Chapter 18 - The Siren of Vomero
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At 11:55 AM, the stolen white medical transport van rolled through the heavy iron gates of Pier 90 at West 50th Street, stopping thirty yards from the rusted black hull of the MV Vesuvio.
Rain had begun to drizzle over the Hudson River, shrouding the towering steel superstructures of the adjacent cruise terminals in gray mist.
Standing at the top of the freighter’s steel gangway, flanked by six heavily armed Camorra bodyguards holding automatic rifles beneath rain slickers, was a sixty-year-old man in a camel-hair overcoat and Borsalino fedora: Don Raffaele Costa.
In the back of the white van, the rear double doors swung open.
Two of Dante’s Italian-speaking soldiers—wearing the dead kidnappers' blue hospital scrubs and surgical masks—stepped out onto the wet concrete pier, pushing a wheelchair containing a silver-wigged guard slumped forward beneath an oxygen mask, while holding Elena by the arms with plastic zip-ties slipped loosely without latching around her wrists.
Up on the deck of the ship, Raffaele Costa didn't move down the gangway yet. He raised a pair of binoculars, cautious as an old fox, gesturing for the van team to bring the hostages up onto the Panamanian deck.
If they crossed that gangway onto foreign-flagged steel, Lucian’s backup team—hidden inside two municipal sanitation trucks parked fifty yards behind the pier shed—would be pinned down by heavy weapons fire from the ship’s upper bridge before they could cross the open concrete!
Elena knew she had ten seconds to pull Costa down onto the pier.
She wrenched her shoulder back from the masked guard’s grip, planted her feet on the wet asphalt at the rear bumper of the van, and shouted up toward the ship’s deck in pure, aristocratic Vomero Neapolitan—the exact upper-crust dialect spoken by the old noble families of Naples who had looked down on street thugs like Raffaele Costa for centuries:
"Scendi da quella barca di ruggine, Raffaele Costa, o hai paura di guardare negli occhi una donna senza sei fucili dietro la schiena?!"
(Step off that rust-bucket of a boat, Raffaele Costa, or are you too much of a coward to look a woman in the eye without six rifles behind your back?!)
Up on the gangway, Raffaele Costa stiffened as if he had been slapped across the face.
Born in the slums of Scampia at the foot of the Vomero hill, Costa had spent his entire life murdering men who spoke to him in that exact tone of educated Neapolitan contempt.
"My father needs an electrical outlet for his oxygen concentrator inside the pier shed in three minutes, or he dies right here on the concrete!" Elena called out sharply, pointing to the wheelchair. "And if my father dies before Lucian Bellini gets here at noon, I’ll bite my own tongue off before I give you the six-digit cipher key to the Zurich escrow account that Arthur Donovan couldn't unlock!"
That was the bait that sealed it.
Costa had been waiting since nine o’clock for Donovan to transmit the Zurich cipher key—and when Donovan’s screen had frozen at 88%, Costa thought the girl had intercepted the final key!
Blind with greed and stung pride, Don Raffaele Costa lowered his binoculars, barked an order to four of his riflemen to follow him, and marched down the metal gangway onto the wet concrete of Pier 90 to wrench the cipher out of her mouth himself!
Clang. Clang. Clang.
His polished leather boots hit the concrete of the Manhattan pier and strode within fifteen feet of the open back doors of the ambulance van.
"Where is the Zurich cipher, little whore?!" Costa snarled in Italian, drawing a gold-inlaid Beretta as he reached the rear bumper.
"Right under the stretcher," Elena replied in English—and dove sideways behind the armored steel wheel well of the van!
At that exact fraction of a second, the canvas skirt beneath the ambulance gurney ripped upward.
Lucian Bellini rose from the floor of the van with a short-barreled Heckler & Koch HK416 assault rifle braced against his shoulder, while the "frail old man" in the wheelchair threw off his silver wig and oxygen mask, drawing dual Glock 18 machine pistols!
RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!
Before Costa’s four bodyguards could even bring their rifles up from beneath their rain slickers, Lucian and his three disguised operatives dropped all four gunmen to the wet concrete in a three-second storm of precision gunfire!
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Don Raffaele Costa spun around to run back up the gangway toward international jurisdiction—only for Lucian to vault off the rear bumper of the van and fire a single 5.56 round straight through Costa’s right calf, sending the Camorra boss crashing face-first onto the wet asphalt ten feet short of the gangway!
As the remaining two guards on the ship’s deck tried to swing a heavy weapon over the rail, the two sanitation trucks behind the pier shed roared forward alongside three DEA and Coast Guard armored boats surging out of the river fog—surrounding the MV Vesuvio with fifty federal rifles!
