Chapter 112 - Fire on the Horizon
The night sky over the storm-wracked Mendocino Ridge detonated into a blinding corridor of tungsten and fire. The unflagged stealth corvette’s 30mm CIWS turret ripped the gale to shreds, spitting three thousand rounds per minute in an unbroken incandescent laser of tracers.
Above the collapsing oil rig, the Navy MH-60 Seahawk’s missile warning receiver shrieked. The pilot reacted with combat instincts forged in fire, kicking the left rudder pedal and pitching the rotor blades hard into the crosswind. Flares erupted from the helicopter’s dispensers in a brilliant cascading fan of magnesium white, but the CIWS was radar-guided, indifferent to heat. The burst caught the tail boom with devastating force.
Metal shredded. Hydraulic fluid atomized into a pink mist against the driving rain, igniting in midair.
"They're hit!" Reyes bellowed over the roar of the tempest, dropping flat against the rain-slicked diamond-plate deck of the tilting helipad. "Marcus, clear out! The cable's parting!"
High above, clinging to the primary rescue hoist, Arthur and Clara Vance screamed as the helicopter swung violently through a fifty-foot arc. The sheer centrifugal force whipped the cable like an angry snake. The heavy steel winch on the helicopter’s door frame buckled under the torque; the locking dogs sheared off with a sharp acoustic crack like an artillery shell.
The hoist line whipped free into the dark.
My sister’s shriek pierced through the howl of the storm as she and our father plummeted toward the raging, white-capped blackness of the Pacific below.
At the same instant, the oil rig’s main starboard support column gave way beneath my boots. A three-foot steel beam groaned under impossible torsion, its bolts snapping like rifle shots before shearing completely. The entire helipad platform titled at a sickening sixty-degree angle toward the churning sea.
"Jump!" I yelled, shoving Reyes toward the windward side where the debris wouldn't crush him.
The corvette’s secondary deck guns opened up, hammering the rig’s superstructure with 57mm high-explosive ordnance. The impacts blew the control cabin into thousands of jagged shrapnel fragments. Steel rained down through the storm.
I didn't wait for gravity to take me. I sprinted up the steeply tilted angle of the falling helipad, hit the safety netting at full sprint, and launched myself into the freezing void.
The fall was four seconds of sensory overload: the deafening thunder of the storm, the burning wreckage of the rig falling behind me, and the looming expanse of ocean rushing upward like a slab of black marble.
I hit the water feet-first, muscles locked, arms pinned tight to my chest.
The Pacific hit me like a solid wall of ice. Saltwater forced its way past my lips as the kinetic shock ripped the breath from my lungs. Down and down I plunged into the freezing dark, dragged deeper by the weight of my tactical plate carrier and combat boots. My body screamed for oxygen, but the training took over automatically.
I surfaced three seconds later, spitting brine, gasping in air that tasted of burning jet fuel and ozone. Fifty yards away, the flaming remnants of the rig’s derrick plunged into the sea, sending a wall of boiling water and steam forty feet into the air.
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Through the stinging rain and towering twelve-foot swells, I spotted the strobe light of an emergency life vest bobbing fifty yards to my south.
Arthur and Clara were still afloat. And bearing down on them through the foaming swells was the razor-sharp bow of the Syndicate's stealth corvette.
