“Turn wide to port... Get our nose on her!” he ordered. “Stand by, number two!”

“Yes, sir!” Strauss said.

The Ghost went around the Chinese boat in a long, looping turn.

“Number two—fire!”

“Aye!”

The Ghost’s second Mark 54 hit the Gahjae amidship, colliding with its hull at a textbook perfect ninety-degrees. There was a flash in the night, a roar, and it was gone, blown out of the water.

Two down, Harper thought.

He checked his screen. The Ghost’s three-sixty view field showed the third fast boat racing away from them a hundred fifty yards to the east.

“Linick, see that last one?”

“Check.”

“Get after it. Full throttle.”

“Roger”

“LeMahieu?”

Doug LeMahieu, the fourth member of the crew, was aft in his seat manning the Vulcan Gatling gun.

“Yes, sir.”

“Objective’s yours. Fire at will. They aren’t running out on our party.”

The Ghost surged after the fast boat, practically flying over the water. At his station, LeMahieu began chopping out .20 mm ammunition.

Harper grabbed his bullhorn microphone.

“Halt and surrender!” he shouted. “This is your only warning!”

The fast boat kept racing eastward in the dark, but the Ghost’s near-frictionless speed vastly overmatched it. Within a minute it had chased down the smaller craft like a fox after a hare, pulling within fifty yards, LeMahieu slamming it with bullets at a rate of six thousand rounds per minute. Chunks of its hull blasted into the air. Flames spouted from its deck. Finally it stopped dead, leaning to one side at an extreme angle.

“Come up onto the deck with your hands in the air,” Harper boomed through the horn. “You have thirty seconds before we open fire.”

He silently counted down. The fast boat sat at its precarious tilt, taking on water. No one came topside. He kept counting down.

Fifteen seconds into his count the Chinese craft blew from within, self-destructing with a flash that momentarily blanked his display and pushed a whipping, thumping wave of seawater over the Ghost’s hull. But it remained balanced on its foils thanks to twenty-odd gyroscopic stabilizers under the keel.

Harper kept his eyes intently on his monitor once it cleared of glare, observing the wreckage of the boat on the surface. His impulse was to order Linick to move in and see if there were any survivors, unlikely as that might be. The crew obviously hadn’t wanted to be taken alive, and he doubted anyone could have made it through the blast.

After a minute, he went ahead and looked anyway.

“Oh, shit. Oh, Jesus God,” said the pilot, Lt. Jase Waller, the P-8’s commander. “Archer, you see what I see?”

Archer was Captain Ty Archer, his co-pilot.