Page 58 of Christmas Harbor Secrets
Night-vision flipped the world into a green that made human faces look like something dreamed badly. Rone thumbed the goggles down and the tunnel took him: halos around anything that remembered how to hold light, black holes where shadows stacked, the slight phosphor shimmer on Isobel’s cheekbones when he glanced back. Blake’s men in the lead wore their units tight to their faces, frog-eyed, paddles moving without sound except for the occasional tiny slap where a blade misjudged the surface skin.
A ripple rolled off the starboard side, long and low, and ended with a sound like a wet sigh.
Alligator.
Rone’s paddle paused in the air. Another sigh to port. The hair along his arms rose a fraction, purely animal. He’d been shot at more times than he liked to count. Something about that slow, contented hiss always made his stomach go cold.
“Hold.” Blake’s whisper drifted back like a moth. He let them drift, hulls bumping a root here and a dead limb there, the subtle thud of rubber against wood. Somewhere not far, something big slid into the water. The sound of it was casual, kingly.
Isobel didn’t move. Her breathing stayed small and quiet. He put his heel against her sneaker under the bench—justenough pressure to tell her he was there, that the world hadn’t gone empty. She didn’t look at him. Good girl.
The cut narrowed further, mangrove branches knuckling down like a low ceiling. Twice, they had to lay the paddles across their laps and grab roots to pull forward. Mud oozed under Rone’s fingers, cold and slick, releasing that sweet-rotten scent that lived in places where the sun didn’t always win. His shoulder brushed a branch, and something with too many legs skittered across his sleeve and was gone. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t have room for fear.
The creek mouth arrived with no fanfare—a seam of darker water pressed between palmetto and mangrove, shallow enough that the paddle blade kissed the bottom with a scrape of oyster. Blake hissed once, warning. Rone adjusted to half-strokes, low angle, no lift. The inflatable slid over the hidden bar with a gritty lurch that felt loud as a bell in Rone’s teeth. He braced for light, for sound, for the flat, hard crack of a rifle from the west.
Nothing.
Only the rustle of a night heron moving its weight from one foot to the other, somewhere almost above them. And the wet, heavy exhale of a gator drifting off a sand tongue into deeper water.
Rone dragged his gaze to the west through the goggle tunnel. If you were going to sit someone out there with glass and a scope, you’d pick the shelf just off the bay’s edge, high mangrove behind, water in front—a black-on-black silhouette problem for anyone trying to find you. He couldn’t see the shelf through the trees. Good. That meant they probably couldn’t see him either unless he did something stupid like flash a light or stand.
They pushed. The creek kinked twice like a question bent into a tighter one. At the first bend, the water whispered faster against the boat’s skin—a run of shallow where the sandybottom rose just to the edge of rude. Rone and the kid at the bow on Blake’s team jumped out and walked the hull forward, calves vanishing into black muck up to mid-shin, the kind of sucking grip that wanted what you were wearing more than it wanted you. The mud was cool as a fridge. Something nudged his boot. He didn’t ask what.
He kept Isobel in his peripheral vision. She stayed crouched, eyes forward, fingers wrapped white around the painter. When they slid off the bar into depth again, she reached and caught Rone’s wrist for a second, steadying herself as the boat dipped with her frigid hand. He wanted to put it inside his jacket and keep it there. He wanted a lot of things he couldn’t have.
The lake announced itself by its quiet. The creek’s whisper flattened and spread until it wasn’t sound so much as potential for it. The trees opened. The goggles went from tunnel to bruise. Rone pushed the unit up for a breath and let the tiny sliver of moon tell him where the world was in relation to him. The tide pulled the bay, and the bay tugged this water with it. He dropped the NV back down and the lake appeared—glass-green, ringed by the ribs of boardwalks ripped out by a storm and thrown into the brush like a pick-up sticks game played by a giant with bad intent.
“The station’s north,” Blake breathed. “We skirt east, then cut across. Laurel has sightlines from the west ridge. Their perch puts a cone over the middle third. We don’t silhouette.”
So they’d ghost the eastern margin, where cattail and sawgrass wouldn’t give a clean head-and-shoulders shape to a man with a scope. There were a dozen ways it could still go wrong. Most of the ways ended the same. Rone felt his heart find the old, slow push he used when there wasn’t enough future in a room and you had to pretend there was.
