The abandoned Fort Monroe sat like a forgotten gravestone on the Virginia coast—a relic of the Civil War now surrendered to decay and the Atlantic wind. Catherine drove the Ford through overgrown approach roads, headlights cutting tunnels through fog that rolled off Chesapeake Bay like the breath of ghosts.
"You're sure about this?" Rick asked from the passenger seat. His father's Colt felt heavy in his jacket, loaded with rounds he'd scavenged from the dead at the paper mill.
"Petrov's decode was explicit." Catherine's voice was flat, drained. They'd left the cryptographer at a safe house in Baltimore with instructions to disappear. Scott's body they'd left at the mill—another casualty in a war that hadn't officially started yet. "Shipping manifest, grid coordinates, and a delivery schedule. Whatever Prometheus Protocol needs, it's stored here."
Rick studied the decoded sheets in his lap by flashlight. Names and numbers that had cost Scott his life. Senator Andrew Morrison. General Patterson. Marcus Webb of Consolidated Aircraft. And underneath it all, like a disease spreading through the body politic: weapons manifests, shipping routes, bank transfers routing through dummy corporations.
The conspiracy wasn't just about money or power. It was about control. About reshaping America's response to the coming war in Europe—or preventing that response entirely.
"What did Scott give you?" Catherine asked. "Before he died."
Rick's hand moved to his coat pocket, feeling the blood-stained paper Scott had pressed into his palm. More names. Backup leverage. Insurance Scott had been too smart—or too paranoid—not to keep.
"Nothing," Rick lied.
Catherine's eyes flicked toward him, reading the deception but choosing not to push. They'd crossed too many lines tonight for honesty to matter much anymore.
The fort's main gate hung open, rusted chain swinging in the wind. Catherine killed the engine fifty yards out, letting momentum carry them into the shadow of the walls.
"Military decommissioned this place in '32," she said, checking her revolver's cylinder. "Budget cuts. It's been federal storage since—mostly forgotten munitions and obsolete equipment."
"Except it's not forgotten," Rick said.
They moved through the gate on foot, weapons drawn. The fort's interior courtyard stretched before them—crumbling barracks, a parade ground overtaken by weeds, and at the far end, a squat concrete bunker with a steel door that looked disturbingly new.
Rick's combat instincts screamed warning. The approach was too open, too exposed. Anyone watching from the barracks or the walls would have clear fields of fire.
"Something's wrong," he whispered.
"Everything's wrong," Catherine replied. "Has been since Berlin."
They crossed the courtyard in a combat crouch, using abandoned equipment for cover. The bunker door was padlocked but the lock was fresh—military grade, recently installed. Rick pulled a set of picks from his coat, working the mechanism while Catherine covered their six.
The lock gave with a soft click that seemed to echo across the empty fort.
Inside, concrete steps descended into darkness that smelled of machine oil and cordite. Rick's flashlight cut through the gloom, revealing a storage room that stretched back fifty feet into the earth.
What he saw made his blood run cold.
Crates. Dozens of them. Stenciled with military designations and shipping codes. Thompson submachine guns, still packed in factory grease. Boxes of ammunition—thousands of rounds. Stick grenades with German markings. And against the far wall, something that made no sense at all: wooden crates marked with Japanese characters and the imperial chrysanthemum seal.
"Jesus Christ," Catherine breathed.
Rick moved deeper into the arsenal, his mind racing. The ATF agents had been killed with military weapons—Thompsons, specifically. Here was the source. But the Japanese ordnance...
He pried open one of the Japanese crates with a crowbar hanging on the wall. Inside, wrapped in oiled cloth: Arisaka rifles. Type 89 heavy machine guns. And something else—technical manuals, all in Japanese, with annotations in English.
"They're not just arming themselves," Rick said, the pieces falling into place like tumbling dominoes. "They're stockpiling foreign weapons. Creating evidence."
Catherine was reading shipping manifests she'd found on a makeshift desk. "These crates came through Webb's shipping company. Three deliveries over the past six months. Routed through Mexico and Vancouver." Her voice dropped. "Rick, these manifests are dated for future deliveries. Weapons shipments that haven't arrived yet."
"When?"
"December. Next December." She looked up at him, face pale in the flashlight beam. "1941."
The implications hit like a physical blow. Prometheus Protocol wasn't about the current war in Europe. It was about the next one. About positioning, about creating the conditions for American intervention—or preventing it. About having the weapons and the evidence in place when the moment came.
"They're planning something," Rick said. "Something that needs to look like—"
The lights blazed on, flooding the bunker with harsh fluorescence.
"A tragedy," a voice said from the stairs. "Not an attack. There's a difference."
Rick spun, Colt coming up, but froze when he saw the rifles trained on them. Six men in civilian clothes but with military bearing, weapons steady, faces empty of everything except professional purpose.
The man who'd spoken descended the stairs with the measured pace of someone entering his own office. Mid-fifties, silver-haired, wearing an expensive suit under a canvas coat that somehow remained pristine despite the bunker's grime. Rick recognized him from Petrov's decoded sheets.
Marcus Webb. Consolidated Aircraft. One of Prometheus Protocol's architects.
