Chapter 47
Behind Cara, the door closed with a sickening finality.
Gabe started to pray, because praying was the only thing left he could do for her. Lord, I can't go in there after her. So You do. Go where I can't, and don't leave her side.
He was tucked into the stilts at the dark edge of the dock, chest-deep in black water, Wade a shadow at his shoulder and Reagan a body-length back.
Wade wanted them spread out, each of them a hard angle of cover behind a piling with a clear lane up onto the boards, weapons up out of the water and dry.
Half of Gabe's attention stayed on the dim cabin lights.
The other half stayed on the black water at their backs, where Cartwright's outside men were still working the dark, hunting for a way to get at three armed people they couldn't see.
A light moved behind the blinds. The plan was a house of cards in a windstorm.
Cara could probably sell ice in the Arctic, but this was, by far, the sketchiest move they'd ever made.
If she held Cartwright's attention long enough, Tom might be able to do some damage.
Or at least kill the lights. If Skye got free, she could probably take down half the men in that room on her own. If. If, if, if.
And he couldn't do a thing to help, except not get himself killed before he had a chance to storm in.
Out in the cypress to their left, the water changed.
Bennion had gone that way the moment Cara stepped up onto the dock. She melted away between the flooded trees, weapon held shoulder high to keep it dry. Now it paid off.
A splash too big to be a fish came from their left, then a low voice gone wrong in the middle of a word.
An operative farther upstream swung a light out across the water and caught a long, unhurried wake cutting away into the dark.
He said something his mother wouldn't have liked and backed off the waterline fast, hauling his partner with him.
Bennion hadn't fired a shot, just pulled a watcher down into that dank swamp.
Or let something bigger and badder do it for her.
Before he had time to celebrate Bennion’s win, the world went white.
Every bulb in the cabin came on at once. The generator roared. The crew on the dock threw their arms up over eyes gone wide in the long dark.
But Gabe and Wade, in the shade of the dock, could see. "Go time," Gabe breathed over the commlink. "Heading in."
Wade's answer came back more growl than word.
Every nerve in Gabe strained toward the bank, toward the door, toward Cara. The second he broke the water he'd be a target, squarely lit for anyone still standing inside.
He didn’t care. Cara needed him. He set himself to go.
Wade's hand closed hard on his shoulder, holding him there half out of the black water. "Together. On my count. Lose your head now and you lose her."
Gabe made himself nod. It was all he could do.
They came up out of the water onto the dock low and fast, two men where a breath ago there'd been only black bay. And for one terrible second, rising into the light, the cabin window gave Gabe the whole room.
Cara lay flat on the floor by the galley, hands laced over her head, exactly where she'd sworn she would put herself.
With a man unconscious at her feet, Skye was flying up out of a chair with the rope cut, the man's sidearm already in her grip.
Owen stood at her shoulder with a folding knife shaking in his fist. Cartwright, unhurried, reaching for a weapon she would never get to lift.
And the Neptune crew, blind and terrified, opening fire at all of it.
It was the worst kind of shooting, the kind panic makes, wild and deafening and aimed at nothing and everything.
Ignoring the fusillade, Gabe was already three strides from the cabin door.
A line of bullets shredded the boards toward Cara's head.
Tom, still half-risen over the electrical panel, took a round.
Limbs splayed, he flew backward, sinking out of sight behind the console.
The sound Gabe made was not a word.
The blinded crew on the dock never saw them coming. It was hands and noise, and the short, brutal work Wade did better than anyone alive, and then it was three men down. Gabe was already past it, hitting the cabin door at a run and going through into a room coming apart.
Skye was up. That was the thing he understood first. Skye on her feet in the middle of it, a pistol steady in both hands, blood pouring down her side, the cut rope still around one ankle.
Owen stood at her shoulder, the folding knife that had freed her open and useless in his fist, his whole body shaking and his feet planted anyway.
Skye had waited on the light the same as Gabe had, and in the half second it bought her, the most dangerous woman in the swamp had gone back to being exactly that.
Between Skye in the room and Wade on the dock and Gabe in the doorway, the crew had nowhere to go.
It didn’t take long for them to realize it and flee.
The ones outside left first, then the men inside crowded out, melting into the dark.
It was loud, and then it was less loud, and then it was over, and the cabin stood blazing and reeking of gunpowder over the green rot of the marsh.
Cara was up on her hands and knees by the galley, the boards beside her white where the rounds had missed her.
She lifted her face and found him. The fist that had been closed in Gabe's chest came open so fast it hurt.
Alive. She was alive. He would come apart about it later, in private, for a long time, and be glad to.
In the far corner, unhurried, a pistol she had never raised hanging from one hand, stood Helen Cartwright. Gaze locked with Gabe’s, she set the gun on the table and laced her hands behind her head.
She looked at them: Gabe drawing down on her, Wade heading out after her fleeing men, Cara rising to her feet, and at Skye bleeding and upright. She was straining to look unaffected, but Gabe saw the fear and the disbelief in her eyes. Her whole operation, wrecked.
"Well," she said. "You're better than I expected."
Skye pulled her back into a chair and zip-tied her wrists.
Reagan flew in the door, her bag already swinging down off her shoulder.
And in that same breath it came roaring back. The window. The panel. The round. Tom going down behind the console.
“No, no, no!” Reagan dropped down beside him and pressed both hands hard into his side. The trauma-calm dropped over her face like a visor. The dark spreading under Tom’s side was a thing Gabe would not let himself name.
"Tom." Her voice didn't rise. It never rose, and that was the worst of it. "Tom? Stay with me. You hear me? You stay with me."
Cara, her face white with strain, slid down to the floor at Reagan’s side while Skye stacked the confiscated weapons on the small dining table.
Bennion came up out of the dark onto the boards, shotgun slung, the swamp running off her. "Both boats are sinking," she said, flat as ever. "Theirs and ours. Ours took rounds in the fight. She's already going under. Nobody's leaving here by water."
Beyond her, through the open door, up the long road, a string of red and blue had finally begun to swing through the cypress. Too late now to do anything but count.
They had won. Cartwright and a handful of Neptune crew were in zip ties. The network was safe. Every name in Ray's book was alive tonight, or already gone somewhere no one could follow.
Wade filled the doorway, his gaze going immediately to Reagan and Tom. He swung around toward Gabe. “Nobody left for your boy out there to round up, I’m thinking.” He jutted his chin at Tom’s prone form. “He good?”
“No!” Reagan stiffened, but never took her attention off Tom. “I need an ambulance ASAP.”
Gabe exchanged a look with the older man. They had patrol cars, but even at top speed, they had to be an hour, maybe two, from any kind of lifesaving help.
What they needed wasn’t an ambulance. What they needed was a miracle.