Chapter 6 - The Defusal at Forty Seconds
One minute and forty seconds.
In ninety seconds, two hundred pounds of military-grade thermite and plastic C4 would detonate in the sub-cellar beneath my feet, generating an eight-thousand-degree thermal column that would vaporize the central brick supports, dropping the entire three-story granite mansion into a blazing sinkhole within forty seconds.
I didn't look at the contractor. I drove the heavy steel butt of my Walther into his temple, knocking him unconscious onto the floor, and sprinted across the blood-slicked tiles to the pantry door.
"Mia!" I roared, striking the heavy oak panel with the flat of my palm. "Mia, unlock the door! Now!"
A terrified whimper sounded from inside. Then came the rattle of a brass bolt being dragged back with small, desperate fingers.
The door swung inward.
Mia stood there in the dark, her back pressed against a stack of canned peaches, her arms wrapped around fourteen-month-old Lily with a feral, protective ferocity that made her small frame shake. The baby was crying now—loud, shrill, terrified wails that cut through the silence of the house.
"Mr. Duca!" Mia cried, tears streaming down her soot-stained cheeks. "The floor is getting hot! The floorboards smell like fireworks!"
I didn't speak. I reached down, scooped Mia and the baby into my right arm against my chest, lifting forty pounds of human life as if it were featherweight, and kicked the rear emergency fire door that opened directly onto the west garden terrace.
The heavy oak door burst open into the freezing rain.
"Marcus!" I shouted into the night.
From behind the stone fountain in the courtyard, two dark figures broke into a dead sprint through the sleet. Marcus Vance and his senior lieutenant, both wearing tactical body armor and carrying short-barreled carbines, reached the terrace steps in four seconds.
"Take them!" I commanded, transferring Mia and Lily into Marcus’s broad, armored arms. "Move them to the secondary armored Suburban at the end of the alley. Get them behind the perimeter line!"
"Boss, the house is rigged!" Marcus shouted over the crying baby and the driving sleet. "The external sensors show thermal blooming in the foundation! You have less than a minute!"
"Get the girls out of here, Marcus!" I roared, my eyes locking onto his with an unyielding, sovereign fury that brooked zero insubordination. "I am getting my mother and Grace!"
I spun on my heel and bolted back into the smoke-filled kitchen.
The digital clock on the Pelican case was at 00:48.
Forty-eight seconds.
I didn't have the tools to defuse a dual-circuit military demolition package. Attempting to cut the wires on an unfamiliar commercial detonator was suicide.
There was only one way to survive a thermite charge: separation.
The charges weren't wired into the structural steel yet; the contractors had been interrupted before they could complete the drill mounts. The main explosive package—six blocks of olive-drab composition C4 wrapped in secondary thermite blankets—sat inside an open commercial duffel bag resting on an iron wheeled trolley beside the dumbwaiter shaft.
I grabbed the heavy nylon handles of the duffel bag with both hands, my injured shoulder screaming with tearing agony as two hundred pounds of dead weight lifted off the trolley.
I didn't carry it toward the street. The street was an enclosed canyon of brick brownstones; detonating two hundred pounds of high explosives on Chestnut Street would blow out every historic bay window within three blocks and kill fifty sleeping civilians.
I dragged the bag through the kitchen, out the shattered rear fire door, and sprinted across the wet flagstones toward the deep, stone-lined ornamental reflecting pool at the center of the garden.
The pool was eight feet deep, carved from solid New England granite in 1912, fed by an artesian well that never froze.
00:18... 00:17... 00:16...
The digital timer was beeping now—a shrill, high-frequency pulse that sounded like an executioner’s stopwatch.
I reached the granite lip of the pool, swung the heavy duffel bag with every ounce of leverage in my legs, back, and shoulders, and hurled the two-hundred-pound explosive package straight into the center of the eight-foot-deep water.
SPLASH.
I turned and dove behind the five-foot-thick solid granite retaining wall of the lower terrace, pulling my knees to my chest, hands clamped over my ears, mouth open to equalize the impending blast pressure.
00:03... 00:02... 00:01...
BOOOOOOOOOOOM.
The detonation was not a fiery blast; it was a hydraulic earthquake.
A six-foot geyser of boiling water, pulverized granite, and white-hot thermite slag erupted fifty feet into the night sky, lighting up the rooftops of Beacon Hill in a blinding, incandescent flash of violet-white light. The shockwave slammed into the retaining wall, shaking three tons of stone beneath my back, showering the gardens in scalding mud and shattered flagstones.
The water had done its work. The hydrostatic pressure had contained ninety percent of the shrapnel, turning an apocalyptic structural collapse into a muddy, smoking crater in the middle of my lawn.
I scrambled to my feet through the falling mud, my ears ringing with deafening white noise, my vision blurred by smoke.
Above me, through the broken second-floor windows of the study, I saw a flashlight beam wave twice in a frantic, deliberate circle.
Grace and my mother were alive.
May you like
I reached for my radio, coughing through a mouthful of sulfur and damp ashes.
"Marcus," I said, my voice dropping into that dark, bottomless register that signaled the end of diplomacy and the beginning of a hunt. "Bring the Suburban to the front. We are going to Berth 42."
