Chapter 49
The industrial rail yard at Pier Fourteen in Ostia Antica was a desolate, decaying wasteland of rusted shipping containers, abandoned freight cars, and cracked concrete slabs overgrown with weeds. The storm had reached its peak, rain lashing sideways off the Tyrrhenian Sea, whipping the black water of the river into a churning, violent froth. Dante arrived on the outskirts of the yard, killing the motorcycle’s engine and gliding into the shadows behind a row of derelict train cars. He moved through the darkness like a ghost, his combat boots making no sound against the wet gravel, his suppressed assault rifle held in the low-ready position. Through the driving rain, he spotted the meeting point—a massive, open-sided maintenance hangar illuminated by four high-intensity halogen floodlights mounted on tripods.
Standing beneath the harsh glare of the lights was Antoine, flanked by eight heavily armed mercenaries in full tactical combat gear. The Frenchman was pacing nervously, checking an expensive gold watch on his wrist, an automatic submachine gun slung casually across his chest. He was expecting Dante to arrive via the main access road, his snipers positioned on the surrounding crane towers to cut the American don down the moment his headlights appeared. But Dante had not survived twenty years of underworld warfare by playing by his enemies' rules. He had infiltrated the yard from the riverbank, crawling through a submerged drainage culvert to flank the hangar from its blind side.
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Dante didn't announce his presence with words. From the shadows beneath an overturned rail car thirty yards away, he raised his rifle and fired two suppressed shots into the portable generator powering the floodlights. The halogen lamps exploded in a shower of brilliant white sparks, instantly plunging the hangar into absolute, suffocating darkness. "Ambush! Kill him!" Antoine shrieked in French, panic tearing through his voice as his mercenaries opened fire blindly into the rain, the muzzle flashes illuminating the darkness in violent, staccato bursts. But their blind fire struck only rusted steel and empty air. Dante was already in motion, moving like a phantom through the rain, his night-vision optics giving him absolute command over the killing field.
He eliminated the two outermost mercenaries with double-taps to the head before they could even adjust their night-vision goggles. Dante closed the distance with terrifying, explosive speed, sliding across the wet concrete beneath an incoming burst of fire and driving his combat knife into the throat of a third gunman. Using the falling man’s body as a ballistic shield, he fired his sidearm with pinpoint accuracy, dropping two more shooters as they attempted to reload. The remaining mercenaries panicked, breaking formation and retreating toward the edge of the pier, but Dante pursued them with the cold, relentless precision of a grim reaper. In less than three minutes, the gunfire died down, leaving only the sound of torrential rain and the ragged, terrified gasps of Antoine, who had backed himself against the rusted iron railing of the pier, his empty weapon slipping from his trembling fingers into the churning river below.
