Chapter 7 - The Horn in the Fog
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Elena didn't have a gun, and through two inches of military-grade ballistic glass, Lucian would never hear her scream over the roar of the diesel tugboat engines.
She looked at the dashboard of the Maybach.
Unbuckling her seatbelt, Elena lunged forward between the leather captain’s chairs into the driver’s cockpit, slammed her left palm down on the steering wheel horn, and with her right hand hit the toggle switch for the armored vehicle’s high-intensity blinding security strobes—aimed directly up toward the roof of the shed!
BLAAAAARE!
The deafening air-horn blast echoed off the steel shipping containers across the pier at the exact instant the blinding halogen floodlights hit the sniper’s scope on the shed roof.
Startled and blinded for half a second, the first mate jerked the trigger of his hunting rifle.
CRACK!
Instead of taking Lucian in the back of the skull, the high-caliber round sparked violently off the steel gantry girder three inches to Lucian’s left!
Lucian spun around like a striking viper, dropping to one knee behind a concrete bollard and firing three rapid, suppressed rounds straight up into the open skylight of the corrugated roof.
The rifle clattered down the tin roof into the harbor water, followed a second later by the gunman slumping motionless across the gutter.
Down at Slip 3, hearing the rifle shot, Sabatini’s eight Neapolitan gunmen abandoned the crane lines and opened fire down the pier with automatic weapons, bullets pinging off the steel containers and starring the outer layer of the Maybach’s bulletproof windshield as Elena ducked low behind the dashboard.
Inside the crane control booth at the base of the gantry, Lucian didn't duck. While Dante and his three guards pinned Sabatini’s crew behind the cargo stacks with heavy suppressive fire, Lucian smashed the glass override box on Crane 4, threw the hydraulic slewing lever hard to port, and swung the forty-ton steel box of Container 409 in a massive, groaning arc right over the edge of Slip 3—directly above the deck of Sabatini’s getaway tugboat!
Then Lucian hit the emergency cable brake release.
Forty tons of hollow Carrara marble and chemical drums plummeted twenty feet out of the sky and slammed straight through the wooden wheelhouse and hull of the tugboat Sant'Angelo with a deafening, splintering roar that sent a ten-foot wave of greasy harbor water crashing over the pier!
As the tugboat’s stern buckled and pinned the barge against the pilings—trapping Sabatini’s surviving gunmen on the flooded dock—the outer chain-link gates of Pier 11 blew open under the sirens of twelve black DEA and Homeland Security tactical vehicles, accompanied by two Coast Guard cutters roaring into the slip with mounted machine guns!
Lucian didn't wait to shake hands with the feds.
Keeping behind the blind spot of the stacked containers, he and Dante sprinted back to the Maybach, wrenched the doors open, and dove inside just as Dante threw the transmission into reverse, backing smoothly out through the private union service alley before the DEA agents even reached the water’s edge.
In the backseat, Elena was still kneeling between the front seats, breathing hard, her chestnut hair coming loose from its pins around her flushed cheeks.
Before she could scramble back to her seat, Lucian’s large hands closed around her waist and lifted her effortlessly back onto the leather cushion beside him.
He didn't let go.
His chest was heaving beneath his charcoal waistcoat, a smudge of grease and gunpowder across his knuckles as his gunmetal eyes burned into hers from four inches away.
"I told you to stay in the back," Lucian rasped, though his hands were gripping her waist as if he were checking to make sure she was still solid.
"If I hadn't hit the horn, you wouldn't have a head right now, Mr. Bellini," Elena whispered back, her hands braced against the hard muscle of his chest, feeling the thunderous beat of his heart beneath her palms.
May you like
Lucian looked down at her mouth, then back up into her hazel eyes.
"Call me Mr. Bellini one more time after saving my life twice before three o’clock," he murmured darkly, his thumb brushing a stray lock of hair behind her ear, "and see what happens, Elena."
