Chapter 110 - Blood and Saltwater
"Marcus, the timer!" Reyes shouted over the team comms, kneeling by the central terminal. "The charges are wired into the main buoyancy tanks! We have less than two minutes before the lower column floods and the entire structure capsizes!"
I knelt beside Clara. She looked up at me with wide, terrified eyes, shaking violently. "Marcus... I'm sorry... I didn't know... I swear to God I didn't know about Julian and the syndicate... Dad told me you were dead... he showed me forged casualty reports..."
I pulled out my ceramic blade and sliced through the industrial zip-ties binding her wrists and ankles.
"Save it for the federal prosecutors, Clara," I said, grabbing her by the collar of her jacket and hauling her to her feet. "You wanted my house. You wanted my money. You drank champagne while I was bleeding in the dark. You don't get to play the victim now."
"Vance, we have to move!" Reyes roared, slapping a fresh magazine into his rifle. "The scuttle sequence is irreversible! The sea valves are blowing!"
A deafening groan shook the entire rig. Deep within the lower pilings, massive explosive charges detonated, sending a shockwave through the steel floor that knocked us off balance. Seawater began erupting from the drainage grates, white foam churning with toxic hydraulic fluid.
"Move to the elevator shaft!" I ordered. "Ascend to the upper helipad! We need extraction right now!"
"What about him?" Reyes pointed at Arthur, who was crawling toward the severed hard drives, groaning in pain, his eyes manic and wild.
"Pick him up," I commanded coldly. "He doesn't get to die a martyr in the deep. He's going to stand trial in federal court. Every man, woman, and officer he betrayed will look him in the eye when they read the verdict."
Two SEALs grabbed Arthur by his arms, dragging him kicking and screaming into the ascent harness.
We climbed frantically up the emergency ladder, racing against a wall of freezing Pacific seawater that was rapidly filling the central column. The platform was beginning to tilt violently to port, steel beams snapping with sounds like artillery shells as thousands of tons of ocean poured into the ruptured ballast chambers.
We burst through the upper maintenance hatch onto the main helipad deck.
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The Category 2 storm hit us like a freight train. Gale-force winds tore across the open ocean, driving sheets of rain into our faces. The ocean below was a nightmare of frothing, forty-foot swells, crashing against the dying legs of Platform Prometheus.
Above us, cutting through the driving rain with twin searchlights, the dark silhouette of an MH-60S Seahawk helicopter from the USS *Hampton* hovered twenty feet above the violently pitching deck, its hoist cable descending through the storm.
