Chapter 88 - The Crumbling Citadel: Fire in the Sub-Oceanic Trench
"Core breach in three minutes," the automated voice calmly announced over the blaring sirens. "All personnel evacuate immediately."
"Dante, we have to go!" Claire shouted, securing the straps of the double harness around her shoulders. The concrete ceiling was already raining heavy slabs of stone onto the surgical tables below.
Salvatore crawled across the floor toward the central console, clawing at the severed cables with bleeding fingers. "My legacy... my empire... I will not let it burn..."
Dante looked down at the pathetic shell of the man who had orchestrated thirty years of bloodshed, who had stolen his childhood and tried to turn his children into biological weapons.
Dante didn't raise his gun. He simply looked at Salvatore with cold, absolute dismissal. "You died in Palermo twenty-five years ago. History just took a while to catch up."
Dante turned his back on his grandfather, grabbed Claire’s hand, and together they sprinted toward the subterranean transport rail that led to the island’s emergency surface hangar.
Behind them, the laboratory was consumed in a roar of blue plasma fire as the primary cryo-array ruptured, burying Salvatore Moretti beneath tons of shattered glass and boiling coolant.
They hit the rail platform just as the first shockwaves tore through the island's foundation. Dante smashed the emergency release on the armored maintenance car, hauling Claire and the boys inside. The magnetic rail shot them upward through the vertical shaft at blistering speed, the walls around them cracking as seawater began to breach the outer silos.
They erupted onto the surface cliffside just as the entire southern half of the island collapsed into the foaming ocean.
The storm outside had reached hurricane fury. On the cliffside helipad sat an unmarked, heavily armored tilt-rotor VTOL transport, its twin rotors already spinning up, cutting through the torrential rain.
"Someone’s spinning the bird up!" Claire yelled over the deafening engine scream. "Friend or foe?"
The cockpit door swung open.
Standing in the doorway, drenched in rain, holding a high-caliber sniper rifle in one hand and giving a crisp military salute with the other, was Captain Miller—Claire’s former commander from the elite naval medical extraction unit, a man who was supposed to be in a Pentagon holding cell.
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"Need a ride, Vance?" Miller yelled over the gale. "Pentagon just had a clean sweep! The traitors are in irons from Langley to the Joint Chiefs! Get your family aboard before this rock goes under!"
***
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