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. / Chapter 164 / 181

Chapter 164 - Blood Across the Moonpool

The reaction was instantaneous and cataclysmic.

The hydraulic guillotine valves deep in the moonpool snapped shut with fifty thousand pounds of pneumatic force, severing the heavy four-inch mud circulation lines. Deprived of backpressure, the raw, pressurized gas from the subsea drilling shaft surged upward like an erupting geyser.

A high-pitched, banshee scream tore through the doghouse as the primary rotary table began to spin out of control, throwing five-hundred-pound steel drill collars across the drilling floor like bowling pins.

"You scuttled the wellhead!" I yelled, lunging forward across the console.

Victor didn't flinch. From beneath the desk frame, he whipped an antique, customized Colt 1911—the ceremonial sidearm presented to him upon his promotion to Rear Admiral. He fired three rounds through the console glass, the heavy .45-caliber slugs punching through the instrument panels, showering us both in white-hot electrical sparks and screaming ricochets.

One of the rounds caught me along the ribs, grazing through the outer ballistic cordura of my vest, the burning friction searing flesh like a red-hot branding iron.

I didn't stop. The momentum of my forward charge carried me over the control bank. I slammed my shoulder directly into Victor’s chest, driving him through the shattered rear window of the doghouse out onto the narrow, suspended walkway that hung directly over the yawning mouth of the moonpool.

We hit the wet diamond grating together, our boots sliding across a film of hydraulic oil and sea spray. The storm hit us with full force—freezing horizontal rain, the deafening scream of the rig’s torn superstructure, and the violent rolling of the platform as the sea rose forty feet beneath our boots.

Victor’s ceremonial sidearm skittered across the wet metal, catching in the edge of the safety mesh above the churning foam.

Despite his sixty-four years, Victor fought with the savage, ruthless strength of a man who had trained generations of Navy divers. He threw a vicious, short-range elbow into my fractured ribs, driving the air from my lungs, then drove his thumbs toward my eyes with lethal, blinding intent.

I blocked his forearms with an outward cross-parry, twisted inside his guard, and drove a savage right cross flush into the side of his jaw. Bone crunched beneath my knuckles. Victor stumbled back against the outer handrail, spitting blood into the howling wind, but his face twisted into an expression of unhinged, feral triumph.

`COUNTDOWN: 00:01:59.`

"Look at it, Marcus!" he screamed, gesturing wildly at the black ocean below, where massive plumes of methane gas were bubbling to the surface, turning the dark water into a frothing, combustible cauldron. "The pressure is self-sustaining! The hydraulic shear didn't abort the detonation—it sealed the borehole! The acoustic trigger is already down at twelve thousand feet! You can't reach it! You can't stop it!"

"There’s an emergency scuttle charge on the gantry crane, Victor!" I roared over the gale, closing the distance between us, my tactical knife locked in a reverse grip. "If I drop the five-ton counterweight down the moonpool, it shears the telemetry cable before the final command fires!"

Victor’s eyes widened with genuine shock—not because my plan was impossible, but because he knew the engineering layout of the rig well enough to know it would work. But that shock instantly transformed into cold, sociopathic madness.

"You’d have to manually release the mechanical brake from the winch platform!" Victor snarled. "And the winch controls are right here!"

He lunged toward the manual hydraulic valve mounted on the railing beside him, pulling a steel pry bar from a wall mount to smash the release mechanism into an irreversible lock.

I moved with the predatory speed forged in a decade of deep-water combat. I closed the three yards between us, caught his arm mid-swing, and drove the butt of my knife directly into his radial nerve. The steel bar clattered against the diamond plate.

Victor spun, grabbing my tactical vest with both hands, using his entire body weight to drive me backward toward the open edge of the walkway. The handrail here had been sheared away by a flying drill collar moments earlier; behind my heels lay a three-hundred-foot vertical drop into the churning, gas-choked jaws of the Pacific moonpool.

We teetered on the precipice, the rig groaning under another catastrophic seismic pulse from the seabed. The whole platform lurched fifteen degrees to the port side.

"If I don't inherit this world, Marcus," Victor hissed into my ear, his breath smelling of scotch and bile, his fingers digging into my tactical harness with hydraulic force, "then nobody in this bloodline leaves this platform alive!"