Chapter 65 - The Frostbound Crypt
"What does that mean?!" Sarah cried out, gripping my coat as the cutter shuddered violently, caught in the immense wake of the lead interceptor.
"The filament in my arm," I said, my teeth clenched against the cold that was pouring into the cabin through the shattered window seals. "It’s not just a receiver. It’s an acoustic transponder. It’s broadcasting my biological coordinates to their guidance systems."
I looked at Nicholas. "The old South Haven radio buoy. The decommissioned navigational station on the shoal. How far are we?"
Nicholas’s eyes flickered with instant understanding, the tactical mind of the Sterling heir cutting through the haze of his fever. "Two miles due east. It’s an abandoned concrete monolith sitting on a submerged reef. Pure steel and high-density aggregate built during the Cold War."
"If we get inside the shadow of that reef, their radar will blind itself on the concrete," I said, grabbing the wheel and throwing the rudder hard to starboard.
The cutter rolled violently to the left, the gunwales dipping perilously close to the churning, black surf. The interceptor’s searchlight swept past our stern, the beam cutting empty snow as our turn caught them off guard.
A burst of automatic fire ripped through our aft deck, chewing through fiberglass and severing the radio antenna in an explosion of white sparks.
"Brace!" Nicholas yelled, pulling Sarah to the floor beneath the heavy oak table of the navigation nook.
The cutter slammed through a wall of frozen spray. Ice was building up on our hull by the ton, making the steering sluggish, the bow plowing deeper into every swell. The temperature gauge on the diesel engines was screaming in the red—the raw water intakes were choking on slush.
Out of the screaming dark, the monolith appeared.
It didn't look like a building; it looked like a tombstone rising from the boiling black lake. A four-story tower of brutalist concrete, streaked with decades of rust and capped with a ruined radar dome that groaned in the sub-zero gale.
"There's an old service canal on the lee side!" Nicholas yelled over the storm. "Supply boats used to dock inside the foundation to avoid the ice packs!"
"Hold on!" I screamed.
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I didn't throttle down. With the interceptors closing in from our stern, their spotlights painting our wake in blinding white, I aimed the cutter’s bow directly at the gaping, dark rectangular maw cut into the concrete base of the tower.
The boat hit the outer ice barrier with a sickening crunch of tearing metal, bounced off the submerged pilings, and rocketed into the pitch-black belly of the crypt.
