Chapter 33 - The Venetian Underground
The Venetian Foundry sat like a rusted iron behemoth at the edge of the industrial canal district. Built in the late nineteenth century, its towering smokestacks had stood dormant for fifty years, surrounded by stagnant brackish water, rotting timber piers, and rusted shipping containers.
Rain lashed against the black hull of the tactical zodiac boat gliding silently through the canal's murky water. Julian cut the silent electric motor thirty yards from the foundry's submerged drainage culvert.
Beside him, Clara checked the night-vision goggles mounted on her helmet, her breath misting against the humid glass. Constance sat in the stern, an ancient Franchi SPAS-12 shotgun resting across her knees, her eyes fixed on the rusted iron grates ahead.
"Thermal imaging shows twenty-four hostiles on the ground floor," Julian whispered into his comms, pointing his tablet toward the factory blueprint. "Heavy weapons. They’ve set up two machine gun nests covering the main corridor. The lower level—the flooded canal vault—has twelve more. That's where the old dry-dock is. If Luciano reaches that dock, he has an amphibious transport waiting to take him to international waters."
"He won't make it to the dock," Clara said, clicking the safety off her customized MPX submachine gun.
"Clara," Julian murmured, catching her wrist. For a brief second, the hardened tactical commander vanished, replaced by the man who had pledged his life to her at the altar. "If this turns into a kill box... you take the child and run. You let me and Constance hold the line."
Clara looked at him, her green eyes luminous in the ambient green glow of the night-vision optics. She placed her gloved hand over his.
"We leave together, Julian. Or this entire city burns with us."
They slipped into the freezing canal water, wading through the chest-high sludge until they reached the rusted drainage grate. Julian drew a miniature hydraulic spreader, wedging the jaws between two corroded iron bars. With a quiet electric hum, the spreader exerted ten tons of pressure, tearing the metal apart with a muffled groan.
One by one, they slipped into the subterranean bowels of the foundry.
The smell of sulfur, stagnant seawater, and hot engine oil hung heavy in the air. Above them, through the iron floor grating, they could hear the heavy thud of combat boots and the harsh, guttural barking of Eastern European dialects.
"Two guards on the catwalk above the intake valve," Constance signaled with three swift hand movements.
Julian nodded, unholstering his suppressed pistol. He aimed upward through the gaps in the metal grating. Two soft *puffs* of compressed gas hissed through the chamber.
Above them, the two sentries collapsed instantly, their bodies thudding onto the steel catwalk without a sound.
Clara moved like a phantom, scaling the iron access ladder with lethal grace. She breached the main factory floor just as a patrol of three men turned the corner near a bank of decommissioned smelters.
Before they could raise their Kalashnikovs, Clara opened fire.
A tight three-round burst ripped through the chest of the point man. Julian surfaced behind her, his rifle barking twice, dropping the second guard before his finger could touch the trigger. The third lunged with a combat knife, his eyes wild; Constance stepped out of the shadow of a massive coal furnace and leveled the 12-gauge barrel directly into his sternum.
*BOOM!*
The deafening roar of the unsuppressed shotgun shattered the silence of the foundry, blowing the mercenary backward five yards through a stack of wooden crates.
The alarm immediately blared across the facility—a shrieking klaxon that bathed the rusted factory walls in spinning crimson emergency lights.
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"Cover blown!" Julian yelled, dropping into a low crouch as heavy automatic fire ripped through the air, chewing the concrete pillar beside him into flying gravel. "Suppressing fire! Move to the dry-dock!"
***
