennett was a ghost in the fog.
He bypassed the main gate of Pier 14 by entering through the water—slipping into the frigid, oily current of the James River two hundred yards downshore, using a piece of salvaged driftwood for flotation to spare his injured shoulder.
The water was bone-chilling, forty-two degrees, but the icy bite numbed the throbbing fire in his deltoid. He swam with silent, practiced combat strokes, his weapon sealed in a dry-bag strapped to his chest.
He surfaced beneath the creosote pilings of Berth 3, directly below the shadow of a seven-hundred-foot Panamanian container ship, the *Mar de Plata*.
High above, on the weather deck, floodlights illuminated a team of eight men in yellow hard hats and dark tactical jackets. They weren't loading standard consumer freight. They were guiding a crane sling that held four olive-drab, climate-controlled military storage containers—each bearing the stencil: *USN GUIDANCE SUB-ASSEMBLY / CLASSIFIED.*
Standing on the catwalk of the second-story dockmaster’s office, overlooking the operation, was Victor Hales.
He was wearing an expensive cashmere overcoat over a tailored suit, an unlit cigar between his teeth, holding a satellite phone to his ear. And standing five paces behind him, a heavy combat dressing wrapped around his neck where Bennett’s bullet had grazed him, was Declan Cross.
Cross was holding an automatic shotgun, his dead, reptile eyes scanning the shadows of the container yard below.
May you like
Bennett climbed the rusty steel maintenance ladder of the piling with the silent, predatory efficiency of a panther. His boots made no sound on the wet iron grating.
The war had come to its final ground.
