Their giant underwater monster might have been impressive, but it wasn’t actively killing them, so the rest of the cultists were paying attention to Franks now. The demon was waving his long misshapen gorilla arms and wailing in the original tongue, beseeching the ancient thing from the deep to do their bidding and to kill Franks and then attack the human cities along the coast. This operation’s primary objective was to keep that from happening. The secondary was to capture this demon for questioning. The tertiary was to kill every cultist who pissed him off. He’d added that one himself.

Franks bent down, picked up the ceremonial dagger—solid—and covered the distance to the demon in a flash. It clawed at him, still screaming for the monster to save them. He slugged the demon in the chest and felt bones explode. “You’re wanted for questioning.” He hadn’t brought cuffs, so Franks caught the demon’s arm, forced it to the deck, and slammed the dagger through its hand and deep into the wood. “Stick around.”

He left the demon thrashing and clutching at the dagger in a futile attempt to pull it free, but when Franks stuck a blade into something, he did so with authority, and the demon wasn’t strong enough to pull the blade free.

Something needed to be done before the cult got their wits together enough to actually get the big monster to do their bidding. In Franks’ experience, the best way to keep somebody from accomplishing something was just to kill them.

The thing which had been sleeping beneath the ocean was directly under them, and it seemed angry about being woken up. A tentacle as big around as their boat broke the surface, whipped through the rain and spotlight beams and then came crashing back down only twenty yards off their port side. Franks snarled. He had no patience for eldritch horrors. They think they’re so tough . . . The Navy had an attack submarine a few miles away. He’d show them tough. He keyed his radio as he walked toward the dropped pistol. “Come in, Command.”

“What’s your situation, Franks?” Myers asked, sounding a little flustered, but the boss always got that way when he was watching some supernatural world-altering event unfold over a satellite feed.

“Situation under control.” The cultists were going for their weapons. A cultist standing in the wheelhouse door started shooting at him with an AR-15. Franks calmly bent over, snatched up the dropped handgun, an old GI 1911, lifted it as he ran, and put a single round through the window. The glass shattered and the shooter went down. Several others were retrieving their weapons, so Franks methodically went about gunning them down as bullets flew past him. He took cover behind some metal storage boxes. “Requesting torpedo fire on the big one.”