Chapter 42 - The Churning Abyss
The concrete roof of the boathouse split in two with the sound of an artillery shell detonating in an enclosed room. Massive slabs of masonry and jagged granite tore away from the subterranean ceiling, crashing into the water and creating violent waves that tossed our armored tender against the stone slipway.
"Hold on!" Eleanor screamed over the roaring diesels.
She slammed the twin throttles completely forward. The propellers bit into the churning foam, launching us through the narrow outflow canal just as a five-ton block of structural limestone slammed down directly where our stern had been hovering a split-second prior. The backblast of displaced water showered over the windshield, obscuring everything in a blinding, icy deluge.
"Julian!" I shrieked, clawing at the transom, my fingers slipping on the freezing wet fiberglass.
Behind us, through the collapsing mouth of the cavern, the emergency lights of the Vance vault sputtered their final red warnings before being snuffed out by a wall of black lake water. David Vance’s silhouette—standing tall upon the platform with the stolen hard drive clutched against his chest—vanished behind an avalanche of falling rock and detonating infrastructure. The shockwave rattled my teeth in my skull, vibrating through the hull of the boat like a monstrous hammer blow.
Sophia lunged across the bench seats and wrapped both arms around my waist, dragging me violently down to the deck floor as another geyser of stone fragments peppered the reinforced glass canopy above us. "Clara, stay down! You can't reach him! If you jump into that current, you’ll be pulverized against the weir!"
"He went under!" Tears of rage and terror burned hot against my freezing cheeks as I fought her grip. "David came up, but Julian didn't! We can't just leave him in the dark!"
"Eleanor, get us into open water!" Sophia yelled, her knuckles white as she wrestled me down.
The tender burst out from beneath the sunken cliffs of the Vance estate, breaching into the open, wind-whipped expanse of Lake Geneva. Heavy midnight rain drove horizontally across the dark water, masking the Swiss shoreline in a shroud of impenetrable gray mist. Behind us, along the private shore where the boathouse had stood for over eighty years, a sickening plume of oily black smoke and pulverized dust rose into the rain, illuminated from within by the dull orange embers of the ruptured generator banks.
The boathouse was gone. The slipway was completely swallowed by the lake.
Eleanor cut the starboard engine slightly, circling our craft two hundred yards off the ruined cliff face, keeping the spotlights swept low over the debris field bobbing on the whitecap waves. Floating wooden beams, splintered docks, and insulation foam floated in sickening clusters, caught in the undertow.
"Look for a strobe!" Eleanor shouted, her hands white-knuckled on the polished steel wheel. "His tactical vest has an automatic salt-water pressure beacon! If he breached surface, the LED activates!"
We stared into the violent, churning dark for five agonizing minutes, our lungs burning with gasoline exhaust and freezing mist. Nothing broke the surface except pieces of charred wood and drifting swaths of torn silk from the storage lockers inside.
Then, fifty yards to our port side, a single, sputtering strobe pulsed once. Twice.
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"There!" Sophia shouted, pointing toward the churning wake of the drainage culvert.
A figure was tangled in the remnants of a mooring line, drifting face down in the freezing surf.
