Chapter 57 - The Fire on the Ice
The deck was tilted at a forty-five-degree angle by the time we scrambled through the rear maintenance hatch onto the frozen lake.
The ice was jagged, a vast desert of blue-black ice plates shoved against each other by the blizzard winds. Two hundred yards behind us, the towering black bow of the mercenary ice-breaker loomed, its searchlights sweeping the frozen surface.
"There they are! Light them up!" a voice barked through a megaphone across the ice.
A hail of assault rifle fire chewed up the ice around our feet, spraying frozen needles into our faces.
"Now, Laura!" Dante roared, holding onto my shoulder with one arm while Marcus carried Mateo ahead toward the shoreline tree line.
I turned, spun on my heels against the slick ice, and raised the heavy plastic flare gun with both hands. Through the blizzard, I saw the open bilge hatch of the sinking barge, fuel misting into the air like vapor.
I squeezed the trigger.
The magnesium round streaked through the night in a bright, arcing trail of ruby light. It disappeared cleanly into the bilge hatch.
For one second, there was silence—only the howling of the wind.
Then, the world turned white.
A massive thermobaric shockwave erupted from the barge’s fuel tanks, a fireball rising three hundred feet into the storm clouds. The blast wave shattered the surrounding ice, throwing the prow of the mercenary ice-breaker violently off course and blinding their thermal sights with an impenetrable curtain of fire and boiling black steam.
The shockwave knocked us flat onto the ice. Dante gasped in agony as his stitches tore, but he clamped his jaw shut, refusing to cry out.
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"Keep moving!" Marcus pulled us both to our feet, dragging us into the shadow of the dense pine forests bordering the Wisconsin state line. "The ice will refreeze in twenty minutes, but they won't follow us in there!"
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