My Marine Brother Threw My Visitor Badge Into the Gravel and Mocked Me in Front of His Entire Unit / Chapter 26 / 53

Chapter 26 - The Master Sergeant's Forge

The neon sign of *Sully’s Diesel & Marine Repair* hummed with a sickly green flicker against the coastal fog of Oceanside. The garage looked like an ordinary civilian chop shop, but behind its corrugated iron walls lay the private armory of Master Sergeant Thomas "Sully" Sullivan—a retired Marine Raider who had served two tours with Dylan and Mia’s late father.

Dylan knocked the coded sequence onto the steel side door: three heavy thuds, a pause, then two quick raps.

A sliding peephole clicked open. A pair of scarred, weathered eyes squinted through the steel. The heavy deadbolts retracted with a heavy clunk, and Sully stood in the doorway holding a 12-gauge combat shotgun aimed squarely at Dylan’s chest.

"You kids made the national evening news," Sully growled, lowering the barrel only after checking the alley behind them. "Every SWAT team, federal marshal, and Recon platoon from here to Yuma has your faces pinned to their dashboards."

"Good to see you too, Sully," Dylan said dryly as he and Mia stepped inside.

The warehouse smelled of motor oil, cordite, and stale coffee. Sully locked the reinforced door, killed the overhead lights, and motioned them toward a hidden basement bay beneath an hydraulic lift. When the steel trapdoor opened, Dylan felt a surge of grim satisfaction. Laid out along wooden racks were military-grade plate carriers, suppressed MPX submachine guns, Barrett anti-material rifles, and boxes of armor-piercing 5.56 ammunition.

"Marcus Vance came to me three days ago," Sully said, spitting tobacco into an empty can. "Offered me a million dollars in untraceable bearer bonds to supply his contractor escort with private transponders. Said he was on a black-ops mission sanctioned by the Joint Chiefs. I smelled sulfur on him the second he walked through that door."

"Did you take the money?" Mia asked, her hand resting near her sidearm.

"Hell no," Sully snapped, offended. "Your old man saved my life on Highway 80 in Iraq. I don't betray blood. But I did plant a high-yield GPS beacon on his lead offshore escort cutter before they loaded it onto the *Caspian Tide*."

He walked over to a bank of computer monitors, tapping a keyboard with calloused fingers. A blinking red beacon appeared forty miles off the coast of Baja, moving southwest at a steady twenty-two knots.

"He’s heading toward international waters where the Seventh Fleet can't touch him without congressional authorization," Dylan observed, studying the nautical map. "Once he crosses the maritime border, he’s gone."

"He won't cross it alone," Sully said, grinning with stained teeth. "I’ve got an 800-horsepower stealth interceptor boat tied to an unmarked slip at San Onofre. Kept it for high-speed salvage work. It can catch that floating fortress in ninety minutes."