Chapter 154 - The Lockout Chamber
Dragging my father's limp body through the ruined, tilted corridors of the Leviathan was like hauling a sack of wet cement through a collapsing mineshaft.
Every step through the flooded passageway was an agonizing trial. The water had reached mid-thigh, frigid and thick with fuel oil, hydraulic fluid, and floating insulation panels. The hull shuddered continuously as the external pressure of Lake Tahoe crushed the unpressurized outer ballast compartments. The sound of buckling bulkheads resonated like distant artillery fire inside a tomb.
Clara splashed behind me, sobbing hysterically, holding her arms above the water to protect her diamond-encrusted watch—a sickening reflex of vanity that even the imminent threat of drowning couldn't purge from her soul.
"Leave him, Marcus!" she screamed, pointing at our father as I hauled him up the three steps leading into the circular titanium lockout chamber. "He tried to shoot you! He took everything from you! Why are you carrying him?!"
"Because a firing squad or a federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, is waiting for him," I said between heavy breaths, heaving Arthur's unconscious body onto the steel grated bench inside the tiny chamber. "Drowning in forty-degree lake water without facing a federal judge is too easy a death for Arthur Vance."
I turned, grabbed Clara by the collar of her jacket, and threw her inside after him. She crashed onto the grate, gasping as the freezing water splashed over her face.
I stepped inside the lockout chamber and slammed the heavy circular hatch shut.
I spun the locking wheel with frantic, practiced precision. The six heavy steel lugs engaged with a heavy, thudding series of mechanical clangs.
`SELF-DESTRUCT IN: 00:18... 00:17...`
The automated voice was faint now, muffled through the five-inch-thick steel bulkhead, but the timer was running in my head with absolute clarity.
The lockout chamber was barely six feet in diameter, designed for a two-man Navy SEAL combat swimmer team to exit a submerged submarine while at depth. It was never intended to evacuate three people, one of whom was a six-foot-two unconscious man with a compound fracture, and another who was hyperventilating in sheer terror.
Mounted to the wall were two emergency escape hoods—Steinke hoods—dated from the late 1980s. Primitive, yellow canvas survival gear designed to provide just enough buoyant lift and trapped air to get a submariner to the surface from moderate depths before pulmonary embolism tore their lungs apart.
Two hoods. Three people.
Clara saw them immediately. Her eyes locked onto the yellow canisters like a starving animal spotting raw meat.
She lunged for them.
Before her fingers could touch the nylon straps, I grabbed her wrist, twisting it inward until she cried out in pain and dropped to her knees on the metal grating.
"Don't touch them," I said, my voice dead and cold.
"Marcus! There's only two!" she screamed, clawing at my forearm with her free hand. "There's only two hoods! Look at him—he’s half-dead anyway! Give one to me! You're a Navy diver! You have combat training! You can swim up without one!"
"A free ascent from two hundred feet in forty-degree freshwater without thermal gear?" I laughed, a bitter, vicious sound that echoed in the tiny steel drum. "My lungs would rupture at seventy feet, and hypothermia would stop my heart before I saw daylight. You really don't care who dies, do you? As long as Clara Vance walks away with the deeds."
"Please!" she begged, tears streaming down her soot-streaked cheeks. "I'm your sister! Blood has to mean something!"
"Blood meant eleven thousand dollars a month when I was in the Persian Gulf sending wires to keep your boutique open," I said, leaning down into her face. "Blood meant signing a fraudulent deed of trust while I was in the Pacific. Blood meant standing on my cedar deck drinking Dom Pérignon while the movers threw my deployment footlockers into the mud."
I released her wrist, pulled down the first yellow hood, and shook the canvas open.
I knelt down beside Arthur.
My father groaned, his eyelids fluttering open. He looked up, his gaze unfocused, drifting across the dim red light of the emergency pod until his eyes settled on my face.
"Marcus...?" he rasped, his voice bubbling with fluid. "The... the trust... my villa..."
"Your villa is gone, Arthur," I said quietly, slipping the rubber neck seal over his head and pulling the hood down over his blood-crusted hair. "Whispering Pines is a crime scene crawling with federal agents, Homeland Security, and the United States Navy. You aren't going to a country club. You're going to a cell."
I reached for the compressed air valve on his hood's miniature charging bottle and cracked it open. The small bladder hissed, inflating the yellow canvas around his neck and chest with breathable air.
`SELF-DESTRUCT IN: 00:05... 00:04...`
"Marcus!" Clara shrieked in absolute hysteria, realizing I was about to flood the chamber. "The other hood! Give me the other hood!"
I picked up the second hood.
I looked Clara dead in the eyes.
Then I cut the canvas neck seal with my combat dive knife, slicing it clean down the middle, rendering it completely incapable of holding pressure.
Clara gasped, her jaw dropping in paralyzed disbelief as the shredded rubber dangled from my blade.
"You're a monster..." she whispered, her voice trembling in terror.
"No," I replied, grabbing her by the back of the neck and dragging her toward the secondary air valve manifold on the bulkhead wall. "I'm a survivor. You're going to share my regulator, breath for breath, on a buddy-breathing ascent through two hundred feet of freezing darkness. If you panic, if you try to hold your breath and blow your lungs, or if you try to rip the mouthpiece from my teeth, I will break your jaw and let you sink to the bottom. Nod if you understand."
Clara stared at me, the arrogance and entitlement of thirty years evaporating into pure, primitive animal fear.
She nodded violently.
`00:01...`
May you like
`00:00.`
Deep within the bowels of the Leviathan, the secondary scuttling charges detonated.
