Chapter 16 - The Harbor Sabotage
Three nights later, the warning came to life.
At two in the morning, a heavy coastal fog rolled across Narragansett Bay, thick as cotton wool, muffling the sound of the channel bell buoys. Claire was sleeping soundly in the nursery we had built inside our family’s original seaside home on Goat Island.
A sudden shriek of tearing metal pierced the night, followed by the deep, wailing alarm of Drydock Three.
I ran to the window, pulling on my boots and heavy coat. Down at the water’s edge, a floodlight was flickering erratically. Two figures were scrambling along the maintenance gantry of the *Bennett Pioneer*, our largest container vessel, currently undergoing hull retrofitting.
I grabbed my handheld radio. "Nathan! Luke! Drydock Three!"
"We’re on it!" Luke’s voice crackled through the static. "They’re cutting the intake valves! They’re trying to flood the dock while the hull is unsealed!"
If Drydock Three flooded before the outer caisson was locked, forty thousand tons of sea water would rush inside, crushing the *Bennett Pioneer* against the concrete floor and bankrupting our insurance syndicate overnight.
I sprinted down the private gravel road connecting the house to the marina. The fog was so dense I could barely see ten feet in front of me, but I knew every inch of this granite shoreline by heart.
As I reached the pump house, the door swung open. A man in black diving neoprene burst out, holding a pneumatic cutting torch.
He didn't expect a woman to be standing on the threshold. He lunged forward, raising the heavy steel torch to strike, but I didn't back down. I caught the wooden emergency fire axe hanging from the bulkhead wall and swung the flat side of the handle with everything I had.
The ash wood struck him across the collarbone with a sickening crack. The diver collapsed into the gravel, gasping in pain, the torch clattering against the concrete.
Behind him, Nathan emerged from the flooded catwalk below, soaking wet, dragging a second saboteur by the collar of his wet suit. Luke was already inside the pump room, his hands flying across the emergency hydraulic valves.
With a massive shudder of groaning iron, the secondary floodgates slammed shut. The water level stopped rising with six inches to spare.
Nathan hauled the second diver up onto the dry pavement and ripped off his mask. It was Preston’s former private boat captain—the same man who had stood by the gangway on Christmas morning and refused to let me call an ambulance.
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"Who hired you?" Nathan demanded, his knee driving into the man’s spine. "Was it Vance?"
"Not Vance," the captain wheezed, spitting salt water onto the stone. "Preston... Preston had an escape contingency. He posted bail through an offshore bondman before the federal judge filed the final freeze. He’s out, Bennett. He’s out, and he’s on the water right now."
