Chapter 13 - The Boathouse Ambush
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For half a mile, the six of them waded through the freezing, pitch-black brick culvert beneath the wooded cliffs of the Hudson Valley.
Vittorio Drago, despite his seventy years, carried his five-year-old granddaughter high on his chest without a word of complaint, while Clara stayed right behind him, one hand resting on Lily’s ankle to reassure the silent child. At the rear of the column, Lorenzo and Rico walked backward every ten paces with their weapons raised, listening for any sound of pursuit echoing through the stone pipe.
Finally, a circle of pale twilight gray appeared ahead through a rusted iron portcullis covered in river ivy.
The culvert emptied into the lower foundation of the abandoned nineteenth-century stone icehouse, half a mile south of the Bellini estate boundary line.
Lorenzo used the crowbar to snap the rusted chain on the water-gate. They climbed out onto a mossy stone jetty inside the covered boathouse, where an old, tarp-covered twenty-four-foot Chris-Craft wooden motorboat belonging to the estate groundskeeper sat moored in the dark water.
"Does it run?" Drago whispered, setting Lily down on a dry wooden bench while his two capos checked the fuel tanks.
"Rico and I overhauled the engine in August as an emergency backup," Lorenzo said, pulling back the canvas tarp and tossing the leather courier pack containing his mother’s ledgers onto the front passenger seat. "Full tank. We take it straight across the Tappan Zee to the Drago safe house in Rockland County."
Clara knelt in front of Lily on the wooden dock, wrapping a dry wool emergency blanket from the boat’s locker around the little girl’s shoulders.
"You did so good in the dark, baby," Clara whispered, kissing Lily’s forehead—the exact promise Lily had told Lorenzo her mother never broke.
"Uncle Enzo opened the door, Mommy," Lily whispered back, patting Lorenzo’s wet knee as he stepped past them to prime the boat’s ignition. "Just like I said."
Lorenzo paused, looking down at the five-year-old girl and then at Clara kneeling beside her. In the dim amber glow of the boathouse lantern, with her dark hair damp around her pale face and her hazel eyes shining with fierce devotion, Clara didn't look like an employee anymore. She looked like the heart of everything left worth saving in his life.
He reached down, his scarred knuckles brushing gently along Clara’s jawline. "Get in the cabin, Clara. Both of you stay below the gunwale until we hit the western shore."
Just as Clara stepped onto the mahogany deck of the boat with Lily, the rotten wooden double doors at the landward side of the old icehouse exploded inward under the grille of an armored black Chevrolet Suburban!
Headlights blinded them through the splintered timber.
Deputy Director Vance Harlan hadn't sent all twenty men into the main house—he had stationed a perimeter drone over the river cliffs with thermal imaging, and the heat signature of six warm bodies emerging from the cold stone culvert had lit up their screens like a flare!
"Contact in the boathouse!" a voice barked over a loudspeaker as six black-ops gunmen jumped from the running boards of the SUV, red laser dots dancing across the mossy stone walls.
"Cut the mooring lines!" Vittorio Drago roared, shoving Clara and Lily flat onto the floorboards of the boat’s cabin while drawing his Colt .45 and firing twice into the Suburban’s windshield.
Rico sliced the bow rope with his combat knife and dove over the stern just as Lorenzo turned the brass ignition key.
The big V8 marine engine roared to life, propellers churning the dark river water into white foam as bullets stitched across the wooden dock planks inches from the hull.
Sitting in the rear turret of the Suburban, a heavy gunner swung a belt-fed light machine gun toward the open river mouth of the boathouse—aiming straight for the boat’s fuel tank!
Lorenzo saw the gunner pivoting. If that fifty-caliber or 7.62 belt raked the wooden stern, everyone in the boat—including Lily and Clara—would go up in a fireball before they cleared the jetty.
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"Rico, take the wheel!" Lorenzo shouted.
Before Clara could scream his name, Lorenzo grabbed a full five-gallon metal jerrycan of spare marine fuel from the stern deck, leaped backward off the moving boat onto the stone jetty behind a stack of concrete pilings, and fired his pistol into the jerrycan as he hurled it straight under the front axle of the advancing Suburban!
