Chapter 32 - Ghost Fleet Protocol
Rain lashed against the blacked-out windshield of the unmarked armored Suburban as Julian hurtled through the rain-slicked bypass of Interstate 95, heading straight for Norfolk Naval Station. The highway was suspiciously empty, civil defense checkpoints abandoned, traffic routing systems hijacked by a systemic digital blackout.
In the backseat, Liam held a compression bandage against his reopening sutures, his face pale under the passing sodium streetlights. I sat beside him, my mechanical fingers plugged directly into an interface cable connected to my portable terminal, sifting through the encrypted guts of Project Leviathan.
"Every emergency bypass on the *USS Gerald R. Ford* is routed through a single logic board in the auxiliary cooling deck," I said, cold sweat tracing the nape of my neck. "Derek Halston didn't just sell the Navy faulty titanium valves. His company built a backdoor bypass into the coolant circulation computers. If the pressure triggers, the reactors don’t shut down—they SCRAM backwards, cooking the core from the inside out within ninety seconds."
"And who has the remote abort codes?" Julian asked, his jaw set as he swerved around an overturned military transport truck near the base perimeter.
"Only one person," I answered, tracing the digital signature on the screen. "Vice Admiral Donald Croft. Head of Naval Sea Systems Command."
Liam cursed under his breath. "Croft was Vance's protégé twenty years ago. He was the one who personally certified the *Defiant’s* refit after Derek’s father passed away. He’s been in the syndicate from the beginning."
"He's not just in it," I said, pointing to the transfer logs. "He owns half of Halston Maritime through offshore shell companies in the Caymans. When the *Ford* suffers a catastrophic 'training accident,' Croft’s emergency consortium will be awarded a four-billion-dollar salvage and retrofit contract. And Vance will take the blame for approving the reactor designs back in 2018."
Ahead of us, the towering floodlights of Naval Station Norfolk pierced the driving storm. The silhouette of the world’s largest nuclear aircraft carrier loomed against the dark Atlantic like an artificial mountain of steel.
But something was wrong. The base sirens were silent. The docks were cordoned off not by standard Master-at-Arms security, but by private maritime mercenaries wearing unmarked tactical rigs.
"They’ve locked down the pier," Julian whispered, cutting the headlights. "They aren’t letting Vance near the carrier."
May you like
"Then we don't go through the gate," I said, tightening the straps on my tactical vest and testing the torque in my prosthetic hand. "We go through the drydock intake."
***
