After spending $110,000 supporting my family, I returned from a 21-day Navy mission to find my father giving my $4 million Lake Tahoe villa to my sister—but one message from my attorney was about to turn their champagne celebration into a nightmare.

I didn't wait for a coordinated count. The cold rage that had fueled me from the shores of Lake Tahoe to the floor of the Pacific detonated behind my ribs.

I stepped out from the shadow of the structural beam, brought the suppressed barrel of the MCX to eye level, and squeezed the trigger twice.

*Pfft-pfft.*

The first sentry collapsed instantly, a pair of .300 Blackout rounds penetrating his chest plate before he could raise his weapon. The second guard gasped, his hands flying to his sling, but my teammate beside me fired a single, clean shot that took him down against the steel plating.

We moved forward without a sound, stepping over the fallen men. I confiscated their keycards and tactical radios, clipping one receiver to my harness to listen in on the syndicate's internal chatter.

*"Security Team 2, report,"* a voice crackled through the guard's radio. *"The transfer rate on the main server is at seventy-eight percent. Make sure the charges on the lower moonpool are armed. When the boss gives the word, we drop this rig into the shelf."*

"They're rigging the platform to sink," I hissed to my team. "They want to destroy every scrap of evidence and bury the *Hampton* in a legal and environmental catastrophe."

We swiped the keycard across the elevator panel. The heavy pneumatic doors slid back with a hiss. Inside, the elevator shaft dropped three hundred feet straight down into the submerged heart of the rig—the flooded column where the dry-well laboratory was suspended.

"Rope descent," I whispered. "The elevator motor is too loud. They’ll hear us coming."

We hooked our descenders to the emergency steel maintenance cable running down the center of the vertical shaft. I stepped off the ledge into the dark abyss, sliding silently downward through the grease-stained air, braking every fifty feet with a quick squeeze of my tactical glove.

Through the gaps in the maintenance shaft, I could see down into the illuminated belly of the dry-well.

It was a state-of-the-art covert operations bay. In the center of the chamber, clamped inside a pressurized cradle, sat the titanium escape pod that Clara had fled in. Surrounding it were bank upon bank of high-capacity server arrays, glowing with frantic bursts of blue fiber-optic light.

And standing at the central console, barking orders into a satellite phone, was a man whose voice I had heard over speakerphones throughout my childhood.