Chapter 79 - The Black Ice Run
The ice groaned beneath our boots with a sound like tearing metal.
Lake Memphremagog was deep, over three hundred feet in the center, and while the surface was frozen four inches thick, the heavy snowdrifts masked dangerous pressure ridges and thin patches where the underwater currents churned.
Behind us, the operatives hesitated at the shoreline. They were heavily equipped, weighed down with plates, weapons, and tactical boots. A hundred yards out, their combined weight would crack the ice like eggshells.
"Hold your fire!" Hoffman’s voice echoed across the open shoreline, carried by the biting wind. "The ice is unstable! You shoot her, the box goes into the bottom of the trench!"
I looked back. Hoffman stood at the water’s edge, wrapped in a black cashmere coat, his cane planted firmly in the snowy gravel. He looked furious, his calm facade finally splintering into sheer desperation.
"Emma!" he yelled through a megaphone. "The ice in the channel is rotten! You won't make the crossing! You're killing your daughter for a ghost!"
I didn't slow down. I grabbed Lily’s hand, pulling her along beside me as we ran across the wind-scoured glass of the ice. My lungs burned with every breath of sub-zero air. My knees were bleeding from the culvert, my fingers completely numb around the metal handle of the lockbox.
"Mommy, it’s cracking!" Lily cried out, her small boots sliding wildly.
Beneath our feet, a spiderweb fracture shot across the black ice with a sharp, sickening *CRACK*.
I scooped her up into my arms, taking the brunt of our weight, and leaped over the three-foot fracture onto a solid plate of blue ice. We hit the slick surface and slid twenty feet, coming to a stop behind a jagged pressure ridge that rose four feet above the lakebed.
From this vantage, I could see the Canadian shore. It was less than five hundred yards away. A patrol vehicle with flashing blue lights was moving slowly along the lakeside highway, alerted by the gunfire across the water.
"We're almost there, Lily," I panted, hugging her against my chest. "We're almost safe."
Then, from the shoreline behind us, came the heavy roar of a high-horsepower engine.
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Hoffman hadn't sent his men on foot. He had deployed two heavy utility snowmobiles, their spiked rubber tracks biting into the ice as they surged toward us across the frozen lake at sixty miles an hour.
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