Chapter 86 - The Brink of the North Sea
I looked up toward the catwalk.
Standing behind the safety railing, flanked by six heavily armed mercenaries dressed in black assault gear, was a tall, silver-haired man in a pristine naval greatcoat. His face was weathered like old leather, his left eye milky white and crossed by a jagged scar. Captain Hendrik Dekker.
In his hand, he held a sleek, military-grade detonator with a glowing digital countdown display.
"Captain Dekker, I presume," I said, keeping my voice cold, steady, and utterly devoid of fear, while my left hand behind my back gave Jonah a two-finger signal to hold position.
"Ms. Croft," Dekker said, giving a slight, theatrical bow. "You have your grandfather’s audacity and your father’s brilliance. Julian Vance warned me that you were dangerous, but I confess, I thought he was merely making excuses for his own astonishing incompetence."
"Julian is currently in federal custody facing life in a federal penitentiary," Jonah shouted up at the catwalk, his voice cutting through the hum of the cryogenic pumps. "And the Sovereign Trust controls every rail mile from Chicago to Vancouver. You’re sailing a stolen ship with nowhere to land, Dekker. Leviathan is finished."
Dekker laughed—a dry, rattling sound that had no humor in it.
"You Americans have such a charming, provincial view of power," Dekker said, leaning over the railing. "You think because you took a few railway junctions and locked up a couple of soft, arrogant billionaires in Colorado that you’ve broken Leviathan? Julian Vance was an investor, Mr. Croft. Nothing more. An expendable source of capital."
Dekker gestured with the detonator toward the ceiling of the cargo hold.
"My rendezvous is not in Rotterdam. And the buyers aren't coming by helicopter."
Through the reinforced steel hull plates beneath our feet, a terrifying, low-frequency hum began to vibrate—a sound completely different from the container ship's diesel engines. It was an unnatural, metallic throb that seemed to resonate directly out of the ocean depths.
"Do you hear that, Ms. Croft?" Dekker smiled, his scar twisting grotesquely in the red emergency light. "That is an Akula-class stealth submarine, cruising thirty meters beneath my keel. They have twenty-four million euros wired into my Swiss accounts, and in precisely four minutes, they will fire a docking tether directly into the emergency bilge locks of this ship to retrieve the core module."
"You won't make the transfer," I said, pointing to the control screen.
*DOWNLOAD COMPLETE. MASTER KEY OVERRIDDEN.*
*SYSTEM PURGE INITIATED.*
Dekker’s smile vanished. The digital telemetry on his personal tablet flashed crimson as the proprietary Vance security architecture collapsed, locking him out of the magnetic drive’s operational software forever.
"You insolent little bitch," Dekker hissed, his aristocratic veneer shattering into raw, venomous fury.
He raised the detonator.
"If I cannot deliver the operating system to the buyer, then no one will have it," Dekker snarled. "The Vance Trust paid for total denial protocols. The scuttle charges on the keel are set for ninety seconds. In two minutes, the *Cimmerian Queen* will be resting on the floor of the English Channel with both of you trapped in her belly!"
Dekker slammed his thumb down onto the red trigger.
*BOOM!*
A catastrophic explosion detonated beneath the hull floor. The entire eighty-thousand-ton vessel lurched violently to the port side, throwing Jonah and me against the steel cradle of the magnetic drive. A deafening roar of rushing, high-pressure seawater erupted from the bilge vents below, cold as ice, flooding the iron deck in a foaming torrent.
Sirens wailed in a deafening, continuous scream. Above us, the catwalk groaned as Dekker and his men turned and sprinted toward the emergency personnel lift.
"Jonah!" I cried out as freezing water surged around our boots, rising to our shins in seconds.
Jonah lunged forward, grabbing the master hard drive containing my father’s life work, and shoved it into the watertight pouch on my chest harness. His arm locked around my waist, his eyes burning with an intense, untamed fire that defied the freezing abyss rising around us.
"We don't drown today, Nina!" Jonah roared over the thunder of the incoming ocean. "Move to the gantry ladder!"
Before we could take three strides through the rising flood, the iron hull plates on the starboard side groaned with a horrifying, tearing screech.
The steel wall of the hold buckled inward. A massive, black hydraulic boarding probe punched straight through the ship’s iron skin, crushing the gantry ladder into twisted scrap metal and sealing our only escape route.
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Through the torn hull plates, the black conning tower of an unmarked submarine breached the surface outside, its searchlights slicing through the incoming floodwater, blinding us in a glare of incandescent white.
We were sinking eighty miles offshore in a freezing winter sea, trapped between two hundred feet of ocean and an unknown leviathan rising from the deep.
