Chapter 67 - THE BREACH AT MONTECRISTO
The crossing was an endurance test of raw kinetic violence.
The Sparviero did not ride the waves; she punched directly through them. Mountains of black water slammed over the carbon-fiber deck, washing across the bridge glass in torrential sheets, but the automated gyro-stabilizers kept the hull level as the turbines pushed the vessel past fifty knots through the pitch-black gale.
Sophia sat in her shock-absorbing seat, her small jaw set, her tiny hands resting firmly on the armrests. Whenever the vessel launched off the crest of a massive swell, dropping twenty feet into the trough with a concussive shudder, Sophia didn't scream or cry. She simply let out a sharp, breathless “Ooh!” and then immediately glanced at Dante, making sure his hands remained firm on the throttles.
"Target sighted at three miles, Boss!" Marco shouted from the navigation console, pointing through the night-vision display. "Bearing one-eight-zero!"
Dante adjusted the thermal camera mounted on the mast.
Emerging from the black mist of the storm was the jagged, menacing silhouette of the Isle of Montecristo’s northern reef. Rising eighty feet out of the churning sea was an ancient, circular stone tower constructed of dark volcanic granite—the Faro di San Giorgio.
The lighthouse was supposed to be dead, dark, and abandoned.
Yet through the thermal optic, the stone tower glowed with an eerie, unnatural heat. A massive industrial generator hummed deep within the foundation, and mounted beneath the historic copper lantern room at the summit was a high-frequency phased-array satellite dish, pointing directly toward the geostationary orbit of a European defense network.
And there, slicing through the driving rain forty feet above the crashing breakers, was the beacon.
It was not a sweeping, rotating light meant to guide civilian ships away from the reef.
It was a fixed, narrow pencil-beam of brilliant blue-white halogen light, pointed directly at the southern horizon—unmoving, silent, and steady as an executioner's stare.
The lighthouse where the light does not turn.
"They have automated perimeter defenses, Boss!" Marco warned, his screen flashing red alerts. "Two remote-operated radar-guided thirty-millimeter cannons mounted on the lower sea wall! If we enter within eight hundred yards, they will shred our hull before we can drop the ramps!"
Dante did not ease off the throttles. His gray eyes narrowed into cold, lethal slits as he watched the blue beam cut through the rain.
"Sophia," Dante spoke calmly into his headset.
"Yes, Daddy?"
"Do you see the red button under the little plastic shield on your console?"
Sophia’s eyes darted down to the auxiliary defense panel. A red toggle switch sat covered by a transparent yellow safety guard, labeled in technical military stencils: ECM CHAFF DISPERSAL.
"I see it," she chirped, flipping the yellow guard up with her tiny thumb.
"When I count to three, sweetheart," Dante instructed, his voice smooth and devoid of any panic, "you press it as hard as you can. You are going to throw glitter at their radar."
Sophia beamed, her cheeks dimpling with fierce excitement. "Glitter attack!"
"One," Dante called out, his hand adjusting the helm to align the bow with the reef's narrow breakwater.
"Two..."
The thirty-millimeter cannons on the lighthouse sea wall began to whine, their automated barrels rotating toward the incoming vessel.
"Three!"
Sophia slammed her small palm down on the red button with all her strength.
THUMP-THUMP-THUMP.
Six pneumatic mortar tubes behind the Sparviero's bridge detonated simultaneously, launching hundreds of pounds of radar-reflective aluminum chaff and high-temperature magnesium flares into the air directly above the lighthouse. The storm-lashed sky erupted in a blinding, sparkling cloud of gold and silver fire, completely blinding the automated targeting computers of the shore guns.
The thirty-millimeter cannons fired wildly into the sky, their heavy tracer rounds arching uselessly into the clouds.
May you like
Dante slammed the throttles to maximum.
The Sparviero surged forward through the blinding cloud of smoke and glitter, her reinforced carbon bow smashing straight through the wooden dock of the lighthouse with a catastrophic, splintering roar, grounding her heavy hull securely upon the stone slipway directly beneath the iron blast doors of the tower.
