Chapter 23 - Zero Tolerance Protocol
Richard didn’t move like a sixty-five-year-old man broken by guilt. He moved like an old wolf defending the mouth of his den.
With a roar that tore from his chest, my father threw his full weight into Arthur Vance. His heavy work boot smashed into Arthur’s right knee with a wet, cracking crunch. Arthur shrieked in agony as the ebony cane flew from his grip, spinning over the edge and plunging into the black river below.
"Take the shot!" Arthur screamed, clutching his shattered leg on the wet concrete. "Kill them both!"
The two carbine-wielding mercenaries raised their weapons, but I was already moving. I didn't reach for a gun; I reached for the high-pressure hydraulic hose dangling from the pier’s temporary curing pump.
I whipped the bronze nozzle around and yanked the emergency pressure valve.
A three-thousand-PSI jet of industrial water and grit erupted from the nozzle, striking the lead shooter directly in the chest. The force was catastrophic—it lifted the two-hundred-pound man off his feet and hurled him over the catwalk railing. His scream was swallowed instantly by the roaring waters below.
The second gunman swung his barrel toward me, his finger squeezing the trigger.
*Crack! Crack!*
Sparks erupted from the structural girder inches from my head, hot copper fragments stinging my cheek.
Before he could correct his aim, Richard came up from behind him with a discarded piece of number-eight rebar. My father swung the steel rod with both arms, striking the shooter across the shoulder blades with a sickening metallic thud. The mercenary stumbled, dropping his carbine, and I closed the distance in two strides, driving my knee into his solar plexus, followed by a vicious elbow to his jaw that turned his lights out instantly.
The pier went dead silent, save for the whistling wind and Arthur’s ragged, wheezing gasps.
Arthur lay sprawled against the damp concrete, his pristine cashmere coat soaked in dirty river water, his face twisted in pure, unadulterated terror.
I turned back to the detonator block.
*08:14.*
*08:13.*
The clock was bleeding down. The countdown hadn't stopped. In fact, when the mercenary dropped, his tactical tablet had auto-locked, initiating an accelerated fail-safe sequence. The red numbers were blinking twice as fast.
"You... you can't bypass it..." Arthur spat through bloody teeth, dragging himself backward toward the safety ladder. "The code is quantum-encrypted through an offshore server. You have seven minutes before this entire deck shears off! You're going to die here, Daniel! You and your traitorous father!"
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I ignored him. I dropped to my knees before the bomb, my fingers flying over the intricate web of wires, my mind racing through thousands of blueprints, circuit diagrams, and stress tolerances.
"Dad," I said without looking up. "I need your hands. Hold this optic bridge perfectly still. If it vibrates more than two microns, the circuit completes and we're dust."
