Chapter 14 - The Black Tide Protocol
The rain hammering the concrete of the ruined pier tasted of saltwater and jet fuel. Rebecca didn't waste a second screaming into the storm. A mother’s panic was a luxury of the dead; a colonel’s instinct was cold, mechanical, and fatal.
She opened her palm. The brass casing bit into her flesh, leaving a crescent of crimson. *THE BLOODLINE BELONGS TO THE FOUNDATION.* Eleanor hadn’t just orchestrated a kidnapping; she had initiated an ancestral ritual disguised as an extraction.
Kneeling beside Emma’s shattered tablet, Rebecca pried off the back casing with her combat knife. The screen was dead, but the military-grade micro-transponder she had sewn into Emma’s jacket lining when they left the ER was not. She plugged her encrypted wrist terminal into the transponder’s auxiliary port. Three green pulses pierced the static: 48°12'N, 122°45'W. Moving due northwest at forty-two knots toward the jagged granite shoals of Osprey Rock—the private, unmapped archipelago purchased by the Whitmore Dynasty in 1924.
Rebecca keyed her tactical throat mic, dialing a frequency dead to civilian networks. "Specter Actual, this is Iron Maiden. Break seal on Protocol Black Tide."
A gravelly voice broke through three layers of scrambling. General Donald Vance, her former commander and the only man who knew the true scope of the $700 million military fraud Eleanor had buried a generation ago. "Rebecca? The Pentagon has an active cordon around your location. If you drop into Black Tide, you are operating as an unsanctioned combatant on domestic soil. There is no extraction. No court martial. Just a black hole."
"Eleanor took Emma," Rebecca said, her voice dropping to a register colder than liquid nitrogen. "She has twenty minutes before her boat docks at Osprey Rock. I don’t want extraction, Donald. I want an airframe, thermal sat-link, and total denial of maritime airspace. Or I release the raw brass archive to every foreign desk between London and Beijing before sunrise."
A heavy sigh on the other end, followed by the clacking of keys. "Check the southern fueling slip. A twin-turbine coastal interceptor with radar-absorbent paint is tied up behind the bait shop. Full armory in the bilge locker. You have forty-five minutes before the Coast Guard responds to the flare. God help the Whitmores."
May you like
Rebecca severed the feed. She sprinted down the slippery planks of the marina, leaping the security gate. Within ninety seconds, the twin high-displacement turbodiesels rumbled to life beneath the black carbon-fiber deck of the interceptor. She slammed the dual throttles forward, cutting straight into the roaring heart of the dark ocean swells.
***
