Free No Corner to Hide (The Max Masterson Series Book 2) by Mark E Becker

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CHAPTER 19
    M
    ax was reliving his youth, and although he was years ahead of his protectors, he had found a way to rekindle the joys of his childhood from time to time. “You guys should really try this. It’s a rush like you wouldn’t believe.” He
    ran his wet hair through his hands and put his still-dry T-shirt back on. Straddling the surf ski with both legs, he unlashed the kayak paddle, put his feet in both footwells, and took off again, steering around both canoes and shooting downstream, back to the main channel of the river with powerful strokes.
    His security escorts struggled to turn their canoes, and they nearly succeeded in dumping themselves in the water before pointing in the direction of the current. By the time that they recovered, Max was out of sight, and the anxiety of their failures was compounded. As they emerged from the high grass and entered the main channel of the river, they were relieved to see Max coming their way, paddling toward them against the current.
    “I think I’ll just float for a while,” he said. “After we go downstream awhile, we need to turn around and paddle against the current to get back, and I don’t want to have to tow your sorry asses back to the helo.” He settled in behind the canoes and stopped paddling, allowing the strong current to carry them downstream.
    “Mr. President, you say you have been here a few times?” “Oh yeah, when I was a kid, I used to paddle down the slave canal to where it meets the Aucilla River, go down to Nutall Rise, and then turn around and paddle back. It’s pretty remote, with gators and wild boar. One time, I even saw a manatee give birth. Not a place you expect to see in Florida.”
“Slave canal? Why do they call it the slave canal,” questioned one agent, who bristled at the idea. His ancestors had been slaves, and he had never been able to reconcile the idea that one man could own another and treat him like a commodity that was bought and sold.
Max wanted to cherish the silence and enjoy the abundant wildlife, his way of decompressing from the stresses of the day. But he owed his companions an explanation. After all, he started it, and he wasn’t through testing their ability to protect him from the unknown.
“Back before the civil war, the plantation owners needed a way to float their cotton on barges from the headwaters to the Gulf of Mexico, and this river ends up in a swamp. They had slaves that they used to construct a canal between this river, the Wacissa, and the Aucilla, which is a direct route to the Gulf and deeper water. Then it was easy to load their valuable cargo onto ships.” Max slowed the surf ski by silently back-paddling while the current pulled the canoes farther downstream.
“The interesting part of the story is that the canal was never used. The Civil War intervened, and the South declined. The Union blockade ended the cotton industry, and after the war, trains did the work that the slaves used to do,” Max explained. They had reached the slave canal, hidden to the right behind willow trees. If you didn’t know it was there, there was no way to find it without a detailed map. Miss the concealed cutoff, and you ended up in the swamp.
Max took the cutoff.
Two more seconds, and Max was concealed by trees and high grass. To his protectors, it was if he had disappeared without a sound.
    u

CHAPTER 20
    H
    e paddled at full pull, using the foot-controlled rudder to maintain maximum speed around the turn. As the bow of the surf ski rounded the narrow bend of the river, he passed into full view of the mama gator sunning on the sandy
    right bank. The squeaks of her newly-hatched babies greeted him from the opposite shore. No sane person would intentionally come between a mother alligator and her babies, but his intrusion was purely accidental.
    Max immediately realized his predicament.
He was about to get chomped.
The eleven-foot-long alligator slashed her tail once and lunged
    into the water. He