Chapter 10 - Ghosts in the Water
|
Before Grigori’s gunmen could aim their rifles down through the iron drainage slats, Enzo braced his M4 carbine upward against his shoulder and fired a ten-round burst straight through the underside of the black Mercedes SUV’s sixty-gallon reserve fuel tank directly above them!
"Into the water—now!" Enzo roared, grabbing Jade’s hand and leaping off the narrow wooden maintenance catwalk into the black, freezing waters of Boston Harbor behind the three-foot-thick granite seawall pilings just as Enzo triggered an incendiary flare round into the leaking gasoline above!
KA-BOOM!
The Mercedes SUV blew five feet into the air on the garage slab above them, flipping sideways in a roaring tsunami of flaming gasoline that engulfed two of the adjacent Russian vehicles and sent burning debris raining down through the grates into the harbor water!
The shockwave slammed across the water surface beneath the pier.
As the freezing forty-eight-degree Atlantic salt water closed over Jade’s head in the pitch dark beneath the dock, eighteen years of conditioning kept her from gasping. Even weighed down by her boots and the rifle slung across her back, she kicked powerfully upward—only for a falling timber beam from the blown catwalk to grazing the back of her shoulder, pinning her sling strap against a submerged iron rebar cross-brace four feet under the surface!
Her lungs burned. In the black, oil-slicked water illuminated only by the orange glow of flames dancing above, she reached behind her back to slice the tangled rifle sling—when a pair of powerful arms cut through the dark water beside her.
Enzo’s titanium knife sliced cleanly through the trapped nylon webbing in a single stroke.
Before her lungs could give out, Enzo’s arm locked around her waist, hauling her up behind the blind stone alcove of the outer seawall where a six-foot pocket of air sat hidden beneath the dock apron, completely invisible from the burning warehouse above.
Jade broke the surface, gasping softly for air against the wet granite, shivering violently as the October cold bit straight to her marrow.
Enzo pinned her back against the stone wall between his arms, using the heat of his own broad body to shield her from the freezing wind whipping off the bay, one hand cradling the back of her wet head against his throat while his other hand kept his waterproof SIG Sauer trained on the water curtain ten feet away.
"I've got you," Enzo breathed against her freezing temple, his heart hammering hard against her chest through their soaked clothes. "Don't let go of my collar, Anya. Breathe."
For ten seconds, clinging to the lapels of his soaked waistcoat in the dark while bullets and burning oil hissed into the harbor thirty feet away, Jade felt something crack inside the armor she had worn since she was eight years old.
Nobody had ever come back into the fire for her. Not once in twenty-six years.
"Look at the boat slip at the end of the seawall," Enzo whispered against her ear, nodding toward the private concrete mooring pen twenty yards to their left, where a sleek, forty-foot matte-gray Scarab offshore powerboat sat tied to the outer bollard—outside the burning garage. "Rocco disabled the main gate, which means Grigori and Rocco’s only fast exit once the Coast Guard and fireboats see this smoke is that boat."
"No—if they take that boat, they get away!" Jade’s teeth were chattering from the hypothermia, yet her green eyes blazed like emeralds in the firelight reflected on the water. "And Rocco is right up on the dock apron above it!"
"They aren't taking my boat," Enzo growled softly. "Stay wedged on this stone ledge for ninety seconds. I’m going under the hull to climb the stern boarding ladder."
"Wait—Rocco is watching the stern ladder from the pier!" Jade caught his wrist with her freezing hand. "In the Catskills, whenever Grigori walked toward an extraction vehicle, he always kept two guards watching the driver’s side and the rear—and left his blind side on the injured left eye! Let me climb the dock ladder thirty feet behind Rocco to draw his eyes toward the warehouse door—and you come over the bow!"
May you like
Enzo stared down at her in the flickering orange shadow. "If you miss with cold hands, Rocco puts a bullet through you."
"I don't miss," Jade whispered fiercely, holding up the waterproof Glock 43. "Especially not traitors who call me sweetheart."
