Chapter 14 - The Midnight Pursuit
Rain began to lash against the windshield in violent, horizontal sheets as the storm hit. Lightning tore through the Atlantic sky, illuminating the black gunboats closing in at fifty knots.
Tracers sliced through the darkness, chewing through the fiberglass transom of Daniel’s boat. Lily screamed, burying her face into his chest beneath the steering console.
"Hold on to Daddy!" Daniel yelled over the roar of the engines and the howling tempest.
He glanced at his GPS screen. Two miles ahead lay Devil's Shoals—a graveyard of jagged coral reefs and sunken steel shipwrecks that only an experienced local mariner could navigate in broad daylight, let alone during a midnight gale.
The lead pursuit boat swung parallel to his port side, its mounted machine gun spinning up to unleash a devastating barrage.
Daniel slammed the throttles into reverse.
The sudden deceleration caught the mercenary pilot off guard. The attack boat shot past him, exposed. Daniel gripped the wheel with one hand, raised his captured submachine gun with the other, and emptied an entire magazine into the pilot's cabin. The attack craft veered violently out of control, flipping end-over-end across the boiling surface before detonating in a shower of burning fuel.
"One down!" Daniel gritted out through clenched teeth.
But the remaining two gunboats split, flanking him on both sides, herding him straight toward the razor-sharp rocks of Devil's Shoals.
Suddenly, an ear-splitting naval siren pierced the storm from the deep waters beyond the reef. A 200-foot unmarked cutter materialized out of the fog, its massive searchlights blinding both pursuit vessels.
A voice boomed through external speakers over the crashing waves: *"This is Coast Guard Special Investigative Unit. All vessels cut engines and surrender your controls!"*
Relief washed over Daniel for a split second—until the cutter opened fire not on the mercenaries, but directly into the open water alongside Daniel’s craft, forcing him onto the shoals.
Tom Hayes stepped onto the bridge wing of the cutter, illuminated by halogen floodlights, holding a radio handset.
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Tom wasn't there to rescue them. Tom was orchestrating the trap.
***
