Chapter 93 - The Ghost Freight of Bodensee
The thermal torch above hissed, and the central hatch plate buckled inward with a shower of white-hot slag. We had less than ninety seconds before heavily armed commandos flooded the inspection gantry.
"We can't jump into that water," Clara said, terror finally breaking through her stoic composure. "The hypothermia will kill the infants in seconds."
"We're not jumping into the water," I said, pointing downward.
Beneath the main catwalk ran a suspended maintenance gantry—an ancient motorized trolley used by painters to service the bridge's main underbelly. Its steel cable ran down at a diagonal slant toward the secondary concrete support pier, which sat only twenty feet above the channel where the dark barge was currently gliding.
I grabbed a discarded heavy-duty carabiner and a length of nylon mooring rope left by the maintenance crews. "Wrap the children to your chest, Clara. Wrap them inside your coat, tie them with this cord. Evelyn, you hold onto me."
The hatch above burst open. A tactical flashbang grenade tumbled through the opening, bouncing off the steel girders.
"Down!" I roared.
The grenade detonated in a blinding flash and deafening crack, the pressure wave slamming into my skull. Shrapnel pinged against the ironwork. Bullets immediately tore through the mesh walkway.
I hooked the carabiner over the rusted guide cable, looped the braided nylon around my wrist, locked my arm around Evelyn's waist, and kicked off the platform into the freezing mist.
The descent was pure vertigo. The friction of the steel cable screamed through the carabiner, spraying burning sparks against my knuckles. The wind sheared our breath away as the black river rushed up to meet us. Below, the dark silhouette of the unlit barge emerged from the curtain of fog directly beneath our trajectory.
"Clara, jump!" I shouted backward as we neared the end of the cable run.
We detached twenty feet above the moving barge. Gravity seized us. We slammed onto the snow-covered tarp of a massive coal container aboard the freight vessel, tumbling across the rough canvas in a tangle of limbs and bruised bone. A second later, Clara struck the lower edge of the mound, sliding down into the safety of the iron deck trench.
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Above us on the bridge, searchlights swept frantically over the empty water, but the barge had already slipped into the dense river fog, vanishing into the sovereignty of the lake.
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