Chapter 11 - The Fire on the Water
The metal catwalk beneath Leonardo’s boots shuddered under the relentless onslaught of high-caliber rifle fire.
Sparks cascaded down into the oily sea like orange fireflies.
Dante emptied his submachine gun down the narrow steel spiral staircase, cutting down the first two mercenaries trying to breach the upper landing.
“Boss, we have less than forty rounds left between us!” Dante shouted over the mechanical thunder of assault weapons.
“The stairs are a meat grinder, but they’re bringing up RPGs from the transport trucks!”
Leonardo pressed his back against the thick iron housing of the winch motor, his breath hitching as broken ribs ground against each other.
His vision swam with gray spots, but his mind remained razor-sharp.
He looked down through the perforated steel floor toward the open cargo hold of the Vespera.
The ship was tethered thirty feet below the crane's primary boom.
Stacks of heavy wooden crates bearing international hazardous chemical placards sat directly beneath the container hoisting sling.
Industrial solvents, high-grade ethanol, and pressurized medical aerosols.
Uncle Marco and Angelo were so intoxicated by greed that they had parked their primary infantry line directly between the chemical containers and the fuel bunkering lines.
“Dante!” Leonardo barked, his voice cutting through the ringing in his ears.
“The crane cabin!”
“Can you override the magnetic release on the main hoist?”
Dante’s eyes widened through the smoke.
“The hoist is rigged with a twenty-ton counterweight block!”
“If I drop that block into the open hold, it will ignite the bunkering line!”
“The whole pier will go up in flames!”
“That is the point,” Leonardo commanded, grabbing Dante by the tactical harness and pulling him toward the cabin door.
“Blow the hydraulic locks and jump into the harbor on three!”
“Go!”
Dante scrambled into the shattered operator cab, his bleeding fingers tearing away the maintenance panel under the primary steering console.
Down on the tarmac, Angelo stood beside Uncle Marco behind the bulletproof door of an armored Suburban, laughing through a megaphone.
“Come down on your knees, Leonardo!” Angelo mocked, his voice bouncing off the steel hulls.
“Surrender the offshore codes, and I promise to let the little waitress live long enough to clean your blood off my shoes!”
Leonardo stepped out from behind the winch casing into the harsh glare of the maritime searchlights.
He raised his Kimber pistol, holding his fire, his eyes fixed on Angelo’s grinning face sixty feet below.
“You always were too stupid to read a shipping manifest, Angelo,” Leonardo whispered under his breath.
Inside the glass booth, Dante connected the emergency override wires.
A deafening screech of sheared metal tore through the harbor as the crane’s massive magnetic clamp disengaged.
The twenty-ton solid iron counterweight plummeted straight down like a falling meteor.
It smashed through the upper deck of the Vespera, plunging directly into the central storage compartment filled with volatile industrial solvents.
The initial impact sounded like a train derailment.
A fraction of a second later, the chemical vapours met the friction heat of crushed steel.
The night exploded.
A towering pillar of orange and blue fire ripped upward through the deck, throwing a shockwave that shattered every window within two square miles.
The blast lifted Angelo’s armored Suburban off its axles, tossing it onto its roof like a child’s toy.
Secondary explosions tore through the fuel lines along the concrete pier, turning the entire shipping lane into an inferno of blazing diesel and screaming men.
“Jump!” Leonardo roared, grabbing Dante’s shoulder as the crane’s structural gantry began to buckle under the heat.
Together, the surviving men threw themselves over the railing into the pitch-black void.
The fall lasted three terrifying seconds before the icy, salt-choked water of the Atlantic swallowed them whole.
The shock of the frigid water knocked the remaining breath from Leonardo’s lungs, searing his fractured ribs with unimaginable agony.
He fought toward the surface, kicking against the drag of his tactical vest until his head broke through the oily waves.
All around them, burning debris rained down into the water, hissing as it quenched in the foam.
Pier 42 was a raging wall of fire.
Angelo’s soldiers were running in total disarray, throwing their weapons into the flames as harbor sirens began to wail across the bay.
Dante surfaced ten feet away, coughing violently and dragging one of their wounded comrades by his life vest.
“Boss! The backup extraction launch!” Dante sputtered, pointing toward the outer seawall where a low-profile tactical cutter was speeding toward them through the smoke.
Leonardo grabbed the side netting of the rescue boat, his strength rapidly failing as hypothermia joined the trauma of his injuries.
As two operators hauled him onto the deck, Leonardo turned his bloodied face back toward the burning shoreline.
The docks were destroyed.
Angelo’s drug shipment had been reduced to toxic ash.
Yet in the distance, speeding away down the harbor access road, Leonardo caught the flashing taillights of a single black sedan that had slipped through the perimeter before the explosion.
Uncle Marco.
May you like
The old viper had survived the blast.
And there was only one place a desperate, cornered traitor would head with thirty armed survivors at his back: the Costas estate on the cliffs, where the gates were open, and two defenseless sisters waited in the dark.
