Chapter 7 - The Canal Intercept7
The tires of my rental sedan screamed as I tore down the narrow, gravel-strewn service road that ran parallel to the old industrial shipping canal. The storm that had been brewing over the mountains all afternoon finally broke, casting a torrential downpour of freezing rain that smeared my windshield and turned the gravel track into a treacherous lane of thick, brown mud.
The time was 5:12 p.m. We had less than twenty-five minutes before the Gulfstream was scheduled to clear the runway at Oakland.
Up ahead, through the blurred sheets of gray rain, the skeletal steel silhouette of the old lifting bridge loomed out of the darkness. It was an abandoned railway structure, long since rusted into the down position, crossing a narrow bottleneck point where the industrial highway converged before approaching the airport perimeter.
A dark luxury SUV was already parked across the mouth of the bridge, its hazard lights blinking a dull, rhythmic orange against the concrete barriers.
Standing outside the vehicle in a heavy waterproof jacket, his formal wedding tuxedo trousers soaked to the knees, was Julian. He held a massive, industrial-grade steel crowbar in his right hand, his face a grim, unyielding mask of absolute resolve as he stared down the long stretch of the approaching highway.
I slammed my car into park beside him, throwing my door open and lunging out into the freezing rain. "Julian! Did you see the van?"
"It’s coming down the north lane now, Christian," Julian said, his voice deadly calm over the roar of the wind and the rain. He pointed the crowbar toward a pair of distant, high-intensity halogen headlights tearing through the dark highway traffic half a mile away. It was a white, unmarked transport van, moving with a frantic, aggressive speed that cut through the slower commuter traffic like a blade.
"How are we going to stop it?" I shouted over the wind. "If they hit this bridge at seventy miles an hour, they’ll plow straight through your SUV."
"They won't hit it at seventy," Julian said, a cold, ruthless smile touching his lips as he pointed toward the bridge’s manual mechanical control box mounted on the concrete pylon. "Before you arrived, I found the old emergency override crank inside the maintenance shed. The gears are rusted, but the manual counterweights are still functional. If I pull the primary brake release... the lift span drops another three feet below the roadbed grade. It creates a solid concrete wall that no vehicle can cross without tearing its front axle completely off."
"Julian, that’s suicide for whoever is driving that van!" I argued, grabbing his arm.
"The driver is Marcus Croft—Vanessa’s brother," Julian said, tearing his arm away from my grip with an iron strength. "He was the one who drove the vehicle that hit Elena’s car on the bridge two years ago. He’s not a courier, Christian. He’s a killer trying to escape the country with the evidence of his crimes. He leaves this road over my dead body."
The white van roared onto the approach ramp of the bridge, its brakes screaming as the driver suddenly realized the dark SUV was blocking the lane. The tires locked up, fishtailing violently through the standing water, blasting a massive sheet of dirty canal water over the concrete barriers.
Julian didn't hesitate. He lunged toward the mechanical pylon, grabbed the heavy iron brake release handle, and threw his entire body weight downward.
With a deafening, metallic shriek that sounded like the scream of a dying monster, the heavy steel railway span dropped, slamming down into the concrete recess with a violent impact that shook the entire foundation of the bridge.
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The white van hit the sudden three-foot concrete ridge at fifty miles an hour.
The front bumper disintegrated in a brilliant explosion of plastic shards and white metal. The front wheels caught the concrete lip, tearing the entire axle assembly clean off the chassis with a terrifying scream of ripping steel. The van launched into the air for a fraction of a second, flipped completely over onto its side, and skidded violently across the wet bridge deck, sparks flying through the dark rain until it crashed heavily against the rusted iron side railings, its engine compartment erupting into a violent cloud of white steam and leaking oil.
