Homo Sapiens

North America.

The East Coast of America.

Jacksonville City, on the border of Florida and Georgia.

The warm sea breeze of summer caressed the coastal city, carrying with it the warm, moist air from the North Atlantic Ocean.

Nearby Kings Bay was home to a famous United States Army submarine base, also known as the Navy’s most leisurely R&R harbor.

At that moment, four nuclear submarines—the Florida, the Alaska, the Maryland, and the Wyoming—were moored in the bay’s dedicated submarine port.

Large numbers of sailors treated the place like a vacation spot.

The maintenance crew dispatched to service the submarines was currently inspecting the Florida.

Mark, an engineer inspecting the anechoic tiles on the submarine’s surface, was doing a somewhat perfunctory job when he felt a sudden tap on his shoulder. Startled, Mark glanced behind him in annoyance.

His tall, imposing supervisor was glaring at him, looking displeased. ”Mark,” he threatened, ”are you trying to get fired? If there’s a problem with these tiles, you’ll be facing a court-martial.”

”I know...” Mark replied dismissively.

Suddenly, his eyes widened.

’What is that?’

’A torpedo?’

”Mark! Are you even listening to me?” his supervisor growled, his anger mounting.

But Mark, his hand trembling, pointed at the sea behind his supervisor. ”Torpedo! There’s a torpedo!”

”What? That’s not a funny joke...” The supervisor was completely bewildered.

But a look of terror crossed Mark’s face, and he instantly pulled his supervisor down onto the deck.

BOOM! Near the waterline on the port side of the nearby Alaska, a huge gash was instantly torn open. The violent explosion sent a column of water shooting into the sky.

Over two hundred meters away, Mark and his supervisor were instantly soaked by the spray.

”What happened? An attack?” The supervisor scrambled up, staring in shock at the Alaska, which was already starting to list.

Just then, the base’s alarms began to shriek piercingly.

The sailors in the harbor ran around like headless chickens, thrown into chaos by the sudden explosion and blaring alarms.

The sailors at Kings Bay Base could hardly be blamed for their laxness and confusion. This was the American mainland, after all, and the base had never once been attacked since its establishment.

Furthermore, after thirty years of America acting with impunity across the globe, no one ever imagined someone would dare to challenge the tiger in its own den.

Mark scrambled off the submarine’s deck.

His colleagues also began pouring out from inside the sub.

At that moment, the radiation detectors carried by several engineers responsible for inspecting the nuclear reactor started beeping erratically.

”Oh my God!”

”What’s going on?”

”Don’t tell me the Alaska’s reactor was hit!”

But Mark shook his head. ”Impossible. I saw the torpedo, and it didn’t hit the reactor section.”

”Stop talking and let’s go!”

Snapping back to their senses, the maintenance engineers didn’t spare another thought, sprinting for their lives toward the base’s underground bunkers.

Fortunately, a few of the more responsible engineers reported the dangerously high radiation levels at the explosion site to the maintenance officer before fleeing, urging him to prepare anti-radiation measures immediately.

After more than half an hour of chaos, order was gradually restored at the base.

However, the expression on the face of Major General Carnegie, the base commander, was as foul as if he’d swallowed a bucket of flies.

”Radiation levels are dangerously high? Dozens of sailors are showing signs of radiation sickness? Dammit! Was the reactor breached?”

But both Major Kevin, head of maintenance, and Major Austin, head of base security, shook their heads in unison.

”The reactor wasn’t breached? Then where did the radiation come from? Are you trying to tell me the Alaska was hit by a nuclear weapon?” Major General Carnegie demanded furiously.

Major Kevin replied with a grave expression, ”Yes, Major General. We were attacked by a nuclear weapon! To be precise, it was a dirty bomb. The explosion didn’t cause a significant fission reaction, but it contaminated the base’s submarines and harbor with radioactive dust.”

”...” Major General Carnegie was stunned. After a moment, he exploded, ”F*ck! Who did this?”

But no amount of cursing would change the situation.

...

The Pentagon, and by extension the City of the Council behind it, received the emergency report at the same time.

In the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia.

Within a discreet, sprawling manor hidden here, one of the four rotating sites of the City of the Council was located.

This quarter, it was this location’s turn to serve as the council’s temporary headquarters.

The four-site rotation system was established primarily because the core members of the City of the Council belonged to various financial consortiums and families. If the headquarters were fixed in one place, families and consortiums from other regions would object.

Therefore, a remote town was chosen in each of the four cardinal directions—east, west, south, and north—to serve as the office for each quarter.

This also meant that for each quarter, the families and consortiums from that respective region would serve as the acting council members for the season.

The Appalachian Mountains are in Eastern North America, which meant the current acting council members were from the Wall Street Financial Consortium.

For instance, the ”old friend” Li Qingye was so fond of thinking about, Thomas Morgan, was here right now.

”Kings Bay Base was hit by a dirty bomb?” Thomas’s expression was perfectly calm, but his eyes blazed with no small amount of fury. ”Is this the ’security’ you’re always going on about?”

The representatives from Black Ship (the CIA), the FBI, and the United States Army all lowered their heads, daring not to meet the sharp gazes of Thomas and the others.

Another man, a chubby old-timer with a Mediterranean look, lowered his cigar. ”HUFF... Have you found out who’s responsible?”

”It’s... It’s Three-leaf Oak!” Jack replied, a hint of nervousness in his voice.

”Three-leaf Oak? That group that’s been causing so much trouble in Latin America recently?” A vicious, suspicious glint flashed in Thomas’s eyes.

A thin sheen of sweat broke out on Jack’s forehead. ”Yes. They marked the torpedo casing with the Three-leaf Oak symbol. However, it’s also possible that another power disguised their work intentionally.”

Thomas immediately issued an order: ”Continue the investigation! I don’t care if it was Three-leaf Oak or not. You must find the source of the raw materials for that dirty bomb.”

The other acting council members nodded in agreement.

In their view, the Three-leaf Oak group in Latin America didn’t have the capability to refine Uranium-235. Even U-235 with a concentration of only 0.5% was beyond the reach of such underground rats.

An incident like this was most likely the work of another major power, or perhaps a regional hegemon, stirring up trouble from behind the scenes.

And since it happened in the North Atlantic, the culprits were most likely a power from around the North Atlantic.

This further narrowed the range of potential culprits.

Even a veteran agent like Jack, who had spent his entire life in intelligence, didn’t suspect anyone from East Asia, Southeast Asia, or South Asia.

After all, the two regions were tens of thousands of kilometers apart. A conventional submarine couldn’t stay submerged for that long, and only a few powers possessed nuclear submarines.

According to their intelligence, the nuclear submarines belonging to the few powers in Southeast Asia all had alibis.

As for other methods, such as transporting it via a civilian ship and secretly deploying it near Kings Bay, that was also a possibility.

However, with that method, a simple investigation of recent shipping records would have been enough to lock down which vessels had passed through the surrounding waters.

They clearly hadn’t realized that the torpedo had traveled there under its own power, a feat that fell into a current technological blind spot.

As a result, Black Ship’s investigation was heading in the wrong direction from the very beginning.

With such a serious incident occurring on home soil, Black Ship poured nearly all its resources into the investigation.

Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, Joshua was disguised as a business inspector for a multinational trading company, heading for the Borneo region of Malaysia.