Chapter 5 - The Ambush at the Creek
Nathan’s hand clamped around the commander’s wrist, twisting the bone until the detonator fell into the mud. Nathan pressed his forearm against the man’s throat, pinning him against the truck frame.
"What second team?" Nathan demanded, his voice a low, terrifying growl.
"You think a five-million-dollar contract sends one fireteam?" the silver-haired man choked out, blood bubbling at the corner of his lips. "We were the hammer. The anvil came up through the southern creek bed ten minutes ago. Your cellar has an external drainage pipe leading to the culvert... and my men just breached it."
Nathan struck the commander with a decisive hammer fist, knocking him out cold.
Without looking back, Nathan sprinted at full speed toward the rear of the cabin where the stone drainage culvert opened into the rushing mountain stream. His lungs burned with icy air; his muscles strained against the incline.
As he rounded the bend of the creek, his worst fears were confirmed. The heavy cast-iron grating covering the five-foot drainage pipe had been severed with a battery-powered hydraulic cutter. Two mercenaries in black wet suits were hauling Clara and Toby out into the freezing water.
Toby was screaming, kicking furiously at the operative holding him. Clara was fighting like a lioness, clawing at the second man's tactical goggles, her nails drawing blood across his cheek.
"Let him go!" Clara shrieked, driving her heel into the man's knee. The mercenary snarled and raised the butt of his submachine gun to strike her across the temple.
"Don't touch her!" Nathan's roar shook the trees.
Nathan didn't slow down. He launched his entire body down the muddy embankment, colliding with the mercenary holding Clara. The impact sent both men crashing into the icy, waist-deep current of the creek.
Underwater, the fight was brutal and silent. The mercenary tried to draw his dive knife, but Nathan trapped the man's arm against a submerged granite boulder. With a vicious, relentless twist, Nathan disarmed him, surfaced with an explosive gasp of air, and drove his palm beneath the man's jaw, rendering him limp in the current.
Nathan spun around in the water.
The second mercenary had already dragged Toby up the opposite bank, hauling the boy toward an idling black Zodiac inflatable boat anchored at the edge of the river basin where the creek fed into the deeper mountain lake.
"Dad! Dad, help!" Toby cried out, reaching his small arm toward the river.
Nathan scrambled out of the freezing current, his boots clawing up the slippery clay bank. He raised his sidearm, but the operative held Toby directly in front of his chest as a human shield, backing into the boat.
"Drop the weapon, soldier, or the kid takes a swim to the bottom of the lake!" the man shouted over the roar of the outboard motor.
From the high embankment behind Nathan, a small silhouette emerged through the laurel bushes. It was Clara.
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She wasn't running away. She had scooped up a heavy, jagged granite rock from the creek bed, creeping silently through the brush behind the operative's blind spot.
With a primal cry of maternal fury, Clara brought the heavy stone down across the back of the mercenary's helmet with all the force in her body.
