Twenty-five miles away, steel doors opened on the side of a cargo ship and four strange boats exited one at a time. They rose out of the water on sleek white legs and hydrofoiled away at sixty miles per hour.

Twenty minutes later the leader said, “Okay, Stingrays, let’s drop here.”

The hydrofoil “wings” on the bottoms of the legs tilted downward slightly. Instead of lifting the craft upward, they now pulled down, causing them to plow through the water like submarines and disappear beneath it. Thirty feet down they leveled off and continued their course.