Page 21 of Iggy

“Yes. I need muscle. Preferably SEAL muscle that’s used to working beneath the water.” Moose grinned staring at his fellow SEALs in the room.

“Let’s go. We got a storm to fight.”

The tropical storm arrived like it had a personal grudge against Belle Fleur. Rain hammered the roof of the main house, roared over the verandas, and turned the sugarcane fields beyond the live oaks into silver-gray ghosts.

By midnight, the bayous surrounding the property were no longer quiet ribbons of black water. They were rising, churning, muscling against the banks with a hungry, patient force.

Finley stood in the flood control room with one hand braced against the console and the other wrapped around a radio. The screen in front of her should have shown the south spillway gate easing shut in clean green lines. Instead, it blinked red, yellow, red again, then froze with a warning that made every engineer in the room go silent.

“Tell me that’s a display glitch,” Olive said from beneath the access panel, her voice echoing tinny and tense. She had a flashlight clamped between her teeth, two soaked braids pasted to her neck, and grease on one cheek like war paint.

Finley watched the bayou level climb another inch on the monitor.

“If it is, it’s the most committed display glitch I’ve ever met.”

The Belle Fleur flood protection system had been overbuilt on purpose. Three mechanical gates guarded the main channel where storm surge could press up from the bayou. Two had lowered into place before sunset. The third—the old south gate, the one everyone said would be replaced next season—had stalled at forty percent.

Forty percent was not nothing. Forty percent might slow the water, might buy the house an hour, maybe two. But with the storm pushing six inches of rain across the parish and the wind driving the bayou backward over itself, forty percent was not enough.

Olive slid out from beneath the panel with a coil of wiring in one hand and a look of professional betrayal on her face.

“The actuator isn’t receiving full command voltage. Either the junction box is flooded, or something chewed through the conduit.”

Finley’s eyes lifted to the window. Outside, lightning flashed over the black water. Cypress knees poked up like knuckles from a fist, and somewhere beyond them the emergency lights along the south channel flickered under sheets of rain.

“The junction box is underwater.”

Olive sat up.

“Of course it is. Why would the thing we need be dry during a flood? That would be rude to the storm.” Finley keyed the radio.

“Command, this is Engineering. South gate is stalled. Manual override point is submerged in the channel. We need divers.” While Finley and Olive were checking the systems again, Ham and the others were in the small control room near G.R.I.P.

For one long second, only static answered. Then a deep voice came back calm enough to be annoying.

“Engineering, this is Ham. Define submerged.” Olive snatched the radio.

“As in, underwater. As in, the bayou is currently where dry land had the nerve to be this morning.” Another voice cut in, bright with mischief.

“Copy that. Bayou has entered the chat.”

“Zulu,” Ham warned.

“What? I’m documenting environmental shifts.”

Within five minutes, the Belle Fleur security wing had transformed into a staging area. Ham moved with quiet authority, issuing assignments while studying the flood schematics Finley had thrown across the table. Zulu checked comms and grinned like he had been waiting all week for something to go spectacularly wrong. Pax sorted dive lights and backup batteries with monk-like focus. Saint inspected medical gear because Saint inspected medical gear the way other people breathed. Brix stood over the oxygen tanks, expression flat.

“For the record,” Brix said, “I hate night dives, flood currents, electrical systems, and reptiles with more teeth than a chainsaw.”

“That’s a lot of hate for one man,” Pax said.

“I’m efficient.”

Finley pointed to the map.

“The manual override wheel sits inside the south gate housing, behind this grate. The problem is visibility. Under normal conditions, the channel is murky. Tonight, it’s mud, debris, and storm runoff. You’ll be swimming by touch.” Ham folded his arms.

“We’re not SEALs tonight. We’re the people dumb enough to be good in bad water.”