Page 106 of Wild Oblivion

The rocket ripped through the air, eager to fulfill its purpose.

By some miracle, it streaked right past us, spitting a trail of smoke as it continued racing through the heavens.

The goon on the deck took the opportunity to reload.

The pilot angled Tango One around to the port side.

By that time, I had the cargo door open and my rifle shouldered.

The goon ran through the salon to the port side door, shouldered the rocket launcher, and took aim at us again.

I opened fire before he could squeeze the trigger. The rifle hammered my shoulder, and brass casings danced on the flight deck. I sprayed a hailstorm of molten copper down on the bastard, peppering his chest.

Crimson blossomed, and he stumbled back into the salon, tumbling to the deck.

It was game on.

Cameron decided to play a stupid game, and he was about to win a stupid prize. He picked up the rocket launcher and took cover behind the bulkhead. He angled the rocketlauncher through the hatch and tried to find the bird in the sky.

By that time, Mike had circled around. The helicopter hovered behind the stern.

Cameron ran through the salon toward the aft deck to get an angle on us. But the dipshit tripped as the boat pitched and rolled with the swells. With the safety cap removed from the grenade, the striker hit the deck. The detonator triggered, and the warhead exploded without being fired.

It was almost comical.

The explosion blasted through the deck, spraying molten shrapnel everywhere.

The bastard got what he deserved, and a slight grin may have formed on my lips.

Sometimes you get lucky.

But my grin soon faded when I realized what was happening.

The explosion ripped through the cases of Oblivium, shattering their containment tubes, destabilizing the volatile element. The following reaction was inevitable. A cascade of doom.

“We need to get as far away from here as possible. NOW!” I shouted.

Mike banked us around and headed back toward shore.

I didn’t know how big the explosion would be, or how long it would take for the reaction to occur. But with as muchOblivium as they had stolen, our odds of clearing the blast radius were slim. One substandard pellet had taken out an office building. There were hundreds, if not thousands, aboard that ship.

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We raced across the water at 170 knots, maxing out the top speed of the Bell 429. The rotors thumped, and the turbines howled.

My heart pounded my chest.

The yacht exploded in a blinding flash. The detonation made the 50 megaton Tsar Bomba look like a firecracker.

A massive plume of water sprayed into the air as the explosion engulfed the horizon, vaporizing everything within its radius. It expanded in an unrelenting march toward the helicopter.

The cloud of doom approached, threatening to consume us.

Somebody was looking out for us because we escaped the initial blast, albeit by a margin slimmer than I would have liked.

Momentary relief filled me, but that didn't last long.

An electromagnetic pulse followed the explosion, flickering the instrumentation. The electronics went dark, and the turbines coughed and flamed out. The stick went dead.