Chapter 54 - The Boston Harbor Blackout
The blinding white light of burning thermite turned the engine room into a miniature sun.
At 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the chemical compound melted through the steel fuel manifold in a microsecond. The pressurized diesel didn't just catch; it atomized, expanding into a wall of pure rolling flame that blew the inspection hatches off their hinges.
The shockwave knocked Thomas backward off the catwalk, his weapon clattering into the raging inferno below. The second mercenary was caught dead-center in the thermal backdraft, screaming as his tactical uniform ignited like tissue paper before he tumbled over the railing into the fiery maw of the bilge.
Elena was already moving.
The moment she released the grenade, she had shoved herself and the baby into the emergency escape trunk—a vertical steel tube equipped with a counterweighted cable ladder designed for sea evacuations. She kicked the water-tight door shut behind her, slamming the dog-latch just as the pressure wave slammed against the exterior steel with the force of an artillery shell.
The heat through the door was instantaneous, scorching the skin on her back. Smoke poured through the seals, but Elena climbed with a manic, feral energy, holding the infant by the swaddle cloth between her teeth, using both hands to drag her bruised body up toward the exterior weather deck.
She kicked open the topside hatch and emerged into the freezing Atlantic gale.
They had reached the mouth of Boston Harbor, but the city before them was unrecognizable. The legendary skyline—the Prudential Tower, the Custom House, the glittering spires of the financial district—was entirely dead. Not a single light shone. The shipping lanes were black. The lighthouses were dark.
Victoria Montgomery had thrown a kill-switch on the regional power grid. The entire harbor had been plunged into an artificial eclipse, masking the carnage from civilian eyes.
Behind Elena, the cutter *Resolute* was groaning in its death throes. Black, oily smoke belched from the midship ventilators, illuminated by the orange glow of the internal fires. The vessel’s forward momentum was dying as the twin screws ground to a halt against the incoming tide.
A quarter-mile off the port bow, cutting through the thick coastal fog, three low-profile black interceptor speedboats approached in a wedge formation. Their searchlights pierced the mist, sweeping across the listing hull of the cutter.
"There!" a voice shouted from the upper bridge deck of the cutter.
Thomas had crawled out of the bridge wing. His face was scorched, his uniform torn and smoldering, the skin along his cheek blistering from the thermite heat. He held a secondary sidearm, limping toward her across the wet, canted deck.
"The harbor is sealed, Elena!" he bellowed over the wind. "Those are our boats! The police are blind! The Coast Guard is dead! Where are you going to run?"
Elena looked over the railing at the black, churning water below. The waves slammed against the granite breakwater of Fort Warren, the historic Civil War fortress sitting isolated on Georges Island at the harbor’s entrance.
She looked down at the baby. The child was staring at the approaching gunboats, her eyes reflecting the orange flames of the burning ship.
"I'm not running," Elena muttered.
She snatched an emergency orange survival raft capsule from the bulkhead cradle, pulled the manual ripcord, and hurled the canister over the rail. As it hit the sea, it inflated with a sharp, booming hiss of compressed nitrogen, blooming into a self-righting yellow canopy on the crested waves.
Elena looked back at Thomas one last time. She raised the dead officer’s pistol and fired her remaining three rounds, not at him, but into the cutter’s deck-mounted emergency flare locker.
May you like
"Rot in hell, Montgomery," she whispered, and stepped backward into the freezing void.
***
