Chapter 48 - The Price of Blood Money
The cold water lapped against my chest as I held the MPX steady, the muzzle tracking Charles’s every micro-movement. The wind howled through the pines above the cove, carrying the sharp, chemical reek of cordite and the distant, rhythmic thrum of approaching helicopter rotors cutting through the mountain air.
"End of the line, Charles," I said, my voice cutting through the hiss of the surf and the intermittent crackle of gunfire from the shoreline. "The money is frozen, the decryption node is offline, and your buyers are about to find themselves swimming in the middle of a federal dragnet."
Charles turned his head slowly, his breath pluming into a white cloud in the freezing air. Despite the gun barrel pointed inches from his face, the corners of his mouth twitched upward into that familiar, infuriating smirk.
"You think this is about money, Ethan?" Charles whispered, his voice raspy and devoid of warmth. "You spent twenty-one days on a grey hull in the Pacific thinking you were protecting freedom. You were protecting a balance sheet. The men buying these decryption keys aren't foreign syndicates. They're the same people who sign my defense contracts—and yours."
Before I could process the chilling implications of his words, the sky above the granite ridge lit up with a blinding flare of white magnesium.
A heavy-lift military helicopter—unmarked, matte-black, and sporting dual rotary engines—cresting the tree line dropped out of the night sky like an apex predator. It didn't bear any national insignia or coast guard markings. It was a ghost bird.
A heavy-caliber minigun mounted on the starboard side spun up with a terrifying, high-pitched whine that drowned out the shouting from the shore.
"Ethan, get down!" Marcus’s voice roared across the water from the deck of our crippled sub.
The helicopter opened fire. A relentless stream of high-explosive rounds chewed up the rocky shoreline, sending showers of granite shrapnel and dirt flying into the air as the NCIS agents scrambled for cover behind their tactical vehicles. But the primary target wasn't the shore.
The gunner’s sights adjusted downward, walking a lethal line of fire directly across the water toward the hunter-killer sub and the Zodiac raft.
"Charles! Grab my hand!" one of the tactical operatives on the raft shouted over the deafening roar of the rotors, hauling the older man backward into the rubber hull just as a volley of heavy rounds chewed through the aluminum boarding ladder where Charles had been standing a second earlier.
"No you don't!" I yelled, abandoning stealth as I scrambled out of the water onto the rocky shelf, raising my MPX and squeezing the trigger in rapid succession.
My sub-sonic rounds tore through the Zodiac’s outboard motor housing with a shower of blue sparks. The engine sputtered, coughed, and died instantly, leaving the raft dead in the water just as the helicopter’s spotlight locked directly onto my position.
The blinding white glare pinned me to the rocks like a specimen under a microscope. I threw myself sideways behind a jagged boulder just as a burst of heavy-caliber rounds turned the stone where I had been standing into a cloud of gray dust.
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Through the roaring wind of the downdraft, I watched the Zodiac drift helplessly toward the center of the cove, with Charles trapped inside, screaming frantic orders into a satellite handset as the federal agents on the shore regrouped and began returning fire with a vengeance.
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