Chapter 52 - Fire in the Fog
I kicked open the wheelhouse door and slipped into the shadow of the trawler's rusted crane arm. The salt spray stung my open cuts, but the freezing wind only sharpened my senses. The first zodiac was thirty yards off our quarter, carving through our wake to execute a standard pincer boarding maneuver.
I didn't wait for them to throw grappling lines. I raised the flare gun, aimed low at the rubberized pontoon of the lead craft, and pulled the heavy trigger.
The flare struck with a sickening crunch, piercing the outer skin before igniting. A blinding geyser of magnesium fire—white-hot, churning at three thousand degrees—erupted across the zodiac's forward hull. The fuel vapor from their auxiliary tank caught instantly. A concussive blast rocked the water, hurling two of the operators into the boiling surf and turning the small craft into an inferno.
Shouts cut through the hiss of burning petrol. From the second zodiac, automatic fire erupted in disciplined bursts, chewing through our deckhouse. Bullets punched through the thin wood, sending splinters exploding like shrapnel across my face. I threw myself flat onto the deck plates, crawling backward toward the hatch that led down into the cabin.
Below, the twins were crying—terrified, muffled whimpers that cut through me deeper than any bullet. Clara was kneeling beside them in the dark, one hand wrapped around an assault rifle she had liberated from Arthur’s safehouse, the other pressing a bundle of wool blankets over the girls' ears.
"The second boat is coming up on our blind side," I said, gasping for breath as I secured the hatch's brass dog latch. "They're going to breach the stern."
"The reef is less than four hundred meters ahead," Clara whispered, her voice dead-calm despite the chaotic rattle of bullets hammering the steel deck above us. "If we hit those rocks at fourteen knots, the hull will rip wide open. We won't survive the impact, Julian."
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"We won't survive the boarding either," I replied. I held up the titanium keycard. "This boat is dead anyway. We scuttle her in the breakers. The frigate drafts too deep to follow us past the five-fathom line. If we hit the rocks, we take our chances in the surf."
Suddenly, the trawler lurched violently. A deafening metallic shriek tore through the stern. The second zodiac hadn't just approached—it had rammed its steel-reinforced prow directly into our rudder assembly, jamming the steering cables and locking our hull into a fatal drift.
