Chapter 43 - The Bloodline Protocol: The Billionaire’s Heart Flatlined on the Evacuation Chopper
Cora stood framed by the roaring orange flames of the breached engine exhaust, her expression unreadable. Rain from the storm outside whipped through the open hatch, plastering her dark hair against her forehead. She looked at Claire. Then, slowly, her eyes drifted downward to the infant screaming against Claire’s chest.
For a fraction of a second, the cold machine in Cora’s eyes flickered. Her pupils dilated.
Leo stopped crying. He lifted his small head, blinking through the smoke, his tear-stained face turning toward Cora. His little hand reached out through the straps of the tactical harness, fingers curling in the exact same gesture he had made toward Claire months ago in that dim Virginia safehouse.
"He knows my face," Cora whispered, her knuckles whitening around the detonator. "His infant cognitive mapping recognizes the Ellison bone structure."
"He knows a monster when he sees one," Claire countered, her rifle trained squarely on Cora’s forehead. "Give me the drive, Cora. Come with us. You don't have to die for a cabal that discarded you like scrap metal."
Cora gave a bitter, hollow laugh that was swallowed by the screaming wind. "There is no 'with us' for things like me, sister. I am an operational liability with an expiration date."
Suddenly, the deck beneath them buckled violently upward with an ear-splitting boom. The auxiliary reactor in the lower bilges had collapsed. A tidal wave of superheated steam blasted through the elevator shaft behind Cora.
Cora didn't fire. Instead, she pressed the button on the bulkhead, sealing the emergency watertight blast doors between them. "Run, Claire," Cora’s voice came faintly through the reinforced glass viewport. "Save your billionaire. Before the water claims us both."
With a hiss of hydraulic seals, the door locked. Cora vanished into the smoke of the burning stern.
"No!" Claire shouted, but there was no time. The deck was tilting at an alarming fifteen-degree angle. Saltwater was already pooling around her combat boots, rising fast.
With the last reserve of strength in her aching muscles, Claire dragged Dante through the service hatch onto the rain-lashed flight deck. The gale-force Atlantic wind nearly tore Leo from her chest, but she clamped her arm over him, shielding the child from the horizontal sleet.
Through the storm, the twin turboshafts of a Navy SH-60 Seahawk helicopter roared into view, its searchlight cutting a blinding white cone through the deluge.
"Moretti! Ellison! Get the hell aboard!" yelled a crew chief leaning out of the open cabin door, waving a glowing orange baton.
Claire half-carried, half-shoved Dante toward the lowered ramp. Two Navy rescue swimmers dropped to the slippery deck, grabbing Dante under the arms and hauling him into the cabin. Claire scrambled in behind them just as the carrier's bow reared up into the sky like a dying leviathan, slipping backwards into the black Atlantic abyss.
The Seahawk lifted with a violent shudder, climbing into the storm clouds as the sea swallowed the billion-dollar ghost ship whole.
Inside the rattling cabin, red emergency lights bathed the crew in blood-colored shadows.
"He's in v-fib!" one of the medics screamed, ripping open Dante’s sodden Kevlar vest and slapping defibrillator pads onto his bare, chiseled chest. "He's lost over three liters! BP is non-existent!"
The heart monitor’s erratic chirping suddenly dragged out into a long, continuous, terrifying tone:
*BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.*
"Flatline! Charge to two hundred! Clear!"
*THUMP.* Dante’s body arched off the metal floor, then fell back, limp as a ragdoll.
"Nothing! Charge to three-sixty! Clear!"
*THUMP.*
Still the flatline shrieked.
Claire dropped beside him, her hands trembling violently. She grabbed Dante’s blood-spattered jaw, forcing his lifeless face toward hers. "Dante Moretti! Do not do this!" she screamed over the wail of the monitor. "You swore an oath to this family! You fight! Fight, damn you!"
She grabbed Leo’s small hand and pressed the baby’s palm directly against Dante’s bare, unmoving chest—right over his silent heart.
"Feel him, Dante!" Claire wept, tears cutting through the black soot on her cheeks. "Feel your son!"
The baby let out a high, piercing cry, slapping his little hand against his father’s cold skin.
On the monitor, the flat green line suddenly jumped.
*Blip.*
A pause. Then another.
*Blip... Blip... Blip.*
"Sinus rhythm restored!" the medic gasped in disbelief, checking the carotid pulse. "Pulse is weak, but it's there! Get the oxygen on him, maximum flow!"
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Dante’s eyelids fluttered open, dark and feverish. He looked directly up into Claire’s tear-streaked eyes. His lips parted, coughing up a small bubble of blood, and he whispered something so low Claire had to press her ear to his mouth to hear:
"The hospital... in Norfolk... Claire, don't trust... the director..."
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