Chapter 44 - The Lake of Fire
The shockwave tore the tin panels from the shed's walls like sheets of paper. Gabriel took the brunt of the concussive force on his back, shielding Nora completely with his own body as wooden splinters and searing shrapnel peppered his tactical jacket. His ears rang with a deafening, high-pitched whine, but his training took command before sensory overload could paralyze him.
Rolling through the debris, Gabriel came up on one knee, weapon shouldered. Through the swirling white smoke and burning magnesium sparks, two shadowy figures equipped with quad-tube night-vision goggles breached the doorway, their carbines tracking the center of the room.
Gabriel didn’t aim; he executed the contact drill by muscle memory. Double-tap to the center mass of the first intruder. The rounds punched through the operator’s ceramic plate, knocking him backward into the rain. The second operator swept his barrel toward Gabriel, but Gabriel was already lunging forward. He drove his combat knife upward beneath the man’s ballistic helmet, severing the jugular in a single, surgical stroke.
"Sarah! The dock!" Gabriel bellowed over the roar of gunfire now tearing into the shed from multiple angles.
Sarah was already at the water's edge, hauling on the mooring lines of an old, twin-engine wooden motor launch tied to the rotting pier. Bullets stitched the planks around her feet, throwing geysers of wet pine into the freezing air.
Gabriel broke into an all-out sprint, Nora clutched against his ribs. Nora didn't cry; she buried her face into his neck, her small hands digging into his collar with terrifying strength. Two more mercenaries emerged from behind a stack of rusted boat hulls, their laser designators painting green dots directly onto Gabriel’s chest.
Gabriel threw Nora onto the deck of the boat into Sarah’s waiting arms. In the same motion, he dropped flat onto his stomach on the wet boards, using the iron mooring cleat as improvised cover. He unclipped a fragmentation grenade from his chest rig, yanked the pin with his teeth, and rolled it across the dock directly toward the stack of discarded fuel drums sitting near the mercenaries.
"Cover!" Gabriel roared.
*KABOOM!*
The secondary explosion was catastrophic. The discarded fuel ignited in a massive fireball that mushroomed into the night sky, engulfing the two shooters in an inescapable wave of liquid fire and flying shrapnel. The concussive blast pushed the motor launch violently away from the dock.
Gabriel leaped across the widening gap of freezing black water, catching the wooden transom with his fingertips. His legs dragged through the icy current of Lake Zurich, the freezing water threatening to drag him down like lead weights. Sarah lunged forward, grabbed the drag handle of his tactical vest, and strained with every muscle in her body to pull him over the rail.
Gabriel tumbled onto the wooden deck, gasping for air, his skin numb from the glacial temperature. He scrambled straight to the helm, stripped the ignition wires with his utility knife, and crossed them. The twin big-block V8 engines screamed to life, roaring with unrestrained horsepower.
Gabriel slammed the dual throttles forward. The wooden launch reared up out of the water, its twin bronze propellers churning the black lake into a frothing rooster-tail of white water as they blasted into the open darkness.
Behind them, three high-speed tactical interceptor craft plunged into the water from the marina’s private launch ramp, their high-intensity searchlights sweeping across the mist like blazing swords of light.
"They're faster than us!" Sarah screamed over the deafening engine roar, shielding Nora on the deck floor. "Those are military-grade rigid inflatables! They’ll overtake us in less than two miles!"
Gabriel checked the marine dash console. No radar. No navigational GPS. Just raw iron, fuel, and the black, fathomless expanse of the Swiss lake ahead.
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"They have speed," Gabriel shouted back, his eyes narrowing into cold slits of lethal resolve. "We have twenty tons of dead weight and zero intention of surrendering. Get down and brace yourself!"
***