They beached the inflatables on the smallest suggestion ofshore. Sand gave way to a thin strip of ground that had once believed in being dry. Blake signaled low—two fingers pointing, curl, spread. Go. Rone slid out first, boots finding the place between roots that wouldn’t roll and ones that would. Isobel followed so close he could feel the heat of her on his back through the wet cool—a presence he was as aware of as his own hands.
Blake’s men went to ground like they’d practiced here. They hadn’t. But they were that kind of professional—dangerous, quiet, nothing to prove. He’d have liked them if he didn’t have to calculate whether they’d point their guns the wrong direction five minutes from now.
NV made the understory look like x-ray. Palmetto fans became flat, luminous hands. Sawgrass etched itself into bright scratches. Trunks went black enough to be holes in the world. They moved in bounds—one pair forward to the next patch of cover, the other covering, then leapfrogging. Rone kept Isobel between him and Blake. He didn’t mean it as a challenge. He meant it as law.
A low pop sounded ahead—soft like a bubble bursting. Rone grabbed Isobel’s hand and yanked her to her knee by his side, before the sound finished being a sound. Blake dropped too, hand up, fist closed. He held. The seconds lengthened into a rope pulled tight enough to sing.
Frogs sang back in an overlapping chorus: pig frogs with their ridiculous grunts; cricket frogs ticking like a child shaking beads in a jar. The pop didn’t repeat.
Rone angled his NV to the right, just enough to let the edge catch anything reflective that a human would leave if they were lazy. There. A tiny bright line strung between two palmetto stems, low to the ground. Not wire. Fishing line. He swallowed a curse.
“Trip,” he whispered, close enough to Blake’s shoulder thatthe word wouldn’t go anywhere else. He pointed. The kid in front had missed it by six inches. Another step, the line would’ve tugged a pin, probably nothing more than a can of rocks hitting another can, the old bush alarm. Maybe a flashbang if someone had money to burn and a sense of humor. Laurel Tide had both.
Blake nodded, reached two fingers out, and stroked the line. It hummed with tension under the touch. He traced it to the anchor point—half-buried screw-eye in a mangrove knee. Followed that to a coffee can tucked under leaf duff. He tipped it. Pebbles clinked. Just a rattle can, but the hairs on Rone’s neck stayed up. Laurel didn’t need tech to be fatal. Sound in a place this quiet would travel like a rumor set on fire.
They stepped over, one by one. Isobel took it with room to spare, avoiding the line like someone who’d dealt with snare cord of a different kind all her life—people’s expectations tied at ankle height.
The lake edge ran into a strip of hammock—oaks low and twisted from holding wind, cabbage palms that had seen more storms than men. The ground lifted a foot, then another. Each rise gave them a fraction more dry. Rone’s calves burned in that good way that meant you were moving with intent. Isobel slid her fingers in between his, and it took everything he had not to turn to look at her.
Halfway around, the smell changed. Diesel and something acrid underneath—the scalp-prickle stink of a small generator that hadn’t been tuned, its exhaust barely making it through the brush. Blake lifted his head, nostrils flaring like a dog’s. He cut his hand to the right. They drifted that way, slow, no feet on sticks, soles rolling instead of planting.
The generator gave them their next choice. To their right, the glow through NV brightened—not visible light, but the warm suggestion of it, bleeding around the edges of a tarp. Ronecould hear it now that he knew where to listen: a small, complaining engine doing a job in the dark where it shouldn’t have work to do. He smelled coffee, stale. He smelled human.
He put two fingers to his eyes, then toward the glow. Blake nodded. The nearer of his men belly-crawled ahead and came back with a tilt of his head that said campsite but not civilian. Rone glanced at Isobel. He could tell her heart had jumped by the way the muscles between her neck and shoulder tightened.
They slithered silently closer. Twenty yards. Fifteen. The tarp came into full green life. Under it: two coolers, one generator, a low table, a case that looked like a rifle would be pleased to live there if asked. A trail-camera hung from a cabbage palm like a vulture with a secret. Rone’s breath flattened. He reached for the strap and tilted the camera toward him without touching it, seeing the red blink that meant cellular, not SD card. He hissed like he’d been cut.
