Chapter 47 - The High-Seas Incursion
The radar display showed three high-speed interceptor vessels converging on our last known coordinates at the base of the cliffs. But Marcus’s tactical knowledge of Arthur’s naval protocols was flawless. We hugged the shallow coastline, scraping over sandbars that would tear the bottom out of Arthur's heavier patrol cutters, using the towering swells to mask our thermal signature.
Forty minutes into the storm, the dark silhouette of an eight-hundred-foot commercial container vessel loomed through the fog ahead—the *Atlantic Sovereign*, an Panamanian-flagged cargo ship steaming slowly toward Rotterdam.
"That's our ticket," Marcus shouted over the engine roar, throttling back the interceptor as we matched the giant freighter’s speed in its lee wake. "Arthur monitors private yacht registries and high-speed coast guard bands. He doesn't have the jurisdiction to board an international container ship without causing a diplomatic crisis."
"We aren't hiding on a freighter, Marcus," I said, pulling up the global satellite directory on my decrypted tablet.
Marcus glanced at me, stunned. "Clara, you have a baby with you! You need to get to an embassy, reach international soil—"
"There is no international soil safe from twenty billion dollars," I interrupted, my eyes locked on the moving GPS tracker that had been embedded inside the encrypted hard drive I ripped from the Blackwood vault.
Before destroying the master server, I hadn't just severed the feed—I had mirrored the handshake protocol Arthur used to broadcast from his yacht. The signal wasn't transmitting to a phantom location anymore. It was updating every ten seconds.
Arthur's yacht, the *Leviathan*, wasn't in the open North Atlantic at all. It was idling three nautical miles off the coast of Montauk, anchored just outside the territorial waters limit, waiting for the extraction team to bring Noah aboard.
"He thinks I’m running like a frightened dog," I said, staring at the flashing red dot on the screen. "He thinks because he engineered my DNA, he owns my soul. He's expecting an extraction team with a package. He isn't expecting me."
"Clara, that yacht is an armored floating bunker," Marcus said, his knuckles tightening on the wheel. "He has thirty private operators, anti-boarding sonars, and a perimeter defense system that could swat us out of the water before we get within five hundred yards."
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"Then we don't board from the water," I replied, pointing toward the freighter's stern, where a massive commercial crane was swinging heavy cargo containers aboard in the sheltered bay. "We board from the sky."
***
