Chapter 73 - The Offshore Bastion
The cutter was foundering, her keel broken across a submerged shoal at the mouth of the bay.
"Abandon ship!" Hayes shouted, grabbing an emergency strobe and a waterproof tactical pack from behind the captain's chair. "David, get the life raft deployed! We have less than sixty seconds before the engine room pulls her down!"
I dragged Eleanor out onto the listing deck. The rain was torrential now, mixing with heavy black soot from the burning fuel depots along the shoreline. With Miller limping behind me, clutching an assault rifle in his functional hand, we launched the self-inflating rigid-hull inflatable boat (RHIB) over the starboard gunwale.
We hit the freezing chop just as the cutter groaned in mortal agony, its steel hull folding in half with the sound of a subterranean gunshot before sliding beneath the churned, foam-flecked surface of the Atlantic.
In the RHIB, surrounded by the smell of salt and burning aviation fuel, Miller kicked the twin outboards to life. The vessel surged forward, skipping over five-foot swells as we cleared the burning perimeter of the Chesapeake barrier.
Hayes wiped sea spray from his face, his service weapon drawn and resting across his knees, pointed directly at Eleanor's chest. "Talk, Eleanor. You know the coordinates of Tartarus-Alpha. The six hypersonic birds didn't launch from a silo on land. They launched from the submersible gantry."
Eleanor laughed—a bitter, hollow sound that was swallowed by the roar of the wind. "Even if you reach it, David cannot stop it. The platform operates on a biological tether. It requires two matching DNA keys from the Vance bloodline to initiate override. Vance—your brother Vance—is already there. Or what's left of him."
My hand tightened on my sidearm. "Vance survived the bunker collapse?"
"He was extracted forty minutes before you breached the lower level," she sneered, looking up at me with open hatred. "Did you really think I would leave my true heir behind while you and your disgraced admiral played soldiers? Vance possesses the operational code. The platform's automated foundry has been printing deep-strike torpedoes for forty-eight hours. By sunrise, every deep-water cable connecting North America to Europe will be severed, and the secondary nuclear payloads will detonate along the New Madrid faultline."
"Why?" I demanded, leaning down until my face was inches from hers. "You sat in ballrooms with senators and ambassadors. You traded our father's name for invitations and committee chairmanships. Why destroy the very empire you crawled on your knees to belong to?"
"Because an empire on its knees pays any price to the ones holding the switch!" she screamed back. "We weren't going to destroy it! We were going to own it! All of it! Without your father's sanctimonious conscience, and without you—his miserable, unbending reflection!"
"Target contact, two o'clock!" Miller interrupted, his voice taut as he pointed into the oceanic gloom.
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Rising from the pitch-black waves four miles off the continental shelf was not an oil rig, but a colossal, pyramidal structure of black titanium and reinforced composite. It was larger than a supercarrier, anchored to the seabed by gargantuan hydraulic tension legs. Towering exhaust plumes vented sulfurous steam into the gale, and across its broad, flat superstructure, rows of automated launch cells glowed with the sickening, green luminescence of pre-ignition diagnostic cycles.
Tartarus-Alpha had awakened.
