Chapter 44 - Blood on the Catwalk
Naomi didn't wait for the operative to raise his rifle. She kicked a rolling server rack directly into his path, sending the heavy steel cabinet crashing into his legs.
As the soldier stumbled, Naomi lunged forward, closing the distance under his field of fire. Her combat knife slipped from the sheath concealed beneath her maid’s skirt, flashing silver in the emergency lighting. With surgical precision, she bypassed his body armor, driving the blade upward beneath the jawline into the base of the skull.
The man went limp instantly. She stripped his flashbang grenades and secondary sidearm before turning back to Ethan and Clara.
"Keep moving! Don't look down!" she commanded.
They sprinted up the narrow industrial staircase. The metal walls around them were warping, the rivets popping like high-caliber gunshots under the immense torque of the collapsing platform. Water was already surging up from the lower shafts, foaming white and black with crude oil and salt spray.
Above them, the door to the upper catwalk burst open under a blast of cold, torrential rain. The Atlantic gale hit them like a wall of ice, whipping Naomi’s hair across her face.
Out on the open platform, three hundred feet above the churning ocean, the sight was apocalyptic. One of the massive support legs had sheared completely away, causing the entire north side of the rig to tilt at a twenty-degree angle into the black water. Waves forty feet high crashed against the lower girders, throwing clouds of freezing spray over the metal walkways.
Hovering just fifty yards away, the searchlight of the second gunship swept over the catwalk, blinding them.
"Found them," a voice crackled through the rig's exterior public address system. "Eliminate the assets."
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The gunship’s heavy rotary cannon began to spin with an ominous mechanical whine.
"Get down!" Naomi hurled Clara and Ethan behind a massive reinforced fuel manifold just as the minigun unleashed a torrent of lead.
