Chapter 150 - Flight from the Abyss
Ten thousand tons of Arctic seawater exploded into the study behind us. The concussive wave of black water smashed through the oak doors, throwing Vance and me up the metal staircase as the lower level filled completely in under five seconds.
We scrambled upward, our lungs burning, the icy spray lashing our backs like whips. The rig was listing heavily now, leaning forty degrees to the port side as the ballast chambers flooded unevenly. Alarms screeched in deafening dissonance, drowning out the roar of the wind outside.
We breached the upper deck just as the ocean began swallowing the main helipad.
The wreckage of our Gulfstream was already slipping into the waves, its burning wing hissing violently as the black swells engulfed it. But parked near the edge of the maintenance bay, tethered to the deck with heavy steel cables, sat an emergency search-and-rescue hovercraft—a twin-turbine, enclosed amphibious craft designed to survive the worst sea conditions on the planet.
"Release the cables!" Vance roared, stumbling toward the pilot cabin as seawater surged over the toe of our boots.
I drew my combat knife and slashed through the emergency quick-release straps holding the hovercraft to the deck cleats. The wind screamed at eighty knots, blowing freezing sleet horizontally into my face, blinding me as the steel deck tilted toward the churning void.
The hovercraft slid violently on its skids toward the ocean.
I dove through the side hatch just as the rig's structural supports tore free beneath us. Vance slammed the hatch shut, engaged the lift fans, and the craft roared to life with a deafening twin-propeller whine, shooting forward over the railing and into the abyss just as the multi-thousand-ton platform collapsed into the freezing sea behind us in a massive vortex of foam, diesel, and twisted steel.
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We hit the ocean swells hard, bouncing violently across twenty-foot waves, the craft’s reinforced hull shuddering under the impact. Behind us, where the black monolith had stood moments before, there was only darkness, swirling foam, and the indifferent expanse of the North Atlantic.
Arthur Sterling was gone. The fortress was gone. The ledger of Connecticut was at the bottom of the world.
