Chapter 44 - The Mercenary Breach
The shockwave blew the monitors into glittering shards of glass. Smoke, thick with black plastic soot, rolled through the blown blast doors. Thorne was already firing—three controlled double-taps from his custom sidearm cracking through the haze, dropping the first mercenary who tried to clear the catwalk railing.
“Move! Into the secondary bilge!” Thorne bellowed, ejecting an empty magazine and slapping a fresh one home in a single fluid motion. “They’ve got tactical breaches from both stairwells. These aren't local guards. These are former European operators hired to sanitize the facility!”
Ryan hauled Charles Jr.—CJ—over his shoulder. The boy’s legs were limp, his nervous system struggling to reclaim motor control after years of pharmacological stasis. Emily was instantly at Ryan’s side, supporting CJ’s left flank, her shoulder pressed against his freezing skin.
Bullets peppered the diamond-plate floor around them, throwing up sparks that hissed in the pooling amber fluid.
“Emily, the cargo hoist!” Ryan shouted, ducking behind the reinforced stasis frame as a volley of 5.56 rounds tore through the plastic coolant pipes above. Freon hissed into the room, creating an impromptu smoke screen.
“I’ve got the lift panel!” Emily yelled, smashing her palm against the yellow freight elevator button. The iron cage rattled in its shaft, slowly rising from the utility deck below.
On the catwalk, a heavily armored operator leveled a submachine gun directly at Emily’s back.
Ryan didn't think. He drew his weapon with his right hand, keeping CJ upright with his left, and squeezed the trigger twice. The rounds struck the operator’s chest plate, throwing him backward off the catwalk; he crashed twenty feet below onto the concrete turbine housing.
“Thorne, fallback!” Ryan ordered.
Thorne fired two more suppressing rounds down the stairwell, then threw an incendiary flash-grenade into the server bank. The legacy mainframes—containing the only digital copies of Charles Vance’s illegal offshore biological records—erupted into a blinding white inferno.
“Nobody gets the data,” Thorne growled, sliding into the iron elevator cage just as the steel lattice door slammed shut.
The freight lift groaned, descending into the lower ballast bowels of the platform. Through the iron mesh of the cage ceiling, they could see the catwalk crawling with six more armed men. A voice echoed down the shaft through a tactical megaphone—a smooth, cultured voice that Ryan recognized with sickening clarity.
“Ryan! Don't be a fool!”
Ryan leaned against the cage wall, his arm trembling under CJ’s weight, and looked up through the mesh.
Standing at the edge of the blown blast door, surrounded by four mercenaries with laser sights trained downward, was Arthur Pendelton—Helena’s chief personal attorney and the senior partner of the Vance Family Trust’s private legal council for thirty-five years.
“Pendelton,” Ryan spat, his voice cold as the Atlantic squall outside. “You traitorous bastard.”
“Not traitorous, Ryan—faithful!” Pendelton called down, his silk tie fluttering in the draft from the breached lab. “Faithful to your mother’s original covenants! Charles stole that child from Sarah Sinclair twenty-two years ago to dilute Helena’s rightful inheritance! That boy does not belong to you! Hand him over, and you and Emily can take your helicopter back to Maine!”
“You work for Helena?” Emily yelled back, her eyes burning with pure contempt. “She tried to murder my unborn baby, Arthur! She’s sitting in a federal isolation wing!”
“Helena was transferred two hours ago to an off-site medical facility for emergency cardiac evaluation,” Pendelton replied, his voice laced with venomous triumph. “Signed off by a compliant federal judge whose campaign fund happens to be owned by a Sinclair trust. She’s already on her way to a sovereign airstrip in New Brunswick. Give me the boy, Ryan! If you don't, this platform will become your family tomb!”
“Over my dead body, Arthur,” Ryan roared.
Pendelton lowered his hand in a dismissive gesture. “Cut the lift cables.”
Two mercenaries on the upper deck stepped forward with an industrial oxy-acetylene torch.
“Hold on!” Thorne roared, grabbing Ryan, Emily, and CJ, throwing them toward the emergency maintenance hatch set into the elevator floor.
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The steel cable above them snapped with the sound of a whip cracking through an artillery barrage.
***
