Chapter 113 - Plunge into the Iron Deep
The freezing water was sapping my core body temperature by the second, but adrenaline burned hot in my veins. I released the quick-detach buckles on my plate carrier, letting the heavy ceramic armor drop away into the three-thousand-foot abyss below. Without the weight dragging me down, I could stroke powerfully through the swells, my combat dagger secured at my bicep, my waterproof sidearm strapped to my thigh.
"Reyes!" I shouted over the crash of a rolling wave.
"Two o'clock, Marcus!" a voice answered from the crest of a nearby swell. Reyes was treading water with practiced ease, his tactical knife already drawn. "Helicopter managed an autorotation three miles west! They're down on the water, but they're alive. We’re on our own out here!"
"Arthur and Clara?"
"Directly ahead of the corvette’s bow! If that warship hits them, they’ll be sucked straight into the twin screw propellers!"
The sleek, faceted hull of the rogue corvette, painted in radar-absorbent matte charcoal, was cutting through the sea at twenty-five knots. It wasn't slowing down to rescue anyone. It was maneuvering to run them down—or capture the waterproof courier case still cuffed to Arthur’s wrist.
Even in the middle of a collapsing deep-sea extraction, my father hadn’t let go of the case. The greed that had driven him to steal my $4 million Lake Tahoe home was the very thing anchoring him to his own execution.
"Dive!" I yelled to Reyes.
The corvette’s forward hull-mounted searchlights suddenly ignited, cutting twin swords of brilliant xenon light through the sheets of rain. The beam swept across the water, locking directly onto Clara’s thrashing arms and Arthur’s pale, terrified face.
From the corvette’s low-profile forward deck, a hatch slid back. Four figures in matte-black drysuits and closed-circuit rebreathers appeared, armed with suppressed sub-aquatic carbines. They weren't sailors; they were Syndicate sanitizers—the cleanup crew.
"They're deploying divers to recover the courier case and drown the witnesses," I hissed, swimming with long, silent strokes beneath the surface chop.
Reyes and I converged on the floating life vest just as the corvette throttled back its engines, reversing its waterjets with a churning hiss that sent plumes of white foam bubbling across the surface.
Clara was hyperventilating, her lips blue, her fingers clawing frantically at the foam vest. "Marcus! Marcus, help me! Don't let them kill me!"
Arthur was floating on his back, barely conscious, his eyes glazed with hypothermia. Yet his right hand remained frozen around the handle of the titanium case.
"Shut up and take a deep breath," I told her, grabbing her collar with one hand and hauling her behind a floating fragment of composite rig plating.
"Marcus, please, I didn't know—Dad told me the Tahoe deeds were legitimate! He said you were dead in the Pacific!" she sobbed, teeth chattering violently.
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"Save your lies for the tribunal, Clara," I growled, looking over the edge of the debris. "Take a breath. Now."
The water erupted ten yards away as the first Syndicate diver surfaced, the barrel of his underwater assault weapon rising directly toward Clara’s chest.
