Chapter 156 - The Surface Rendezvous
Two Navy divers in black drysuits and closed-circuit rebreathers materialized out of the emerald gloom.
They moved with the swift, effortless grace of predatory creatures born in the deep. Their hands, clad in thick neoprene, locked onto Arthur’s floating harness first, instantly arresting his uncontrolled ascent before his lungs could rupture from rapid decompression.
The second diver swam directly toward Clara and me.
Through the clear faceplate of his Draeger rebreather, I recognized the steely, familiar eyes of Master Chief Paul Bennett—my lead petty officer from Special Boat Team Twelve.
Bennett didn't waste a second on sentiment. His gloved hand caught Clara by her life vest, smoothly slipping an auxiliary octopus regulator into her mouth while his other hand secured a heavy carbine lanyard around my harness.
He gave me the combat diver hand signal: thumb up, two fingers tapping his wrist.
*Ascent controlled. Decompression stop at twenty feet.*
For three agonizing minutes, we hovered twenty feet beneath the glittering ceiling of Lake Tahoe, suspended in the emerald light while our bodies off-gassed the microscopic nitrogen bubbles threatening to shred our circulatory systems. Clara was shaking uncontrollably, her skin a mottled, sickly blue, her teeth chattering so hard the regulator was vibrating in her lips.
Arthur hung limp between two SEAL divers, his yellow hood bobbing lifelessly.
Finally, Bennett checked his digital depth gauge, looked at me, and pointed upward with a sharp jab of his thumb.
We kicked to the surface.
Our heads broke through the surface of Lake Tahoe into a blinding assault of sensory reality.
*Gasp.*
The air was bitterly cold, clean, sharp with the scent of mountain pine and high-altitude snow—a stark, shocking contrast to the stagnant, chemical-laden air of the sinking submarine.
The roar of rotors was deafening.
Hovering barely fifty feet above the water, its twin turboshaft engines beating the surface of the lake into a blinding cloud of white spray, was an MH-60S Seahawk helicopter bearing the insignia of Naval Special Warfare.
Ringing the perimeter of Emerald Bay were four 33-foot Special Operations Craft-Riverine (SOC-R) gunboats, their mounted .50-caliber machine guns and Mark-19 grenade launchers trained in a lethal, unbroken cordon around the bay. Tactical searchlights cut through the morning haze, their brilliant beams pinning us in the water like targets on a firing range.
On the shoreline, the tragedy of Whispering Pines was fully exposed to the midday sun.
The granite cliffside beneath my former $4 million villa had suffered a catastrophic structural collapse. A massive scar of raw earth and shattered pine trees marked where the submarine pen's subterranean blast doors had blown outward. Half of the cantilevered glass living room—the room where Arthur and Clara had toasted their stolen empire with champagne just forty-eight hours ago—hung precariously over the abyss, supported by nothing more than twisted steel rebar.
On the private beach below, a dozen armed federal agents in tactical gear, FBI HRT patches glaring in yellow against their black vests, had already secured the perimeter.
"Stand by for hoist!" Bennett roared through the rotor wash, clipping a heavy titanium carabiner into Clara's harness.
A steel cable descended from the hovering Seahawk.
Clara shrieked as the winch engaged, hauling her out of the freezing water like a soaked, thrashing animal. Her sodden designer clothes clung to her skeletal frame, her hair plastered to her skull, weeping and howling in pure sensory shock as she was pulled up into the open bay of the warship.
Arthur was next. Two rescue swimmers secured him into a rigid Stokes litter basket. As the winch lifted him, his head lolled to the side, his blood-caked face illuminated by the searchlights of the gunboats.
Then the cable came back down for me.
I clipped in.
The high-tensile steel cable went taut, pulling me clear of the freezing lake. As I swung through the spray, rising into the sky above Emerald Bay, I looked down at the dark, deep water.
A hundred feet down, a wide, boiling ring of white bubbles and shimmering diesel oil marked the final resting place of the Leviathan. The doomsday platform that Arthur had tried to claim as his personal real estate portfolio had become an iron grave at the bottom of the trench.
A pair of strong hands grabbed my combat harness, hauling me over the helicopter’s deck lip and onto the nonskid floor.
I hit the aluminum deck, rolling onto my back, panting hard, the freezing air burning my battered lungs.
A pair of polished black tactical boots stepped into my field of vision.
Standing over me, clad in a crisp Navy service uniform under an all-weather trench coat, holding a secure satellite tablet in his left hand, was Captain James Reynolds—Naval Legal Service Command, Office of the Judge Advocate General.
Standing beside him, wearing a heavy winter parka and holding a leather briefcase, was Jonathan Vance—my private attorney.
"Welcome back to the surface, Commander," Reynolds said, his voice cutting through the roar of the engines. "We received the telemetry from your abort transmission. The Pentagon has stood down the strategic alert."
Jonathan knelt down beside me, snapping open his briefcase and pulling out a heavy, notarized stack of legal documents stamped with the seal of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California.
"I told you I'd file the emergency injunction before breakfast, Marcus," Jonathan said, a grim, satisfied smirk playing at the corners of his mouth. "Arthur and Clara didn't just commit grand larceny and deed fraud. They walked straight into Title 18, Section 2381 of the United States Code."
May you like
"Treason," I rasped, sitting up against the helicopter bulkhead.
"Treason," Reynolds confirmed, turning his cold gaze toward the corner of the cabin where Clara was huddled on the floor, shivering beneath a wool blanket, surrounded by two heavily armed master-at-arms. "And in the United States military, we don't negotiate settlements with domestic terrorists."