"Mr. Forsyth," Webb said, his voice carrying the cultivated neutrality of a Harvard education. "Miss Ashford. You've been remarkably persistent. Your father would be proud." He said it without irony, as if pride were a commodity he could measure and distribute.
"The arsenal," Catherine said, gun still raised despite the impossible odds. "What's it for?"
Webb looked at her with something approaching sympathy. "May I?" He gestured to a crate. When neither of them objected—what could they do?—he sat with the careful posture of a man who'd never slouched in his life.
"Tell me, Miss Ashford. What do you know about forest fires?"
Catherine's finger tightened on the trigger. "Don't patronize me."
"I'm not." Webb's tone remained perfectly even. "Forest management services learned something decades ago. If you suppress every small fire, prevent every natural burn, the underbrush accumulates. Deadfall piles up. And when the fire finally comes—and it always comes—it doesn't burn. It incinerates. Total devastation. Nothing survives."
He gestured around the bunker. "But if you allow controlled burns. Strategic fires that clear the deadwood, that create firebreaks, that remove the fuel before the inferno arrives..." He paused. "Then the forest survives. Changed, certainly. But alive."
"You're talking about killing people," Rick said flatly. "Not managing timber."
"I'm talking about saving a nation." Webb's eyes met Rick's, and there was no madness there. No zealotry. Just absolute certainty. "War is coming, Mr. Forsyth. Not the European conflict—that's just the opening act. The real war. The war that will decide whether democratic civilization survives or whether totalitarianism becomes the defining philosophy of the twentieth century."
He stood, moving to the Japanese crates with the ease of a professor at a lectern. "Japan will attack us. December 1941. Pearl Harbor. That's not speculation—that's mathematics. Their resource needs, their strategic position, our embargo policies. The equation has only one solution."
"You know this," Catherine said slowly. "You've known."
"We've modeled it. Wargamed it. Consulted with the brightest strategic minds in three countries." Webb's voice carried quiet pride. "And we know something else. America, as it exists today, is not prepared for what's coming. We're isolationist. Fractured. Industrial capacity geared toward consumer goods, not military hardware. Our intelligence services are joke. Our military is using equipment from the last war."
He turned back to them. "If Pearl Harbor happens with America in its current state, we lose. Maybe not immediately. But Japan controls the Pacific. Germany controls Europe. And we're left defending a hemisphere with a military that can't project power beyond our own coastline."
"So you're going to let it happen," Rick said. "Let them kill our sailors. Start a war you could prevent."
"Prevent?" For the first time, emotion crept into Webb's voice—not anger, but something like disappointment. "Mr. Forsyth, we can't prevent Pearl Harbor any more than we can prevent gravity. Japan's strategic imperatives demand it. Our economic policies make it inevitable. The question isn't whether it happens. The question is whether America survives what comes after."
He moved closer, and Rick saw it then—the absolute conviction of a man who'd done the moral calculus and accepted the cost.
"Prometheus Protocol doesn't start the war," Webb said softly. "It ensures we win it. Every labor riot we've orchestrated, every weapons cache we've positioned, every foreign weapon we've stockpiled—it's all preparation. When Pearl Harbor happens, we won't waste months debating intervention. We'll have our narrative already in place. Evidence of Japanese fifth columns. German saboteurs. Proof of coordinated attacks on American soil."
"Fabricated proof," Catherine said.
"Does it matter?" Webb's question hung in the air. "When the bombs fall on Pearl Harbor, when thousands of servicemen die in their bunks, when America is finally, irrevocably committed to war—does it matter that we prepared the ground? Does it matter that we ensured maximum unity, maximum industrial mobilization, maximum national commitment?"
He gestured to the arsenal around them. "These weapons will save millions of American lives. Not by being fired—by existing. By providing the evidence that transforms Pearl Harbor from an isolated attack into the final proof of a coordinated threat. By giving Roosevelt the mandate he needs to mobilize industry, conscript soldiers, and prosecute total war."
"You're talking about false flag operations," Rick said. "Killing Americans to justify—"
"I'm talking about acceptable losses." Webb's voice remained steady, clinical. "Three hundred deaths in staged attacks over eighteen months. Versus three hundred thousand deaths if America enters the war unprepared and fractured. Versus three million if we lose. If totalitarianism wins. If the world that emerges from this conflict is one where democratic values are extinct."
He looked between them. "I'm not a villain, Mr. Forsyth. I'm a man who's done the mathematics. Who's accepted the weight of necessary sacrifice. Your father understood that, even if he couldn't accept it. He knew about Prometheus Protocol. He knew the cost. He just couldn't bear to pay it."
"So you killed him," Rick said quietly.
"We gave him a choice." Webb's tone suggested genuine regret. "Join us. Help us save the country he loved. Or step aside. He chose a third option—investigation, exposure, justice. Noble. Futile. And ultimately fatal."
The bunker fell silent except for the hum of fluorescent lights and the distant sound of wind through broken walls.
"You actually believe this," Catherine said, and there was something like horror in her voice. "You think you're the hero."
"I think I'm the man willing to make decisions others can't," Webb replied. "Someone has to stand in the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be. Someone has to accept the cost of survival. That burden falls to those with the clarity to see what must be done and the strength to do it."
He nodded to his men. "I'm sorry. Truly. But you're part of the deadwood now. And the fire is coming."
The rifles came up.