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 unstrapped myself from the pilot’s seat, ignoring the sharp pain flaring along my cracked ribs. I reached into the weapon locker beside the control station and pulled down a specialized underwater carbine—an APS amphibious rifle loaded with steel-dart flechettes designed to fire through both pressurized air and water.

Above me, the exterior hatch groaned under the extreme thermal pressure of the cutting tape. Sizzling drops of liquid metal began to drip down through the inner gasket, sizzling against the steel ladder below.

"Depressurizing conning tower," I ordered the computer.

"Warning: Lieutenant Vance, depressurization will flood the access tunnel," the computer replied.

"Do it."

I slammed the environmental override. The pressure valve in the conning tower vented instantly, creating an explosive vacuum differential between the sub's hull and the hostile docking collar.

The cutting tape failed prematurely. The immense pressure of Lake Tahoe at 1,500 feet—over six hundred pounds per square inch—did the work for me. The hostile collar buckled inward with a terrifying shriek of collapsing steel, crushing two of the armored divers instantly against the outer hull.

The upper hatch tore open under the violence of the collapse, and a roaring torrent of black, freezing water poured down into the access shaft.

I raised the APS rifle and aimed directly into the flooding cataract.

The lead diver tumbled down through the breached hatch, his heavy atmospheric suit caught in the raging current, his mechanical manipulator arms clawing wildly at the ladder rungs. As his visor cleared the spray, I fired three solid steel flechettes straight through his acrylic faceplate. The pressurized glass shattered, and the water pressure instantly crushed his chest cavity into silence.

The fourth diver managed to sever his umbilical cord and kick away into the pitch-black water of the lake, his silhouette vanishing into the silt cloud.

I lunged forward, fighting the raging inflow of freezing water, and slammed the heavy secondary blast door shut beneath the access shaft, spinning the manual dogging wheel until the seals clicked into place.