Chapter 72 - The Ghost Warheads of 1994
The roar of the lead interceptor split the night air like ripping canvas. A high-intensity spotlight punched through the ocean mist, blinding us in an instant of brilliant, searing white.
"Vessel *Harvester*," an amplified voice boomed across the chop, flat and synthesized through an LRAD acoustic horn. "Cut your engines and heave to. Prepare to receive boarding team. Any evasive maneuver will be met with lethal force."
"Caleb, now!" I screamed.
Caleb slammed the helm hard to port. The ancient dredge groaned, her keel dragging through the shallow sandbar off Gull Island. The bow swung into the blinding light just as a heavy machine gun opened up from the interceptor’s foredeck. Fifty-caliber rounds chewed through our wheelhouse glass with ear-shattering cracks, tearing the pine paneling into a cloud of lethal splinters.
Arthur screamed, curling into a ball on the deck as tracer rounds ignited a drum of kerosene on the starboard rail. Fire blossomed across the midship, licking toward the salvage winches.
"We can't outrun them, Clara!" Caleb yelled over the din, bleeding from a jagged gash across his forehead where flying glass had struck him. "The steering cable is shredded! We’re running on port rudder only!"
"We don't outrun them," I said, my teeth clenched so tight my jaw ached. "We bait them into the shallows."
I lunged to the crane console, grabbing the manual release lever for the two-ton claw bucket suspended fifty feet above the waterline. The heavy steel dredge bucket hung poised like a guillotine in the dark.
"Arthur!" I shouted, leaning down over the trembling patriarch. "What was on the *Sovereign*?"
"Weapons-grade telemetry cores!" he shrieked over the gunfire. "Cold War prototypes! Harold was the chief engineer on the salvage mission before he sold out to the consortium! He stole the acoustic key and implanted the bioceramic capsule into your fifth rib before the Navy could audit the inventory! If they get you, they salvage the arming sequence for twenty nuclear warheads sitting in the mud four hundred feet below us!"
The interceptor surged forward, its sleek, carbon-fiber bow rising over the wake as it prepared to ram our port quarter. Black-clad operators were visible along its catwalks, rifles raised, night-vision goggles glowing ghostly green in the fog.
I watched the distance close: forty yards... thirty yards... twenty.
"Hold on!" I screamed to Caleb.
I kicked the crane release.
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The two-ton steel dredge bucket plunged from the darkness of the rigging. It hit the interceptor directly amidships with the force of an artillery shell. The carbon-fiber hull cracked like a dry walnut shell. The sound of buckling composite and screaming metal drowned out the turbine engines. Fuel lines ruptured instantly against the dredge’s burning kerosene.
A fireball erupted into the sky, throwing a wall of heat and saltwater across our deck. The interceptor rolled violently to its side, dragged down into the silt by the crushing weight of the sunken crane claw, its turbines screaming underwater until they choked on sand and seafoam.
