Chapter 128 - Torpedo Bay Showdown
She fired.
The ceramic round grazed my cheekbone, cutting a line of fire across my skin. At the same instant, I lunged forward, closing the fifteen-foot distance before she could reset her trigger.
I grabbed her wrist with my left hand, twisting it viciously downward. The ceramic pistol clattered over the edge of the catwalk, tumbling down into the boiling coolant vats below. Clara shrieked in rage, driving her heel into my wounded ribs with vicious precision.
The pain was white-hot, blinding me for a split second. I stumbled back against the railing, and Clara used the momentum to drive an elbow into my throat, lunging for the tactical knife sheathed on my chest.
She was fast, trained in the private syndicate academies of Geneva, but she lacked the brutal, unsparing muscle memory of twelve years in combat zones.
As her fingers closed around my knife's grip, I grabbed her forearm, pivoted my hips, and executed a combat hip-throw, slamming her violently onto the steel grating of the catwalk. The impact drove the air from her lungs. I pinned her wrist to the floor with my knee and wrenched the remote detonator from her grasp, crushing it beneath my combat boot into shards of plastic and silicon.
"The drive!" she choked out, clawing at my face with bloody fingernails. "You can't abort the core without the physical key!"
I looked at the diagnostic terminal.
The master drive was locked inside a motorized steel security safe beneath the console—its armored door already sealed shut, protected by a six-digit physical tumbler and a biometric scanner keyed to Clara’s dead-man switch.
"Reyes!" I shouted over the blaring alarms. "What’s the readout on the manual scram rods?"
Reyes stumbled onto the catwalk, leaning heavily against the railing, his carbine slung. He glanced at the secondary console. "Negative! The electronic interlocks are bypassed! The scram rods can only be dropped manually from the ventral torpedo bay below the reactor keel!"
"Then we drop them from below," I said.
I grabbed Clara by her collar and hauled her to her feet. "You're coming with us."
"I’m not going anywhere with you!" she spat, blood flecking her lips. "Let the reactor breach! We'll all burn together! You, me, and Father's debts!"
"You're not dying here, Clara," I said coldly, zip-tying her wrists behind her back with heavy-duty Kevlar cuffs. "You're going to face federal court. You're going to stand in an orange jumpsuit while the JAG prosecutors read every single wire transfer, every single treasonous message, and every single dollar you stole from my accounts. You and Arthur are going to rot in ADX Florence."
I shoved her ahead of us toward the central elevator shaft.
Suddenly, the dreadnought shuddered violently.
A massive, muffled shockwave ripped through the vessel from the outside. The catwalk swung wildly on its chains. Alarms across the reactor bay switched from red to flashing yellow:
**EXTERIOR HULL BREACH: SECTOR 4.**
**TORPEDO IMPACT DETECTED.**
**U.S. NAVY SUBMERSIBLE ASSETS IN CONTACT.**
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"The *Hampton*," Reyes shouted, a grin breaking through the soot and blood on his face. "The boys made it through the storm!"
"They don't know the core is overloading," I yelled back. "If they hit the reactor compartment with a Mark 48 torpedo, this whole trench goes up like a small sun. We have less than three minutes to drop the rods!"
