Chapter 161 - The Admiral’s Gambir
"Uncle Victor," I said, speaking clearly toward the omnidirectional microphone mounted above the elevator door. My finger rested lightly alongside the trigger guard of my carbine. "Call off the countdown. Arthur is in federal custody with a crushed leg. Clara is facing life without parole in a federal penitentiary. The Leviathan is lying at the bottom of Lake Tahoe in pieces. Your network is dead."
A cold, dry chuckle crackled through the speaker.
"You think this was about Arthur's pathetic real estate delusions? Or Clara's pitiful little offshore boutique accounts?" Victor asked, his voice dripping with aristocratic derision. "Arthur was a weak, greedy fool who couldn't see past the marble countertops of that house you paid for. And Clara was an amateur playing with adult money."
"You used them," I said. "You let them take the fall while you used the deed to tap into the subterranean bedrock array."
"I used them because they were predictable, Marcus," Victor replied. "Arthur wanted to feel like a patriarch. Clara wanted to feel like an heiress. I gave them a four-million-dollar toy to play with so they would draw the eyes of the local courts, the state probate, and your JAG investigators away from Cape Blanco. While you were spending eleven thousand dollars a month keeping their pathetic lives afloat, and while you were fighting for your life in Lake Tahoe, I was completing the synchronization of the five ocean-floor drilling platforms."
"You're a traitor to your uniform, Victor," Bennett spat at the speaker. "You took the oath as an officer of the United States Navy!"
"The United States Navy is an antique museum piece running patrols for politicians who sell our secrets to the highest bidder!" Victor’s voice hardened into absolute, icy conviction. "When I trigger the Cascadia slip, thirty percent of the western energy infrastructure will collapse. The federal government will fall to its knees. The reconstruction contracts, the strategic minerals released by the seabed rupture, the new maritime routes—they will be owned by the men who control the keys. Not the politicians. Us."
`COUNTDOWN: 00:09:12... 00:09:11...`
The elevator chime rang with a crisp, polite *DING*.
The heavy brass-and-steel doors of the central elevator slid slowly open.
Inside, there was no strike team. No mercenaries.
Sitting on a single, velvet-cushioned wooden chair inside the elevator was a pristine, lacquered cherrywood box—the exact size and design of the presentation case that held my grandfather’s World War II naval dress sword, a family heirloom that Arthur had claimed was lost in a storage locker foreclosure three years ago.
Lying on top of the cherrywood box was a single, laminated document:
`DEED OF COMPLETE RESTITUTION AND ASSIGNMENT.`
`PROPERTY: WHISPERING PINES ESTATE, LAKE TAHOE, CA.`
`BENEFICIARY: COMMANDER MARCUS VANCE.`
`CONSIDERATION: $110,000,000 STRATEGIC BOND ALLOCATION.`
And beside the deed sat a military-grade detonator switch, wired directly to a digital frequency counter that was flashing in perfect synchronization with the Cascadia launch clock.
The intercom clicked again.
"You have a choice, Marcus," Victor said softly, his voice intimate, like a father offering an inheritance to his favorite son. "Step into that elevator, press the button for the drilling deck, and join me. The deed to Whispering Pines is signed in blood and sovereign bond notes. One hundred and ten million dollars—one thousand times what you bled for supporting that worthless family. You take command of the Pacific Rim after the rupture. You become what our bloodline was always meant to be."
"And if I refuse?" I asked, my voice flat.
"If you refuse... look up."
Bennett and I snapped our weapons upward.
Mounted in the ceiling directly above the elevator shaft was not a camera—it was an M18A1 Claymore directional antipersonnel mine, its olive-drab plastic curved casing pointed directly down into the vestibule, wired to a pressure sensor beneath the nonskid deckplates where Bennett and I were standing.
`COUNTDOWN: 00:06:00.`
Through the reinforced observation glass at the end of the hall, out over the raging, hundred-foot waves of the midnight Pacific, a sudden, blinding flash of blue-white light erupted from the sea floor five miles off the rig's starboard beam.
The first oceanic test charge had detonated.
The entire 30,000-ton steel platform swayed violently to the left, the deafening groaning of four-inch steel pilings screaming through the floorboards.
A massive, subsea acoustic roar—the sound of the earth itself tearing along an eight-hundred-mile fracture line—echoed up through the very steel beneath our boots.
May you like
The Cascadia fault had begun to slip.
And behind us, the heavy hydraulic blast door that had locked Bennett and me into the elevator vestibule suddenly hissed... and began to unlock from the outside.
