Chapter 130 - The Scuttling Protocol
The boarding party of SEALs from the *USS Hampton* swept through the lower decks thirty minutes later, their weapon-mounted lights cutting through the lingering smoke like laser beams.
They took Clara into custody without a word, wrapping her in an emergency thermal blanket and zip-tying her ankles before leading her up toward the extraction lock. She didn't look back at me. She walked with her head down, her bare feet dragging through the pooled saltwater, completely broken.
Reyes was immediately evaluated by a Navy corpsman, who fitted him with an oxygen mask and hooked up an IV of saline to counteract the chemical smoke inhalation.
"You're a stubborn son of a bitch, Marcus," Reyes murmured through the plastic mask, offering a bloody fist for a bump as they hoisted him into a rescue harness.
"Takes one to know one, Lieutenant," I said, tapping my knuckles against his. "I'll see you at Naval Station Everett."
"You're not coming up with the first lift?"
"I have to oversee the scuttle charges," I said, nodding toward the engineering team from the *Hampton* that was already rigging the dreadnought’s primary sea cocks with high-yield thermite cutters. "The *Leviathan* can never be salvaged. It belongs at the bottom of the trench."
For the next two hours, under the supervision of Navy demolition experts, we systematically placed explosive charges along the keel, the torpedo launch bays, and the computational core banks. Every byte of Tartarus's stolen military research, every blueprint of the tectonic resonance weapon, and every trace of the Vance Family Syndicate's treasonous technology was wired to disintegrate beneath ten thousand degrees of chemical fire.
When the final timer was set to twenty minutes, I took the master quantum key—the drive that held the cryptographic proof of everything Arthur and Clara had done—and sealed it inside an evidence lockbox bound for the Department of Justice.
Then, I rode the crane hoist out through the breached upper hangar deck, emerging into the cold, clean air of the Pacific dawn.
The storm had broken.
The raging gale had subsided into a steady, gray swell. The morning sun was just beginning to pierce through the heavy Pacific cloud cover, casting beams of golden light across the endless expanse of gray water.
Surrounding the dying hulk of the *Leviathan* was an armada of American naval power. The guided-missile destroyer *USS Dewey* sat three miles off our port bow, its gray silhouette sharp against the horizon. Two MH-60R Seahawk helicopters circled lazily overhead, their rotors thumping rhythmically through the crisp morning salt air. And five hundred yards to our starboard, the black, sleek sail of the fast-attack submarine *USS Hampton* cut through the whitecaps, having surfaced to oversee the final destruction of Tartarus’s flagship.
I stepped off the hoist onto the deck of the Navy extraction cutter.
Behind us, a mile out across the water, the charges on the *Leviathan* detonated.
There were no massive fireballs on the surface. Only a series of deep, subterranean thuds that shook the water beneath our hull. The titanium dreadnought groaned for the last time, its vents spewing colossal plumes of white steam and sea foam as thousands of tons of Pacific water rushed into its shattered compartments.
Slowly, gracefully, the black monster slid backward into the sea, descending through the gray surface until it vanished completely into the bottomless dark of the Mendocino Trench.
It was over.
May you like
Twelve years of war. Three years of lies. One hundred and ten thousand dollars stolen.
And a four-million-dollar sanctuary in the pines reclaimed from the ashes.
