Chapter 136 - The Shattered Ice of Missisquoi
Arthur threw the gear lever forward. The tracks bit into the rotting floorboards, splintering them into kindling as the machine crashed through the flimsy double doors facing the open bay.
The icy blast hit Emma's face like a wall of shattered glass, but she kept Maya shielded beneath her coat, burying the little girl’s face against her collarbone. Behind them, the boathouse exploded in a shower of splintered wood and sparks as tactical stun grenades breached the landward entrance. Flashbangs lit up the snow-covered shoreline in blinding strobes of violet and white.
Through the rear viewport, Emma saw Eleanor Vance stumble out onto the splintered dock, screaming into the blizzard, her designer fur coat soaked and dragging in the mud, surrounded by armed men in black tactical gear whose rifles were trained on the snow around her. The matriarch dropped to her knees on the ice, her hands reaching out into the empty dark, utterly abandoned, watching her family vanish across the frozen expanse.
"Hold on!" Arthur yelled over the roar of the sled.
They were flying across the frozen surface of Missisquoi Bay at sixty miles an hour, the steel carbide runners carving twin ribbons of white through the black ice. Behind them, two tactical snowmobiles broke from the tree line, their headlights bouncing frantically across the pressure ridges.
"They're flanking us on the eastern shoals!" Sterling yelled from the front passenger seat, bracing his pistol against the roll cage.
"They won't follow where we're going," Arthur replied, his jaw set, his eyes locked on a dark, jagged shadow rising out of the center of the lake.
"What is that?" Emma shouted over the screaming engine.
"The old rail bridge abutment from 1910," Arthur shouted back. "The lake ice is thin over the deep thermal springs. The sled is light enough to clear it at speed. Their heavy cruisers aren't."
The ice beneath them began to groan—a deep, resonant sound like an iron bell striking underwater. Crack lines shot out from the tracks of their sled like lightning bolts across the black pane. Behind them, the pursuing snowmobiles suddenly veered hard to the west as their onboard ice-penetrating radar signaled catastrophic structural failure. One of the machines hit a pressure ridge, flipped end-over-end, and vanished into a spray of pulverized ice and steam.
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The second stopped, its headlights illuminating the open, churning black water of the thermal vent that Arthur’s sled skipped across by sheer velocity alone.
With a bone-jarring slam, the sled hit the firm pack ice on the western shore of Isle La Motte, clearing the border into Vermont sovereign territory in a shower of freezing spray.
