Page 103 of Crosscurrent

“There’s ours,” Cara whispered.

Gabe craned to see ahead. The herons that had worked the shallows all afternoon were gone, the water flat and empty where they'd been. As he feared, a speedboat was tied to the long end. No one visible aboard.

The cabin was hidden. Tom had picked it, water on three sides, one road, the end of nowhere.

And Cartwright had found them anyway.

That was the thing he'd carry out of tonight, if he carried anything out at all. The fact that they had done every single thing right, and right hadn't been enough.

Cole was holding half a mile off. Nomad was at the strip with the plane and a promise. That left five of them, in a stolen jon boat, drifting the last yards onto the one side of the cabin nobody was watching.

That left the five of them on foot, and a stretch of black shoreline between them and the camp.

They put in well short of it, at a neighbor's fish cabin dark and shuttered for the season... Bennion took the hull and the shotgun and the water at their backs. The other four stepped off into the muck.

Cara stopped him with a hand flat on his chest, her face a pale blur a hand's width from his. "If this is the one we don't walk out of⁠—"

"It isn't." He caught the back of her neck and put his forehead to hers, one second, the whole bad night held off for exactly that long. "But if it is, it's with you. That's the only way I ever wanted to go anywhere."

"Then don't make me finish it without you." She kissed him once, fast, and let him go.

Then they moved, low and quiet, along the shoreline toward the camp, cypress knees and black mud, the water on their right, the dark wall of marsh on their left, the held cabin growing out of the night one angle at a time. And that smell, decay and death. Gabe wondered if he’d ever get it out of his head.

He made one last stab at the math. Three of them in that black box, five of them in the mud below it, facing who knew how many hostiles? He let it go. Some nights you stopped counting and started moving.

They came up on the cabin from its blind corner, crouching in among the pilings in knee-deep water, where the floor met the bank, and Gabe got his fingers under the edge of Tom's hatch.

Before he could tug it open, the night came apart. A muzzle flash, white and enormous. The first round splitting the air where his head had been. The whole black marsh lit up like the inside of a struck match.

45

Gunfire ripped the thick, dark quiet off the night.

It came from straight above, flat enormous slaps of it through the deck boards, splinters and powder-flash spitting down through the gaps where the floor met the bank. Somebody up there had heard the hatch move and emptied a magazine into the dark beneath his own feet.

“Move. Toward the water. Go!" Wade’s voice filled her ear. "Into the water. Go dark."

She was already moving. Down, sideways, deeper into the black forest of pilings, the water climbing to her knees, her heart trying to come up out of her throat.

Water churned around her. Bodies banging into her at every step.

Under the cabin the stilts dropped into black water in rows, a flooded forest. Fire chased them, wild and furious, chewing the pilings to splinters. Then it slowed. You can't hit what you can't see.

Gabe found her shoulder in the black. "Everyone count off."

"Here." Reagan answered first. She was standing so close, Cara heard her voice and the echo over comms.

"Here." She added her own voice, but she couldn’t keep it from shaking hard.

Wade answered with a grip on Cara’s arm and a tilt of his head toward the dock, where a low, fast hull sat darker than the dark water. Neptune's boat. “I’ll kill the boat,” he said. “Then they’re stuck in the cabin with nowhere to take Owen.”

Bennion counted off next, but Wade was already moving, a silent shadow sliding between the pilings toward the dock. He came back wet to the chest less than a minute later.

"Fuel line and the kill switch," he said. "That hull's going nowhere but down."

Above them the firing had stopped. Cara could hear them up there now — boots, low fast voices, a door dragged shut. They had seconds before those operatives figured out a way to corral them.

Which left exactly one card on the table. The same one for both sides.