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.

"Warning: impact in twenty-two seconds."

I slammed the throttle to the firewall. The electric magnetic drive screamed, hurling me back against the cushions of the pilot’s chair as the stealth sub surged through the freezing trench at an impossible thirty-eight knots. Silt and ancient underwater debris whipped past the bow cameras in a blinding blur.

The lakebed of Tahoe was a treacherous maze of collapsed granite boulders and vertical underwater cliffs formed by ancient glacial rifts. I knew the bathymetry of this lake better than any surface dweller; my mother had forced me to memorize its contours every summer of my childhood.

"Target lock acquired by incoming weapon," the computer warned. "Distance: eight hundred yards."

I cut the main drives, threw the port thrusters into full reverse, and pulled the flight stick hard toward my chest. The submarine swung violently around on its axis, skimming within thirty feet of a sheer underwater granite wall known as the North Tahoe Shelf.

The modified torpedo came screaming out of the darkness, its homing sonar pinging with frantic, deafening frequency.

Instead of trying to outrun a weapon that traveled twice my top speed, I leveled the bow directly at a deep, narrow fissure in the granite face—a crevasse barely twelve feet wide.

"Proximity alert! Ground collision imminent!" the proximity alarms screamed.

At the absolute last second, five yards from the rock face, I fired the high-pressure emergency ballast purge on the starboard side. The sudden burst of air kicked the tail of the sub violently sideways.

The torpedo, tracking the massive acoustic heat signature of my main drive, missed my stern by less than three feet. It shot past the hull and drove straight into the narrow granite crevasse.