Chapter 37 - Echoes of the Broken Boy
The extraction team wasn't here to rescue Eleanor Vance.
They were here to erase her.
As we secured Eleanor in tactical zip-cuffs and dragged her toward the ramp, the first rocket-propelled grenade slammed into the heavy steel blast door of Wharf Four. The explosion sheared the hinges, sending a vortex of flame, shrapnel, and pulverized masonry screaming down the corridor.
"Take cover!" Miller bellowed, tackling Eleanor to the deck as shards of steel ricocheted off the concrete walls.
Through the smoke, four heavily armed mercenaries in unmarked black tactical gear breached the threshold, their automatic rifles spitting 7.62mm rounds down the tunnel. These were professional operators—tight formations, suppressing fire, moving with ruthless intent.
"They're shooting at her!" Jackson yelled, returning fire with controlled, double-tap bursts that dropped the lead mercenary in his tracks. "They want the warheads, and they don't want any living witnesses!"
I leveled my HK416, peering through the holographic sight into the roiling gray smoke.
For a split second, time slowed down.
In the muzzle flashes of the enemy rifles, I didn't just see mercenaries. I saw the faces of the people who had tried to extinguish my life from the moment I drew breath. I saw Bradley’s cruel, triumphant smirk as he slapped me across the face at the reunion gala. I saw my mother standing on the porch under that glaring yellow light, screaming that I was an ungrateful parasite who would die in the gutter. I saw all the cruelty, all the arrogance of a bloodline that thought money and spite made them untouchable.
*Click-clack.*
My rifle barked three times. The second mercenary took two rounds to the center chest and one to the throat, collapsing backward onto the rubble.
"Ramirez, set thermite charges on the warhead casings!" I commanded over the roar of gunfire. "We slag the casings and render the fissile material inert! No one leaves this wharf with nuclear material tonight!"
"Charges set, ten-second fuse!" Ramirez roared back, slapping the magnetic bricks onto the titanium cylinders and pulling the pull-rings.
"Move! Exfil through the drainage canal!"
We dragged Eleanor through the secondary escape tunnel as the thermite ignited behind us. A blinding, four-thousand-degree white glare illuminated the subterranean cavern, melting the Russian warhead casings into bubbling puddles of slagged metal, destroying twenty years of Eleanor's criminal architecture in a matter of seconds.
The heat slammed into our backs like a physical wall as we tumbled through the drainage grate and hit the cold waters of the harbor.
Above us, two high-speed tactical interceptor skiffs manned by SEAL Team Six operators skidded across the black water, their mounted .50-caliber machine guns opening up with a devastating barrage of fire against the mercenary gunboats. Tracers carved red and gold ribbons through the midnight air, shattering the hulls of the enemy vessels into splintered kindling.
Strong hands pulled me up into the rigid-hull inflatable boat.
"Admiral on board!" the coxswain shouted. "All chalks accounted for! Returning to mother ship!"
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Behind us, Wharf Four collapsed into the sea in a spectacular eruption of pulverized concrete and boiling steam. Eleanor Vance lay on the wet deck plates of our boat, shivering, drenched in harbor scum, weeping uncontrollably as the ashes of her empire settled onto the Mediterranean waves.
***
