Chapter 48 - The Ambush at the Old Siphon
The two sentries never had a chance to raise their weapons.
"Jax, silent take! GO!"
Jax tore through the standing river water like a torpedo. He didn't splash; he skimmed the surface, clearing thirty yards of open mud before the shooters could register the rustle of the reeds.
He hit the unwounded gunman square in the chest, driving him backward into the deep silt of the ditch. The man’s rifle flew into the muck with a dull splash as Jax’s jaws locked onto his wrist, pinning the arm into the clay with bone-snapping authority.
I cleared the brush with my sidearm, dropping the second shooter into the mud before he could reach his fallen carbine.
"Drop it! Stay on your face!" I roared.
Beside me, young Nova stepped out of the reeds. She didn't bark or break discipline. She planted her front paws on the bank of the ditch, her hackles raised from her shoulder blades to the base of her tail, letting out a ferocious, gravelly puppy growl that made the pinned gunman freeze in sheer terror.
"Good girl, Nova," I whispered, snapping zip-ties onto both prisoners. "Watch them."
Nova remained planted like a miniature sentinel, her dark eyes unblinking, while Tommy and two state troopers caught up through the brush to take custody of the pair.
"Cruz is at the pump house," I told Tommy, wiping silt from my weapon slide. "He’s got the barge tender."
Three hundred yards downstream stood the Old Siphon—a massive, mid-century concrete pumping station designed to divert river water into the valley’s agricultural canals. The concrete walls were four feet thick, weathered by decades of winter floods, with steel catwalks hanging over the churning water of the main river channel.
As Jax and I approached the rusted steel doors of the pump house, the scent of burning cordite was heavy in the air.
Suddenly, a blinding flash of white light and a concussive roar exploded from the upper intake grate.
BANG.
A tactical flashbang grenade bounced off the gravel, detonating three feet in front of our path.
The pressure wave knocked the wind from my lungs, ringing in my ears like a high-frequency drill.
Cruz had fortified the threshold with booby-trapped distraction devices.
Through the sulfurous white smoke, Cruz emerged onto the upper catwalk, holding an assault shotgun, his eyes wild and desperate. He leveled the barrel straight at my chest.
Jax moved before the smoke could clear.
The Malinois launched himself straight off the concrete foundation wall, using a rusted iron pipe as a launchpad, intercepting the line of fire.
The shotgun blasted—a deafening boom that chewed a foot-wide hole through the cedar siding behind me.
Jax caught the impact along the thick, ceramic armor plate of his tactical vest. The kinetic shock threw him sideways into the mud, but he rolled over his shoulders, sprang back onto all four paws in a fraction of a second, and cleared the iron stairs leading to the catwalk in three violent, airborne strides.
Cruz tried to pump another round into the chamber, but Jax was already on the metal platform.
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Ninety-five pounds of furious Malinois hit Cruz’s chest like a battering ram. The shotgun flipped over the safety railing, tumbling sixty feet down into the churning, muddy waters of the river below.
Cruz shrieked, slamming his back against the rusted pump housing, pulling an eight-inch combat knife from his boot, lunging for Jax’s throat.
