Chapter 13 - Breaching the Boathouse
The interior of the boathouse smelled of marine lacquer, cold lake brine, and the dry, sharp scent of aged pine. Suspended above the water slip hung my father’s restored 1968 Riva Aquarama—a mahogany masterpiece my mother had bought thirty years ago, which Arthur had treated like a trophy piece to flaunt his fabricated wealth.
Beneath the suspended hull, two men in dark tactical gear were kneeling over an exposed section of the wooden subfloor, crowbars wedged deep into the tongue-and-groove boards. A waterproof Pelican case lay open beside them on a work table, equipped with a signal jammer humming at a frequency designed to disrupt local cellular towers.
"Drop the tools. Hands flat on the deck," I commanded, stepping out of the shadows with my weapon leveled at the center mass of the nearest operative.
Both men froze, but only for a fraction of a second. The man on the left—broad-shouldered, wearing a balaclava—immediately reached for a suppressed automatic pistol holstered across his chest.
He never cleared the holster.
I closed the distance in two explosive strides, driving my left heel into his shoulder joint with the weight of my full body behind it. The impact tore his arm away from his chest rig and slammed his skull against the heavy bronze housing of the winch. He collapsed onto the decking, groaning as his pistol skittered across the planks and splashed into the dark water between the slips.
The second man swung his crowbar in a violent upward arc aimed straight at my throat.
I ducked beneath the swing, feeling the rush of displaced air graze my hair, stepped inside his guard, and drove the butt of my sidearm directly into the hinge of his jaw. Bone crunched under the impact. He stumbled backward, his heels catching the lip of the open floorboards, and tumbled hard into the shallow slip beneath the suspended boat.
The icy alpine water hit him like liquid nitrogen. He broke the surface screaming, clutching his fractured jaw, sputtering water and obscenities as the freezing lake sapped the fight out of him within seconds.
"Climb out and lay on your stomach, or freeze. Your choice," I said, keeping my weapon trained on him while my boot pressed firmly into the spine of the first man, who was still dazed against the winch.
The man in the water scrambled desperately for the ladder, shivering violently, his teeth chattering so hard they sounded like dice in a cup. He dragged himself onto the dock, rolling onto his belly and pressing his face flat against the cold cedar planks.
I reached down with one hand, ripped the zip-ties from the first operative’s tactical vest, and bound both men's wrists behind their backs with military efficiency.
With both threats neutralized, I turned my attention to the hole they had torn into the boathouse floor. Kneeling beside the exposed joists, I swept my tactical light into the dark cavity.
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Tucked between two structural beams, wrapped in heavy marine wax paper and sealed inside a fireproof Pelican micro-case, lay the object of their mission.
I cut the seal with my pocket knife and snapped the latches open. Inside rested a military-grade, encrypted solid-state hard drive bearing the classified markings of the Department of Defense Logistics Agency—alongside a handwritten ledger in my father’s unmistakable florid script.
