Chapter 42 - The Black Undertow
The impact with the Atlantic did not feel like water; it felt like concrete shattering against my spine.
The breath was violently expelled from my lungs in an explosion of silver bubbles. The freezing sea clamped around my throat like an iron collar, numbing my skin instantly and dragging me down into the absolute, suffocating dark. Even as my body convulsed from the cold shock, my arms locked around my child. The bundle was wrapped in layers of waterproof insulation, but the crushing hydrodynamic pressure dragged us deeper into the black abyss.
Above, the ocean ignited. The thousand-ton steel frame of Fort Vance hit the surface like a falling moon.
The underwater shockwave slammed into my back, tumbling me head over heels. Torrents of mangled steel, shattered concrete, and blazing fuel hissed into the depths, dragging down currents of turbulence that threatened to rip the child from my grip. Iron girders sank like dropped spears all around us, piercing the dark water with furious trails of phosphorescent foam. One jagged beam brushed past my leg, tearing through my clothing and shearing the skin of my thigh, but the blinding adrenaline kept the pain at bay.
*Swim. You have to swim.*
My boots dragged me down like lead anchors. Kicking furiously with my uninjured leg, I fought against the suction of the sinking fortress. My lungs were burning, on the verge of inhaling brine, when a powerful hand clamped onto the collar of my life vest.
A silhouette appeared through the swirling ash and salt. Daniel.
His face was streaked with blood from his fight with Campbell, his eyes bloodshot against the sting of the salt, but his grip was unyielding. He kicked with desperate fury, hauling both me and the baby upward against the raging downdraft of the metal grave below. Together, our bodies breached the surface into the roaring storm.
We gasped for air, choking on diesel smoke and bitter sea spray. Twenty yards away, the red halogen strobe of Declan’s offshore interceptor cut through the rain.
"Over here!" Declan’s voice was a ragged scream over the roar of twin diesel engines. The boat drifted dangerously close to the spinning vortex of the sinking superstructure.
Declan leaned over the gunwale, his scarred hands reaching down into the froth. He seized my life vest first, hoisting me and the bundle over the fiberglass hull. I hit the deck on my knees, coughing violently, shielding the baby with my torso. Seconds later, Declan and I grabbed Daniel’s arms, hauling him over the railing just as another massive internal explosion from Fort Vance detonated below the surface, sending a geyser of boiling froth into the sky.
Daniel collapsed onto the deck plates, coughing up seawater, his chest heaving. "Campbell..." Daniel rasped between choking breaths. "He went down... pinned beneath the lower crane arm."
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I peeled back the sodden thermal hood of the bundle with trembling fingers. For three horrific seconds, there was silence. Then, a sharp, ragged wail pierced the drone of the boat's engines. My baby was breathing.
Declan slammed the throttle forward, and the interceptor leaped across the black swells, leaving the burning, sinking graveyard of Fort Vance swallowed by the Atlantic.
