Chapter 84 - The Breach at Portsmouth
Three hundred feet beneath the granite foundations of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, the emergency lights pulsed in slow, rhythmic amber beats.
Inside the reinforced panic room of Ward Four, Emily knelt on the concrete floor, holding five-month-old Leo tightly against her chest. The infant whimpered softly, muffled against her wool sweater, sensing the absolute terror and fierce adrenaline coursing through his mother’s veins.
On the other side of the twelve-inch hardened titanium door, a high-pitched hiss echoed through the metal. A glowing orange dot bloomed near the center of the mechanical locking array, smoking and spitting white-hot embers.
Thermic lances. They were cutting through the failsafe bolts.
Emily didn’t scream. She didn’t weep. The soft, elegant woman who had stood beside me while Jason laughed at us at Thanksgiving had vanished. In her eyes burned the ferocious, unyielding instinct of a mother protecting her child.
Laid out beside her on the equipment trunk was a twelve-gauge tactical shotgun she had taken from the wall locker, along with four spare boxes of heavy buckshot. She had already pulled the heavy steel utility shelves across the entryway, rigging an improvised barricade.
"Ma'am," croaked Chief Petty Officer Miller, the only surviving guard inside the room with her, his shoulder bandaged hastily with torn gauze where a suppressed round had clipped him. "When that door falls... the pressure seals will blow. The concussion will knock us flat."
"Then we don't stay near the door," Emily said, her voice chillingly composed. She pointed toward the secondary maintenance tunnel hatch near the ceiling vents. "Can that exhaust shaft take my baby's weight?"
"It leads to the dry dock drainage network," Miller wheezed. "It empties into the tidal basin. But it's fifty feet of vertical ladder in the dark."
"Then you’re going to help me sling him to my back," Emily replied, sliding the shotgun’s action back with a definitive, mechanical clack. "Because no one touches my son while I am drawing breath."
A deafening pop reverberated through the bunker. The top hydraulic locking bar snapped. A plume of toxic gray smoke billowed through the expanding crack, followed by the cold, amplified voice of Arthur Sterling echoing through the external intercom.
May you like
"Open the hatch, Mrs. Harrington. Let us not make this untidy. A child of the Sterling bloodline does not belong in a subterranean sewer."
Emily raised the shotgun, aimed it dead-center at the blistering metal seam, and waited.
