195 I walked into our anniversary party with a man my husband had never met. He laughed in front of everyone and asked, / Chapter 84 / 86

Chapter 84 - The Boarding at Midnight

The ascent was a battle against vertigo, salt spray, and sixty feet of freezing, slick steel.

The motorized tactical ascender hauled me upward through the freezing rain in a matter of seconds, the cable vibrating violently every time the massive ship pitched in the heavy sea swells. Beneath my boots, the churning white cauldron of the freighter’s wake looked like a meat grinder of black water and foam. One slip, one equipment failure, and the sea would swallow us whole.

I reached the lip of the port railing, kicked off against the steel plates, and vaulted cleanly over the coaming onto the wet, diamond-plated catwalk. I hit the deck in a crouch, drawing my suppressed handgun, my eyes scanning the shadows between the container rows.

A heartbeat later, Jonah landed beside me with the soundless grace of a phantom. He disconnected his ascender line, looped it into a quick-release stow, and swept his carbine down the dimly lit corridor formed by stacks of towering shipping containers.

The ship groaned under the strain of the high seas, an endless chorus of groaning metal, howling wind, and the relentless pounding of the diesel engine deep below our boots. Rain lashed against the painted steel boxes, slicking the deck with oily water.

"Deck patrols," Jonah whispered, touching my shoulder.

Through the swirling mist, forty yards forward, two figures in heavy wet-weather parkas and ballistic vests emerged from between two green containers. Both carried compact submachine guns slung across their chests, flashlights cutting narrow yellow cones through the foggy dark.

"Dekker’s mercenaries," I whispered, recognizing the tactical posture. "They aren't merchant sailors."

"No," Jonah agreed, his voice deadly level. "They’re private security contractors paid in blood money. We take them quietly. We can’t let the bridge know we’ve breached the perimeter until we find the cargo hold."

We moved forward like twin shadows, using the massive forty-foot container walls as cover. The wind tore the sound of our boots away into the night.

When the lead mercenary turned the corner of Container Row 14, Jonah struck.

He lunged out of the darkness with terrifying speed, his left arm snaking around the guard’s neck in a textbook sleeper hold while his right hand caught the barrel of the man’s submachine gun, preventing the sling from rattling against his chest plate. With a sharp, leveraged twist, Jonah drove the mercenary down onto the wet deck, cutting off his carotid artery before the man could draw breath to scream. The mercenary went limp in four seconds.

The second guard whirled around, his weapon coming up, but before he could level the muzzle, I stepped from behind the opposite stack. I brought the heavy frame of my suppressed sidearm down in a vicious, downward strike directly against the side of his temple.

The guard’s eyes rolled back, and he collapsed onto the deck like a sack of wet sand.

Jonah looked at the unconscious man at my feet, then looked up at me, an appreciative, wicked grin cutting through his dark features. "You're getting entirely too good at that, Nina."

"I had good teachers," I whispered back, securing the second guard’s sidearm and tossing the magazine over the rail into the sea. "And a very short patience for anyone carrying Vance syndicate money."

Jonah hauled both unconscious men into an empty access corridor between two refrigerated units, binding their wrists and ankles with heavy-duty zip-ties. He pulled a laminated deck schematic from the guard’s tactical vest and spread it across the damp surface of an electrical junction box.

"Hold Three," Jonah pointed, tapping a diagram of the lower midship cargo bay. "The ship’s manifest listed the generator assemblies in Hold Three, directly above the keel. It’s accessible via a hydraulic cargo hatch behind the superstructure. But look at this note."

He shone his red-filtered penlight onto a handwritten notation scrawled across the margin in German: *Sonderfracht 101 – Kühlung aktiv. Autonomer Sicherheitsdienst.*

"Special Freight 101 – Active Cooling. Autonomous Security Service," I translated, my German honed from years of international finance seminars. "The magnetic drive requires cryogenic stabilization to keep the superconducting magnets from destabilizing. That’s why Dekker has to run the power generators continuously."

Suddenly, the ship’s public address system cracked with static, followed by a harsh, guttural voice barking over the speakers in heavily accented English:

*"Catwalk Team Two, report to Bridge immediately. Sensor array shows an unauthorized magnetic breach on the port stern quarter. All stations to full alert. Find them and kill them."*

Sirens began to wail across the open deck, flashing amber strobes cutting through the fog like rotating blades of fire.

"Our window just slammed shut," Jonah said, racking his carbine with cold finality. "They know we’re aboard."