Chapter 46 - The Sluice Gate
The muzzle of the submachine gun caught the faint red glow of the emergency flare.
I didn't think. Four years of living in the Rossi household—of watching the silent, lethal calculations that dictated who lived and who disappeared between the salad course and the dessert—had burned every trace of polite hesitation out of my blood.
I lunged forward, swinging the heavy iron pipe wrench Leo had dropped on the deck.
The iron jaw of the wrench struck the mercenary’s forearm with a sickening, wet crack. The submachine gun discharged into the steel decking, sparks ricocheting wildly off the rivets, deafening us in the enclosed space of the chain locker. The man stumbled backward, his gas mask askew, but he didn't go down. He lunged at me, his gloved fingers closing around my throat.
Leo didn't hesitate either.
He grabbed a heavy iron mooring pin from the bulkhead rack and drove it down with all his strength into the man’s knee. The mercenary collapsed with a muffled shriek, and Gabriel stepped through the smoke, driving the butt of his weapon into the man’s temple. The contractor went limp, slumping over the rusted links of the anchor chain.
"The valve!" Gabriel shouted, coughing as the acrid chemical smoke from the thermite charge began filling the narrow compartment. "Leo, which one?!"
Leo scrambled across the slick, oil-stained deck toward a massive, wheel-operated gate valve mounted directly into the ship's sea chest manifold. The valve was encrusted with decades of salt crust and dry rust, painted a faded, flaking safety yellow.
"It’s seized!" Leo strained against the iron spokes, his veins bulging against his neck, his boots slipping on the greasy steel. "The rust has it locked down!"
Gabriel threw his weight into the wheel beside Leo. Both men pulled with everything they had, their muscles screaming under the strain. Down in the hold, we could hear heavy, deliberate footsteps advancing up the iron companionway—Bellini’s remaining men were moving in tactical formation, their flashlights cutting through the thick smoke in steady, searching beams.
"Clara, the leverage bar!" Leo yelled, pointing toward a four-foot steel pipe lying beneath the chain chute.
I snatched the pipe from the deck, wedged it between the spokes of the yellow wheel, and threw my entire body weight downward against the improvised lever.
With a loud, metallic *SCREAM* of tearing rust, the valve turned half an inch.
Then another inch.
Suddenly, the wheel spun freely, kicking back violently and knocking Leo to the deck.
Deep beneath the *SS Norisle*, in the subterranean concrete base of the dry dock, a sound like a freight train roaring through an underground tunnel shook the entire five-hundred-foot ship.
The winter sluice gates had opened.
Through the drainage grates in the chain locker floor, we heard the sound of ten thousand gallons of pressurized river water slamming into the dry dock floor below.
Down in the lower staging area, the shouting started.
"Water! We've got a breach!" a voice screamed from the catwalk. "The basin is flooding! Pull back to the outer door!"
"Don't retreat, you idiots!" Bellini’s voice broke through the panic, frantic and shrill. "The ladder! Cut the ladder before they get down!"
The sound of gunfire below was suddenly swallowed by the deafening roar of water. The Fox River, swollen with winter melt and early spring rains, was pouring into the concrete depression of Slip 3 at a rate that made the giant bulk carrier shiver on its wooden keel blocks.
"Gabriel, the ship is going to float!" I yelled over the din.
"She won't float—she’s got three hundred tons of concrete ballast in her double bottoms!" Gabriel shouted back, grabbing my arm and pulling me toward the emergency escape scuttle that led to the upper weather deck. "She’ll stay pinned, but the floor below is going to be ten feet under in five minutes! We go up!"
We scrambled up the vertical iron ladder of the escape trunk, coughing and choking on the rising smoke. My hands were shredded by the rough steel rungs, my shoulders burning with exhaustion, but the sight of gray daylight leaking through the overhead hatch drove me forward.
Leo hit the hatch dogs first, slamming his shoulder against the iron cover.
It flew open with a bang, and the freezing, gale-force wind of Green Bay hit us like a tidal wave of clean, cold air.
We pulled ourselves out onto the rusted, snow-dusted weather deck of the *SS Norisle*.
The view was staggering.
To the east, the vast, leaden expanse of Lake Michigan was churning under a slate-gray dawn sky. Below us, inside the massive concrete walls of Slip 3, the dry dock floor had vanished beneath a swirling, violent whirlpool of black river water. Bellini’s three luxury sedans were already half-submerged, their hazard lights blinking erratically beneath four feet of rising froth.
Two of Bellini’s tactical guards were desperately clinging to the upper rungs of the perimeter catwalk, their weapons lost in the flood.
Standing on the high concrete staging apron near the warehouse’s crumpled main door—the only dry ground left in the facility—was Marco Bellini.
His tailored cashmere coat was drenched, his silver hair plastered to his forehead, his face pale with a mixture of terror and unadulterated rage. He was holding a satellite phone to his ear with one trembling hand and a nickel-plated revolver in the other.
He looked up at the deck of the *Norisle*, his eyes locking onto Leo, then Gabriel, and finally me.
He lowered the phone slowly.
"Gabriel!" Bellini shouted across the roaring chasm of rising water, his voice cracking against the wind. "You think you won because you drowned the old man? You think this ends at the dock?!"
Gabriel walked to the ship's forward railing, looking down at the lawyer from a height of forty feet. His posture was completely relaxed, the terrifying calm of the Rossi Don returning to settle over his broad shoulders like a mantle of iron.
"It ended forty minutes ago, Marco," Gabriel called back, his voice cutting through the storm with chilling clarity. "The Caledonia is gone. Hector is gone. Who are you calling on that phone? The Chicago board?"
Bellini’s jaw twitched. He gripped the revolver tighter, but he knew he couldn't hit anything at that range in forty-mile-an-hour crosswinds.
"The board doesn't answer to Hector Rossi, Gabriel!" Bellini screamed. "The board answers to the syndicate in New York! The clearing vouchers were pledged as collateral for the port development bonds in nineteen-ninety-nine! If the vouchers aren't delivered to the federal clearing house in Manhattan by noon, the syndicate triggers the default clauses! They seize every dock, every warehouse, every trust fund connected to the Rossi name!"
Leo stepped up beside Gabriel, leaning over the rail. He held up the silver dog tag, letting it spin lazily in the freezing wind, the alphanumeric cipher catching the early morning light.
"Then let them seize it, Bellini!" Leo shouted down, his voice echoing off the concrete walls. "Because this isn't Rossi property! This is Vance Marine! Every single asset Hector tried to launder through my father’s name reverts to my sister the second I upload this cipher to the Federal Maritime Commission!"
Bellini stared at the silver tag. His eyes widened in absolute, horrifying realization.
For four years, the Rossi family had used Vance Marine as a corporate shield to protect their assets from federal seizure. But by making Vance Marine the legal owner of the transit licenses to hide them from the IRS, Hector had inadvertently handed the ultimate kill switch to the very family he had tried to destroy.
Bellini didn't shout again.
Slowly, deliberately, he raised the revolver. He didn't point it at Gabriel. He didn't point it at Leo.
He aimed it directly at me.
"If the Vance heir dies before the filing," Bellini whispered loud enough for the wind to carry the venom, "the trust defaults to the state. And the state sells to the highest bidder."
May you like
He pulled the hammer back with a heavy, distinct click.
***
