Chapter 19 - High Seas Extraction
The watertight door blew open under the kick of Avery’s boot, immediately followed by the concussive, blinding detonation of two flash-bangs.
BANG-FLASH!
The cargo hold erupted into white light and disorienting overpressure.
Avery plunged through the smoke, her carbine pressed tight against her cheekbone. The nearest mercenary, blinded and clutching his ears, raised an automatic shotgun blindly toward the doorway. Avery’s barrel tracked his movement instantly—two rapid taps to the upper torso, one to the head. He dropped like a lead weight.
The second contractor threw himself behind a steel support beam, returning blind, desperate automatic fire that ricocheted wildly off the metal containers, sending sparks raining across the wet floor.
A high-velocity ricochet grazed Avery’s thigh, tearing through her uniform trousers and drawing a hot line of blood, but her forward drive never stuttered.
She caught the rhythm of his firing cycle. As the enemy bolt locked back empty on an exhausted magazine, Avery broke cover, closing the gap in three explosive strides. She tackled him around the torso, driving him hard into the steel corner of the centrifuge crate.
The man swung a serrated trench knife toward her ribs. Avery caught his wrist in an iron grip, dropping her hips and applying a vicious wrist-lock torque that snapped the ulna clean in two. The knife clattered harmlessly to the deck as she delivered a concussive knee to his solar plexus, leaving him gasping and paralyzed on the diamond-plate floor.
Across the bay, Cole and the cadre team eliminated the final demolition tech before the thermite could breach the radioactive containment seals.
“Hold is secure!” Cole shouted through the haze of gun smoke, kicking the detonator away from the cargo crate. “Centrifuges are intact, Chief!”
A sudden rumble shook the vessel from above.
“Mitchell, this is Hayes!” the Commander’s voice crackled through her earpiece over the roar of approaching naval turbines. “Indonesian coastal patrol cutters and two Navy destroyers have established a three-mile exclusion zone around the ship. Hostile extraction vessel on the water has been neutralized by naval gunfire. Hostages in the forward mess are reported safe by Team Two. What is your status?”
Avery looked down at the unconscious mercenary leader pinned beneath her boot, then across her team. All eight operators were alive, standing firm in the smoking ruins of the enemy's final gamble.
She wiped a mixture of sweat and rain from her eyes, keying her chest mic.
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“Cargo Hold 3 secured, Commander. Centrifuge inventory verified. Hostiles neutralized, zero friendly casualties. The ship is under Navy control.”
A collective sigh of relief washed through the operations net back in Washington and Rota. The threat that had begun in a shadowy conspiracy on an East Coast training base had been hunted down, cornered, and completely eradicated on the other side of the world.
