Chapter 23 - The Judas Protocol
"On my mark, you sprint for the harbor master's concrete bunker!" Mia ordered, priming the grenade’s ignition striker. "Do not stop, Dylan! Do not look back!"
"I'm not leaving you behind!" Dylan shouted back over the deafening cacophony of incoming rounds chewing through the forklift's steel frame.
"I’m right behind you! Move!"
Mia hurled the thermite cylinder straight into the high-pressure manifold of the harbor fuel line.
An instant later, a dazzling four-thousand-degree white flare erupted, instantly igniting the spilled aviation fuel. The manifold ruptured with a catastrophic roar, sending a shockwave that threw the flanking mercenaries off their feet and blasted a curtain of orange flame forty feet into the night sky.
The heat was blistering. Dylan sprinted through the blinding smoke, diving shoulder-first through the reinforced steel doorway of the harbor bunker, rolling to his feet with his weapon raised.
A second later, Mia slid through the doorway, slamming the reinforced steel blast door shut and dropping the heavy manual locking bar into place just as a storm of shrapnel peppered the exterior wall.
Outside, the *Caspian Tide* began violently shuddering as the burning fuel engulfed its stern lines, the ship's mooring cables snapping one by one under immense strain.
Through the bunker's narrow ballistic viewing slit, Dylan watched as General Marcus Vance stood at the ship's bridge, completely calm despite the raging inferno. He was typing furiously on a ruggedized terminal.
Suddenly, Mia's tactical communications headset crackled with a high-priority, override-frequency signal.
It wasn't their mother. It wasn't NCIS.
It was a cold, digitized voice broadcasting across all secure military channels in the Southern California sector:
*"Attention all regional commands. Emergency broadcast from Pacific Joint Command. Major Mia Vance and Corporal Dylan Vance have been classified as armed domestic combatants following the sabotage of Naval Maritime Asset Pier 4. Kill-on-sight authorization has been granted. Repeat: Kill on sight."*
Dylan stared at his sister, the color draining from his face. "He just framed us for the entire explosion. He turned the whole United States military against us."
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Mia slowly walked to the viewing slit. Across the burning harbor, Marcus Vance looked directly toward their bunker, raised his hand in a mocking farewell salute, and stepped inside the armored superstructure as the ship’s emergency secondary engines roared to life, pulling the vessel away from the burning dock into the dark open waters of the Pacific.
Beneath the bunker floor, the heavy vibration of approaching military gunships began to shake the earth.
