The Lost Child On The City Bus And The Father’s Photo
CHAPTER 5: ACID AND IRON
The control platform descended into violent, blinding chaos as the white chemical smoke filled the cavern.
Two security guards stumbled through the fog with their submachine guns barking wild, deafening bursts that ricocheted off the steel vault ceiling. Gage lunged through the smoke, catching the lead guard by the collar of his tactical vest and hurling him over the safety railing. The guard plummeted twenty feet down, landing with a heavy, concussive splash onto a concrete overflow ledge, disarmed and neutralized.
Bear swept the second guard’s legs out with a sweeping strike of his heavy steel tire iron, while Hawk pinned the remaining two gunmen behind the electrical breaker panels with non-lethal kinetic beanbag rounds.
Kurt Sterling panicked. Coughing violently through his hazmat hood, the CEO lunged toward the master hydraulic console, smashing his fist down onto the red emergency override switch.
KLAXON! KLAXON! KLAXON!
An ear-splitting emergency siren shrieked through the subterranean vault. A massive eight-foot cast-iron knife gate at the bottom of the vat began to rise with a groaning screech of hydraulic pistons.
Beneath Lucas Campbell, the dark chemical sludge began to swirl into a violent, churning vortex, creating a lethal suction that threatened to pull anything above it down into the crushing maw of the river discharge conduit. Simultaneously, an overhead gantry pipe began spraying hundreds of gallons of concentrated hydrochloric acid into the vat to lower the viscosity!
“Gage!” Lucas gasped, his voice cracked and raw from chemical inhalation, lifting his swollen eyes toward the catwalk. “The hoist cable is jammed! If the acid hits the cables, they’ll dissolve in ninety seconds!”
Gage didn’t hesitate. He stripped off his heavy leather cut, revealing his massive tattooed shoulders corded with muscle, and grabbed a fifty-foot braided nylon heavy-recovery winch strap from Bear’s pack.
“Bear! Man the secondary hoist lever!” Gage roared. “Hawk, keep that console covered! I’m going out on the beam!”
Gage leaped over the safety railing, landing with a solid thud on the narrow eight-inch steel I-beam that spanned the twenty-foot drop directly above the boiling chemical vat. The fumes were blinding, burning Gage’s eyes and searing his lungs, but his footing was like iron.
He balanced on the slick steel beam, moving hand-over-hand along the overhead trolley rail until he was directly above his trapped apprentice.
Gage looked down into Lucas’s bruised, blackened face. “Lucas. Look at me, son.”
Lucas looked up through streaming tears, his lips trembling. “You found Mia? Is my baby safe?”
“Mia is with your mother at the clubhouse, safe under thirty brothers’ watch,” Gage said, his deep voice cutting through the shrieking sirens like a steady anchor. “She gave me your picture, Lucas. She said you told her I’d stand in the fire. Now grab my arm!”
Gage fired up the portable cutting torch, bringing the roaring blue flame against the hardened steel chains binding Lucas’s wrists to the crane hook. The steel glowed bright cherry-red, showered in sparks, and severed with a sharp SNAP.
Lucas dropped two feet, but Gage caught him by his bare forearm with an iron grip that strained the tendons in Gage’s shoulder to the absolute limit.
Beneath them, the boiling acid rose, sizzling against the soles of Lucas’s boots.
Gage roared with primal, superhuman strength, his combat-trained muscles heaving as he pulled the hundred-and-eighty-pound young man upward onto the steel beam, wrapping the heavy nylon strap around Lucas’s chest.
“Haul him up, Bear!” Gage yelled.
Bear engaged the manual winch, dragging Lucas up to the safety of the main catwalk.
Gage sprinted back across the beam, leaping onto the platform just as the central trolley crane snapped from chemical corrosion, plunging into the bubbling vat with a colossal, steaming splash!
Kurt Sterling was gone. The yellow slicker lay discarded on the catwalk stairs, and the steel fire exit leading to the river wharf stood wide open.
“He’s heading for the barge slips!” Hawk yelled, wiping tear gas from his eyes. “He has an industrial chemical pusher tug tied to the coal dock!”
Gage knelt beside Lucas on the catwalk. Lucas was coughing violently, spitting up clear fluid, but his pulse was strong, his dark eyes clear and burning with resolve.
Lucas gripped Gage’s hand with desperate strength. “Gage… the tugboat… it’s pushing two five-hundred-ton chemical barges loaded with the rest of the trichloroethylene. Sterling isn’t just fleeing… he has remote scuttling charges set in the barge hulls! He’s going to sink them directly inside Lock Number Two on the Monongahela River! It will destroy the navigation locks and release a thousand tons of poison into the city water supply!
Bear and Hawk worked swiftly, using emergency first-aid shears to cut away Lucas’s contaminated clothing, flushing his chemical-burned forearms with sterile saline from their tactical trauma kits. The caustic odor of hydrochloric acid was overwhelming, curling the edges of the metal equipment boxes on the platform.
Lucas leaned his head against the concrete pillar, gasping for breath as fresh air reached his lungs. “Gage… the barges… they’re loaded with ten thousand gallons of industrial solvent each. Sterling bought the tugboat under a foreign shell company registered in Panama. If he sinks them in the lock chamber, the lock gates will be permanently jammed with corroded metal, and the chemical slick will reach the municipal water intakes within ninety minutes.”
“He won’t make it past the river bend,” Gage said grimly, strapping his leather cut back over his chest. “We built these river roads, Lucas. We know every current and every lock.”
