Chapter 15 - The Ghost Fleet
At 0200 hours, three miles off the coast of Portland, Maine, the sea was an ink-black void churned into whitecaps by a rising gale.
Through the pouring rain, the *Aegis Sovereign* looked like a floating fortress of glass, steel, and carbon fiber. Stretching over three hundred feet long, its multi-tiered decks were illuminated by faint amber floodlights. Armed sentries in wet-weather gear patrolled the perimeter decks, carbines slung across their chests, unaware that the real storm wasn't coming from the sky.
Beneath the rolling waves, a rigid-hulled inflatable boat (RHIB) hummed with a muffled, silenced electric motor.
Alongside me sat Briggs and four operators from my former Tier-One black reconnaissance unit—men who had bled beside my father and refused to let his legacy be dragged through the mud again.
"Thermal imaging shows forty armed operatives aboard," Briggs said, tapping the waterproof tablet attached to his tactical vest. "Kane has fortified the bridge and the lower server room where Catherine’s offshore financial drives are being wiped and redirected. If those files transfer to his proxy accounts in Dubai, Kane disappears forever with two billion dollars in blood money, leaving you framed for the whole massacre."
"He's not leaving this ship," I said quietly, adjusting my night-vision goggles.
Beside me, someone shifted their weight. I turned to look at the operative checking her MPX submachine gun in the dark.
It was Rosalie.
She wore a matte-black tactical wet-suit, her hair braided tight against her skull. When I had tried to leave her at the naval safehouse, she had looked me dead in the eye and said: *“Catherine made my life a living hell for twenty-four years. Kane helped her do it. If you think you're facing them without me, you don't know who you married.”*
She wasn't dead weight; she was the master key. Only her biometric palm print could access Catherine’s cold-storage financial vaults aboard the yacht before Kane initiated an emergency system purge.
"Grapples ready," Briggs whispered.
Two silent pneumatic launchers fired titanium hooks into the yacht's lower stern platform. We scaled the hull with mechanical ascenders, gliding up the sleek composite surface like wraiths rising from the deep.
My boots hit the teak decking without a sound.
The two sentries guarding the aft gangway never knew what hit them. A synchronized sweep from Briggs and me dropped both men before their radios could broadcast a whisper of static.
May you like
"Point secured," I murmured into the throat-mic. "Move to the server deck. Rosalie, you stay behind my shoulder. If I give the word to drop, you drop flat."
She gave a firm nod, her eyes cold as winter ice. "Lead the way, Captain."
