Chapter 73 - The Sea of Shadows
"Kill the transponder!" Marcus barked, slamming the phone against the console until the plastic shattered, abandoning his standoff in an instant. "Emily, get below deck! Now!"
"You heard him," I yelled over the rising roar of turbine engines echoing from the warship. "He called himself my father!"
"He’s not a father, Emily! He’s the Patriarch of the First Circle!" Marcus shoved me toward the companionway as a hail of high-caliber suppressive fire chewed through our trawler’s wooden wheelhouse, sending shards of oak and shattered Plexiglas raining down like shrapnel. "Eleanor didn't steal you to hurt Arthur! She stole you to prevent the Sovereign Network from completing a genetic monopoly on the Basel accords! If they take you alive, they don't want a daughter—they want the biometric cipher hardcoded into your retinal profile!"
The trawler bucked violently as a shockwave caught our stern. A specialized interception torpedo had detonated twenty meters off the rudder, disabling our steering and sending the engine into a screaming redline.
"They’re using non-lethal boarding ordnance," Marcus yelled, pulling two military-grade rebreathers from the bilge floor. "They want you breathing. That gives us exactly forty seconds."
"Forty seconds until what?"
"Until I blow the fuel tanks." Marcus shoved a rebreather into my mouth and yanked the harness tight around my shoulders. "There’s an underwater trench four miles off the coast of Heligoland. The current flows south-southwest toward the Dutch mudflats. If we jump before the diesel ignites, the thermal signature of the blast will blind their infrared sensors for ninety seconds."
I gripped his forearm. "And if we don't clear the hull?"
"Then Arthur Sterling won't be the only father who killed you," he snarled.
Marcus kicked open the emergency hatch leading to the sea chest beneath the waterline. Black, sub-zero water surged into the compartment, freezing my boots instantly. Above us, the heavy clatter of magnetic grapple lines slammed against the deck plating. Boots hit the wood above our heads.
*“Target in the lower cabin! Deploy flash-gas!”* an amplified voice barked from above.
May you like
Marcus looked at me, his finger resting on the detonator switch wired to forty gallons of marine fuel. "Three. Two."
He slammed the switch down, grabbed my collar, and dragged me into the suffocating abyss of the black sea just as the world erupted in a blinding flash of orange fire.
