Chapter 46 - The Ice Cracks Open
The delayed scuttling charges I had activated in the sub-chamber hadn't blown the bedrock. They had collapsed the underwater geothermal pressure vents that Grandfather Elias had capped in 1946.
A plume of superheated steam and boiling harbor water erupted from beneath the ice shelf fifty yards offshore. The sound was like the sky tearing open.
A fracture line three feet wide zipped across the bay like a streak of lightning, straight through the center of the Consortium’s landing zone. The lead hovercraft tilted sideways with a sickening screech of twisting metal as the ice shelf collapsed under its five-ton weight, sliding into the black, boiling lake water.
The mercenaries scrambled backward in pure panic, firing blindly into the steam as their tactical formation disintegrated.
"Retreat to the crawler!" Eleanor screamed, scrambling back toward the tracked vehicle as the ice beneath her boots spiderwebbed with fractures.
"Thomas, David, move!" I yelled.
We charged down the wooden pier steps onto the solid shoreline ice, using the blinding steam as cover. The Port Haven fishermen surged forward with us, their iron gaffs and heavy timber tools overwhelming the scattered mercenaries before they could acquire targets in the fog.
I lunged through the freezing mist straight for the crawler.
Eleanor turned, pulling a small silver pistol from her fur coat, her face twisted in a mask of desperation and venom. "You were supposed to be nothing, Benjamin! You were just a fry cook with a broken spatula!"
"I’m Elias Vance’s grandson," I said, swatting the pistol from her grip with the heavy cast-iron skillet I had drawn from my belt. The gun spun across the ice and disappeared into a steaming fissure.
David hauled Eleanor to her knees, while Sheriff Thomas snapped zip-ties around her wrists.
The battle was over. The mercenaries who hadn't fallen into the freezing slush threw down their weapons, hands raised in the red glow of the flares. The remaining hovercraft was dead in the water, its fan blades shattered by flying ice.
Grace stood on the pier above, looking down at the defeated remnants of the Consortium. The town had held. The diner was still standing. The hearth fire was still burning bright against the darkness of the north woods.
I let out a long breath, steam billowing from my mouth, feeling the cold weight of ninety years of family secrets finally lifting from my shoulders.
Then, from the deep center of the lake—far beyond the shattered ice shelf where the water was six hundred feet deep—a sound echoed that stopped every man on the shoreline in his tracks.
It was not the sound of shifting ice.
It was the deep, mechanical, mournful blast of a naval steam horn, echoing from beneath the frozen surface of Lake Superior.
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The water in the fissures began to churn, bubbling with thick black crude oil that welled up from the abyssal depths.
And slowly, rising from the black depths through the shattered ice out in the middle of the bay, the rusted, iron conning tower of an unmarked 1944 submarine began to breach the surface.
