Chapter 345 - 342: Outsmarting Oneself

"Kiel, speed up."

"Okay." Kiel pushed the throttle to its limit.

The engine roared, driving the propeller faster. The small, two-hundred-ton boat surged toward the coast of Saudia Arabia at 22 knots.

Clearly acting on a guilty conscience, Chelsea knew the Homo Sapiens Company was not to be trifled with.

「Meanwhile.」

On the surface of the sea, amidst raging flames.

The five security guards who had just been blasted away had already sunk beneath the waves.

Inside the exoskeletons on the seabed, the "security guards'" exteriors were slowly dissolving, revealing the mechanical components within.

And inside the capsized and sunken patrol boat, the bodies of the security guards within were also slowly dissolving.

「Twenty minutes later」

Three patrol boats, dispatched for rescue, arrived at the blazing patch of sea.

Wearing sunglasses, Susan stood at the bow, the salty sea breeze washing over her.

"Quite the fireworks show."

The patrol boat captain asked in a low voice, "Team Leader Susan, we've detected the signal from Patrol Boat 6."

"Then begin the salvage operation."

"Yes, ma'am."

A dozen security guards in aquatic exoskeletons quickly dove into the sea and swam down toward the location of the sunken Patrol Boat 6.

Although the water depth in this area ranged from 200 to 1,000 meters, for the new human employees equipped with biological exoskeletons, such depths posed no challenge.

Using the pheromone transmitter on the patrol boat, the dozen security guards easily pinpointed the exact location of the wreck.

In the dark depths of the sea, the hull of the recently sunken patrol boat—built with new materials and integrated manufacturing techniques—had not been ruptured by the 15 tons of TNT. The ship and its internal facilities were almost completely intact.

After re-marking the position and installing several supplementary pheromone signal transmitters, the security guards retrieved the data-storing black box from the cabin.

Then, they quickly withdrew.

Returning to the surface, they handed the black box to Susan.

Susan glanced at the black box, an enigmatic smile appearing on her face. "Alright. Leave two patrol boats here to continue the search. We're returning to Hongku Port immediately."

"No problem."

...

「At the same time.」

In the cabin of the small boat, Chelsea was reviewing satellite surveillance footage from headquarters via a satellite link.

Three Keyhole satellites that had just passed over the Red Sea had captured images of the area around the explosion.

Chelsea was now reviewing this data, zooming in on the footage.

He watched the scene unfold: the fishing boat and the patrol boat met, the Homo Sapiens Company security guards boarded the fishing boat to inspect it, then the fishing boat exploded, followed by both vessels sinking.

Next came the rescue dispatched from the Hongku Port branch, searching the explosion area. He even saw one of the patrol boats send a dozen divers into the sea.

About twenty minutes later, the divers resurfaced, and that patrol boat returned to Hongku Port.

Through this series of images, Chelsea obtained the intelligence he wanted. He stared at the explosion footage.

'As expected, the Homo Sapiens Company's intelligence system didn't detect this beforehand. This means our intelligence wasn't leaked.'

Suddenly, a text message containing only a jumble of numbers and English letters popped up on his internal communications phone. Chelsea spent a few minutes decoding it.

Looking at the contents on the paper, he fell silent.

[Persian Gulf—Lavan Island mission: success. Main Republic—Mukala mission: failure...]

There were seven missions in total, corresponding to seven high-ranking executives from the West Asian, South Asian, East African, and South African divisions of Black Ship.

Four missions succeeded; three failed.

It was important to note that these were all single-line operations.

Mission failures meant that three of those lines had been compromised, especially since he had deliberately asked Hodder to have the executives personally find people to carry out the missions.

'McDonald, Jin Philip, David Cole...' Chelsea silently recited the names. Although nothing was confirmed, he had already placed them on his list of primary suspects.

「Four hours later.」

As the sun set over Hanek, a city on the West Coast of Saudia Arabia, a small yacht slowly docked at the local pier.

Chelsea and Kiel abandoned the yacht and immediately used their pre-arranged false identities to take a car to Yanbu, a major city in western Saudia Arabia.

They were so cautious because they knew the Hongku Port incident wouldn't stay secret for long.

America had its Keyhole satellites, and the Homo Sapiens Company also had a large number of spy satellites deployed in low-Earth orbit.

In other words, footage of them leaving the fishing boat in the yacht would soon be discovered by the Homo Sapiens Company. If they didn't run now, they would be utterly destroyed once the company tracked them down.

Spurred by their survival instincts, Kiel covered the 173 kilometers between Hanek and Yanbu in just 47 minutes, parking the Jeep near Yanbu Airport.

They immediately used their special connections to purchase tickets at Yanbu Airport for a flight to Transvaal in Southern Africa.

The moment they were seated on the plane, Chelsea and Kiel finally breathed a small sigh of relief.

The pressure of confronting the Homo Sapiens Company was unimaginable. After all, its Foreign Affairs Division was notorious among the world's major intelligence organizations for being sinister, unpredictable, and ruthlessly vengeful.

Even though he was a high-level agent for Black Ship, the Foreign Affairs Division wouldn't show him any mercy or hold back in the slightest.

「At the same time.」

「Transvaal.」

「Cape Town Port.」

The regional center for Black Ship in Africa was established in this city.

Inside an office building bearing the sign "Good Hope Trading Company," Hodder, the Governor of Africa, had also received the report on the seven operations.

He stared at the report in his hand, his expression grave. "Could they really be the problem? No, a single mission isn't enough to be certain."

Hodder fiddled with his pen, his sharp eyes glinting with various calculations.

Clearly, Chelsea's test had triggered a severe crisis of trust within Black Ship. Although many executives had worked for the organization for decades, seniority did not guarantee loyalty.

Especially with the recent string of intelligence leaks that had left Black Ship Headquarters completely overwhelmed.

If they didn't investigate, the leaks would continue, and the Homo Sapiens Company's Foreign Affairs Division would keep running circles around their operations.

But investigating would sow paranoia internally, affecting all their work.

However, Chelsea's test had given Hodder an excellent idea: use members of the council's major families as a starting point to bait the hook and fish out the mole.

He had now preliminarily identified three suspected executives.

However, Hodder, a veteran of the intelligence world for decades, didn't jump to conclusions.

What if the failure of those three missions was just a coincidence? He would end up eliminating one of his own.

Hodder quickly thought of a solution: 'It seems I'll have to run another test.'

If one test couldn't confirm it, he would run another. If the missions failed again, then those people were definitely compromised.

In North America, Pete Mellon had the same idea. He was already planning to have Chelsea arrange another test, and he didn't care if it cost several hundred million US Dollars.

After all, compared to the money, the security of their intelligence was what truly mattered. The very lives and fortunes of their families were at stake; he had no choice but to take it seriously.

The moment he stepped off the plane, Chelsea received a special directive from Pete Mellon. It acknowledged his contribution and ordered him to continue his probing to uncover the Homo Sapiens Company's mole inside Black Ship.

An unseen, brutal conflict had officially begun within Black Ship.