Chapter 149 - The Breach of the Leviathan
I kicked open the armored door to the flight deck. The pilot turned in sheer panic, his hand reaching for his sidearm, but the cold muzzle of my rifle against the side of his helmet froze him in place.
"Set this bird down on the primary deck of *Leviathan-01*," I commanded, my voice cutting through the cockpit alarms. "Now."
"Commander, look at the lake!" the pilot stammered, his hands shaking violently on the flight controls. "There's no deck to land on! The ballast tanks are blowing!"
I looked through the curved cockpit windscreen, and my breath caught in my throat.
Below us, Lake Tahoe had become an oceanic maelstrom. The 600-foot stealth hull of *Leviathan-01* had fully breached the surface, parting the icy alpine waters like a surfacing continent. But it wasn't holding station.
Along its massive spinal superstructure, six heavy vertical launch silo hatches were sliding back with hydraulic groans that resonated across the entire Sierra Nevada basin. Steam hissed into the winter sky, illuminated by the flashing red strobes of automated launch sequences.
On the shoreline, Whispering Pines was disintegrating.
The entire luxury villa—the sprawling cedar decks, the four-million-dollar living room with its cathedral ceilings, the imported stone fireplaces where my family had gathered to toast my disenfranchisement—was collapsing into the churning abyss created by the submarine's massive displacement.
I saw Arthur on the shore, a tiny, pathetic figure in the snow, watching as the dream he had stolen slid inch by inch into the icy, bottomless waters of Tahoe. The estate was gone. The four million dollars had vanished into the mountain trench.
"Leviathan's automated defense radar has locked onto us!" the pilot screamed, as the cockpit instrument panel lit up with frantic missile warnings. "Surface-to-air close-in weapon systems are tracking! We're dead! We're dead!"
"Put her in an autorotation descent right over the dorsal hangar bay!" I ordered, grabbing the co-pilot's collective yoke. "Do it or I put a bullet in your head right now!"
The pilot slammed the collective down. The helicopter dropped like a stone through the freezing mist, plummeting toward the wet, obsidian metal deck of the rising leviathan.
Ten feet above the submarine's slick hull, the helicopter's tail rotor clipped the trailing edge of an open exhaust vent. The aircraft spun out of control in a sickening horizontal flat spin.
"Brace!" I yelled, diving back into the cargo bay.
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I grabbed Clara by the collar of her jacket, pinning her against the reinforced troop frame just as the helicopter slammed violently into the titanium deck of *Leviathan-01*, rolling onto its side in a screeching inferno of tearing metal, shattered glass, and flying rotor blades.
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