Chapter 9 - The Battle of Pier 42
When they arrived at Pier 42 twenty minutes later, the sky over the Baltimore harbor was stained a violent, bruised red by black smoke and flickering yellow flames.
Three fire trucks were parked in the central yard, their high-pressure water hoses spraying thick streams into the blackened, hollowed-out shell of Bay Four. The smell of burning rubber, melted plastic, and scorched diesel fuel was overwhelming, stinging Frankie’s eyes and throat the moment she jumped out of Gabriel’s sedan.
"Frankie!"
Frankie turned to see Sal sitting on the bumper of an ambulance, an oxygen mask hooked under his chin, his face black with soot.
"Sal!" Frankie ran over, dropping to her knees beside him, grabbing his thick, rough hand. "Are you alright?"
"I'm fine, kid," Sal rasped out, coughing roughly. "Just took a little smoke. They... they set the mules on fire, Frankie. Five days of work, gone in ten minutes."
Frankie looked over at the smoldering maintenance shed. Her chest tightened with a dark, suffocating rage. She stood up slowly, wiping a streak of black soot off her cheek, her eyes turning toward the heavy container crane blocking the main gate.
Gabriel was standing fifty yards away, surrounded by a dozen heavily armed Costa soldiers. Marco was pointing toward the water edge of the pier, his voice urgent.
Frankie walked over to them, her boots crushing wet ash and shattered glass on the concrete.
"The hydraulic line wasn't cut with an angle grinder," Frankie announced loudly, her voice cutting through the noise of the fire truck engines.
Gabriel turned to look at her, his expression cold and focused. "What?"
Frankie walked past the armed guards directly up to the base of the massive six-story steel crane. She pointed up at the severed hydraulic hose dangling twenty feet above the ground.
"If a Moretti soldier climbed that ladder with an angle grinder or a torch, your perimeter guards would have seen the sparks from a mile away," Frankie explained, her engineering mind taking over, sharp and deadly. "That line was cut from the inside using a high-pressure pneumatic shear tool. The kind of tool we keep locked in the chief engineer's locker in Bay One."
Gabriel’s eyes narrowed into dark, lethal slits. "An inside job."
"Someone who knew where the keys were," Frankie said. "Someone who knew Sal took his coffee break at four-thirty in the morning."
Just then, a sleek grey speedboat idled out from beneath the shadow of Pier 43, three hundred yards across the dark water. The boat’s engine revved softly, waiting near the wooden pilings of an abandoned grain silo.
Marco pointed wildly. "There! On the old grain pier!"
A figure in a dark high-visibility jacket was running along the wooden catwalk toward the waiting speedboat, carrying a heavy metal tool case.
Gabriel pulled a sleek black semi-automatic pistol from his shoulder holster, his face turning to pure, unadulterated death. "Marco. Take the cars. Cut them off at the slip."
"They'll be in international waters in five minutes if they reach that boat, Boss!" Marco yelled over the roar of the fire hoses.
"They won't," Frankie said suddenly.
Gabriel looked at her. "Francesca—"
Frankie didn't answer. She turned and ran at top speed toward the far edge of Bay One, where the heavy Kalmar container handler—the massive sixty-ton diesel machine she had repaired on Wednesday—was idling near the edge of the sea wall.
"Francesca! No!" Gabriel shouted, running after her.
Frankie ignored him. She leaped onto the steel ladder of the Kalmar handler, scrambled up into the high glass cab, and slammed the heavy door shut. She shoved the high-capacity diesel throttle all the way forward.
The massive, twelve-liter turbocharged engine roared to life with a deafening, mechanical scream.
Frankie ripped the steering wheel to the left, crashing the sixty-ton steel leviathan directly through the chain-link security fence, slamming the heavy front boom down onto the wooden catwalk of Pier 43 just as the fleeing figure reached the end of the dock.
CRASH!
The heavy wooden planks exploded into splintered matchsticks under the weight of the Kalmar’s front tires. The fleeing man let out a terrified shriek as the catwalk collapsed beneath him, throwing him violently onto the muddy shore below, his metal tool case clattering onto the rocks.
The speedboat in the harbor didn't wait; it revved its high-horsepower engines and sped away into the dark mist, abandoning its operative completely.
Frankie set the Kalmar’s heavy air brakes with a loud PSSH!, killed the engine, and stepped out onto the high steel platform.
Below her, groaning in the mud, covered in wet seaweed and shattered wood, was Leo's former card-game buddy—the assistant fleet supervisor Gabriel had hired three weeks ago.
Gabriel arrived at the edge of the broken sea wall a second later, pistol held low, flanked by six armed men. He looked down at the traitor in the mud, then slowly raised his head to look up at Frankie standing high in the cab of the massive war machine.
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Gabriel stared at her for three long seconds.
Then, right there among the black smoke, the roaring fire engines, and the ruined dock, Gabriel Costa threw his head back and laughed—a loud, triumphant, dark sound that echoed across the gray waters of the Baltimore harbor.
