Chapter 27 - Stalking the Sierra Shadow
The electric thrusters of the mini-sub whined softly as I backed the craft away from the private dock, submerging beneath the black surface of the lake.
Lake Tahoe at night, two hundred feet down, is an abyss of absolute emptiness. The water is crystalline, cold enough to paralyze a swimmer in minutes, and completely devoid of light. I cut the exterior halogen searchlights, relying entirely on the vessel’s passive obstacle-avoidance sonar. The green screen illuminated the jagged cliffs of the underwater granite shelf dropping away into the trench like the wall of a sunken mountain range.
Ahead, twelve hundred yards out, the silhouette of the *Avalon* appeared on the sonar screen.
It was a ninety-foot commercial research vessel, anchored over the drop-off where the lake plummeted to twelve hundred feet. Its deck lights cast a diffused, ghostly aura into the upper layers of the water, visible through the sub’s acrylic observation bubble as a faint blue haze.
I leveled the submersible off at eighty feet below the surface, creeping up beneath the research vessel’s stern.
A heavy steel winch cable hung down from the *Avalon*'s A-frame crane, disappearing into the black depths beneath. They were actively hauling something up from the lake floor—a large, containerized recovery pod designed to retrieve their illegal prospecting instruments and the underwater taps they had spliced into Deep Pine.
If they completed the retrieval and severed the cables, the physical evidence of their intrusion into naval infrastructure would vanish into the silt, leaving behind only circumstantial data logs that high-priced corporate defense lawyers could tie up in court for decades.
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I brought the submersible within ten yards of the *Avalon*’s keel, matching its drift against the gentle current. Through the forward cameras, I spotted the primary hydraulic winches securing the recovery cradle.
Reaching for the sub’s pneumatic tool arm, I manipulated the joystick on the central console. The robotic claw extended into the freezing water, its tungsten cutting torch sparking to life with a brilliant, white-hot burst of underwater plasma.
