Chapter 76 - The Iron Citadel
At 0430 hours, a heavy, freezing fog rolled off the Chesapeake Bay, cloaking the James River in a shroud of white mist that reduced visibility to less than thirty yards.
Three miles upriver from Drydock 4, an unmarked black rigid-hull inflatable boat (RHIB) slipped into the dark water. The twin four-stroke outboards were muffled, idling at a whisper as the hull sliced through the oily, black swell.
Aboard were four of us: myself, Vasquez, Miller, and Chen. Abigail and Frank remained two miles inland in an armored surveillance van, monitoring the regional radar feeds and jamming the local cell towers to prevent Marcus Sterling from alerting outside assets.
"Comm check," Frank’s voice crackled through my bone-conduction headset, low and crisp.
"Echo One, lima-charlie," I replied, checking the battery indicator on my night-vision unit.
"General, you have two patrol craft operating in the channel five hundred meters ahead of you," Abigail's voice chimed in over the secondary encrypted channel. She was reading the infrared feeds from a micro-drone Chen had launched ten minutes prior. "They’re running sweeping searchlights, but the fog is bouncing the beam back into their optics. If you hug the southern seawall beneath the industrial pier, you'll slip through their blind spot."
"Good eye, Abigail," I said, a faint smile touching my lips beneath the neoprene mask. "Hold your station."
The RHIB drifted beneath the massive, rotting timber pilings of the old naval pier. The smell of creosote and salt spray was suffocating. Above us, the skeletal iron structures of abandoned World War II crane gantries rose into the mist like the ribs of a dead leviathan.
Directly ahead was the massive steel gate of Drydock 4.
The gate was closed, sealing off the interior basin from the river, but forty feet below the waterline were the original sluice tunnels—conduits once used to flood and drain the drydock during warship overhauls.
"Tunnel entrance is submerged," Miller whispered, pulling on his closed-circuit rebreather mask. "Ten-foot diameter. Grate is rusted iron. I've got two charges of hydraulic expanding foam. We pop the bars, swim thirty yards, and we surface inside the lower pump turbine room directly beneath the *Astraea*."
"Silent entry," I ordered, checking the seal on my suppressed short-barrel HK416. "Once we breach the turbine room, we split into two elements. Vasquez and Chen, secure the server cooling junction. Miller and I hunt Marcus Sterling."
"Rules of engagement?" Vasquez asked, cocking an eyebrow in the emerald gloom of his night-vision tube.
"There are no non-combatants inside that dock," I answered coldly. "Every man drawing a paycheck from the Consortium signed a contract for our deaths. Eliminate on sight."
We slipped over the side of the RHIB into the freezing black water.
The cold was shocking, piercing through the neoprene suits like thousands of icy needles, but the discipline of hundreds of combat dives took over instantly. Miller led the way, his small dive light cutting a faint cone through the silt-heavy water.
Within two minutes, we reached the heavy iron grate blocking the sluice tunnel. The bars were as thick as a man’s wrist, encrusted with barnacles. Miller reached into his thigh pack, pulled out two pressurized cylinders of high-expansion tactical foam, and jammed them into the structural weld points of the iron frame.
He triggered the manual pin.
The foam reacted instantaneously, expanding with fifteen thousand pounds of hydraulic force per square inch. With a muted, underwater *groan*, the rusted iron bolts sheared clean off the concrete surround. Miller pulled the heavy gate aside like an open cellar door.
We swam into the dark belly of the beast.
Thirty seconds later, our heads broke the surface of the water inside a massive, echoing concrete cavern. The air was foul with stale diesel exhaust and grease. Above us, the steady, rhythmic hum of high-voltage industrial generators reverberated through the iron gratings.
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We were inside Drydock 4.
***
