Chapter 12 - BROKEN CHAINS
I carried Lucas up the companionway onto the pitching deck.
The storm was reaching its violent crescendo, but between the two hulls, Vance and Jackson had already rigged a heavy nylon transport basket.
“Send him across first!” Vance roared over the wind.
I laid Lucas into the padded basket, wrapped him in two thermal survival blankets from the tug’s emergency kit, and clipped the four-point harness over his chest.
“Look at me, Luke,” I said, cupping his cold face. “You’re going across to that boat. There’s a little girl over there named Emily. Do you remember Emily?”
His pale face lit up with a fragile spark of light. “She... she got away? She gave you the picture?”
“She saved your life,” I told him. “Now go show her you’re safe.”
Jackson hauled the guide ropes, pulling the basket smoothly across the gap onto the deck of the fireboat. I saw Emily rush out of the wheelhouse, wrapped in my oversized coat, throwing her arms around the basket before Jackson had even unbuckled the straps.
I stood alone on the deck of the dying tugboat.
Suddenly, the vessel groaned violently. A rogue swell slammed into its starboard quarter, snapping the forward mooring lines like sewing thread.
The gap between the two boats widened instantly to ten feet... fifteen feet.
From the dark wheelhouse of the tugboat, a figure emerged, clutching the shattered doorframe.
It was Victor Sterling. He had abandoned his crushed car on the pier, leaped onto the tug’s stern before we cleared the harbor, and crawled his way through the flooded compartments. His face was a mask of blood and madness; his uniform was soaked; his eyes burned with the psychotic hatred of a man whose empire had collapsed in a single night.
In his hand was a flare gun loaded with a military-grade magnesium cartridge.
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“If I’m going to Leavenworth, Sebastian,” Sterling shrieked over the howling gale, raising the heavy barrel toward the fireboat’s exposed wheelhouse where Emily and Lucas were huddled, “your legacy dies with me!”
He aimed directly at the fuel vents beneath the fireboat's wheelhouse.
