Chapter 49 - Fire Across the Black Waters
"Silas!" I screamed at the top of my lungs, but my voice was swallowed by the roaring roar of the ocean tearing through the shattered deck.
The water surged up to my waist in seconds, icy and violent. Clara screamed in terror as the current tried to rip her from my arms. I dug my combat boots into the metal rungs of the bulkhead ladder, pulling her upward toward the open ceiling emergency hatch that led to the upper helicopter platform.
"Climb, Clara! Climb to the roof!" I ordered, pushing her little body up through the hatchway into the roaring rain.
She scrambled onto the wet helipad, soaking wet and shaking violently. I hauled myself up after her, turning back to look down into the flooded, boiling tomb of the observation lounge.
Through the churning foam, two figures broke the surface.
Silas had Arthur pinned against an iron ventilation shaft. Arthur was choking, coughing up seawater, his revolver lost to the depths. Silas grabbed the old man by the collar, dragging him toward the ladder. Even now, after everything, Silas was trying to pull his father out of the grave.
"Come on, you bastard!" Silas roared over the storm. "Climb!"
Arthur looked up at his son. In the flashing light of the distress flares, a strange, terrifying calm settled over the patriarch’s bleeding face.
"A king does not rot in an American cell, Silas," Arthur whispered.
With a final, desperate act of malice, Arthur pulled the safety pin on an emergency incendiary flare pinned to his vest and jammed it into the severed fuel line running along the bulkhead.
"Get out, Silas!" Arthur laughed as the spark caught. "Protect the girl!"
"No!" Silas cursed, throwing himself backward up the ladder just as the fuel line ignited into a ferocious ball of orange fire.
The fireball blew through the maintenance shaft. The concussion threw Silas upward through the hatch, slamming him onto the rain-slicked helipad beside me.
Below us, the observation lounge collapsed in a thunderous implosion of fire and ocean, sealing Arthur Marcone sixty fathoms deep into the cold Atlantic shelf.
Above our heads, through the screaming rain, the heavy twin-rotor thrum of a Black Hawk helicopter pierced the night. It wasn't the enemy. The spotlight illuminated the proud, battered emblem of Berth Nine—Silas’s loyal vanguard had tracked our emergency transponder.
The winch cable dropped.
Silas hauled himself up, bruised, bleeding, his suit shredded, but his eyes blazing with life. He wrapped his massive arms around Clara and me, locking us into the extraction harness.
"Hold on to me," he whispered fiercely into my ear, his tears mixing with the ocean rain on my face. "I’ve got you both. I’ve got you."
May you like
The winch lifted us into the sky just as the *Leviathan* reared its monstrous iron stern into the clouds, breaking apart under the crushing sea and sinking forever into the black depths of the Atlantic.
***
