Chapter 82 - Ghost Wake
The dark was absolute. The cold was a physical fist.
The pressure tube slammed me from side to side like a ragdoll. Seawater tore my tactical goggles from my helmet and forced its way into my sinuses, but my fingers remained clamped around the release lanyard of my emergency survival vest.
A sudden violent drop. The metallic walls disappeared, replaced by the crushing, boundless black of the open Atlantic.
Above me, the leviathan was dying. The freighter’s keel had cracked clean in half. Thousands of tons of steel were folding in on themselves like an accordion, releasing giant, luminous bubbles of trapped air and burning fuel that boiled toward the surface. The underwater pressure wave hit me a second later—a deep, thrumming shockwave that nearly knocked the wind from my lungs.
I kicked violently, orienting myself toward the faint, churning glow of the surface fire, and pulled the CO2 toggle on my vest.
The twin bladders inflated instantly, rocketing me upward through the freezing turbulence.
I broke the surface gasping, vomiting brine and fuel oil, coughing until my ribs burned. All around me, the sea was an inferno of floating diesel slick. Twenty yards away, Jake was thrashing wildly, screaming into the night spray as he choked on seawater.
"Elena! Help me! I can't swim in this!" he sobbed, his head slipping under the dark chop before he resurfaced, flailing uselessly.
I swam to him in strong, disciplined strokes, grabbed the back of his collar, and flipped him onto his back. "Stop fighting the water! Float! Float or I’ll let you sink!"
He went rigid, trembling uncontrollably, his teeth chattering with such force I could hear them over the hiss of burning wreckage.
Across the water, the remains of the ship slid beneath the waves with a long, hollow death rattle. Then, nothing was left but drifting embers, the stink of burned petroleum, and the vast, indifferent darkness of the ocean.
"She tried to kill us," Jake whispered, his voice cracking into a high, pathetic register. "She... Mom was watching us die on a screen. She didn't even blink, Elena. She had a cup of tea."
"Save your breath," I muttered, treading water while reaching into the sealed waterproof pouch on my shoulder harness. I pulled out my high-frequency emergency beacon and twisted the activation collar. A tiny strobe light began to pulse—invisible to the naked eye, but screaming across infrared spectrums.
Two minutes passed in silence. The cold was beginning to bite into my extremities, turning my fingers numb and sluggish.
Then, from the low cloud deck to the east, came the rhythmic, unmistakable thrum of twin tilt-rotors chopping through heavy sea air.
A dark silhouette dropped out of the overcast, running completely dark without navigation lights. Its twin engine nacelles rotated upward as it flared over the water, generating a hurricane of sea spray that flattened the waves around us.
*V-22 Osprey. Call sign Valkyrie-One.*
A searchlight snapped on, pinning us in a circle of blinding white brilliance. The side hatch slid open, and two figures in black tactical drysuits clipped into hoist cables dropped toward the water.
Within ninety seconds, the winch cables hauled us up through the hurricane wash and onto the non-skid deck of the cabin.
Major Marcus Vance was waiting at the crew chief's station, an emergency wool blanket in his hands and a secure satellite tablet strapped to his forearm. He looked at me, then down at the shivering, drenched wreck of Jake Carter curled on the deck plates.
"Colonel," Vance shouted over the roar of the engines, tossing the blanket over my shoulders. "We picked up the telemetry from your beacon sixty seconds after the scuttle blast. We thought you were gone."
"I don't die that easily," I said, wiping salt from my eyes. "Where is she, Marcus?"
Vance’s jaw tightened. He turned the tablet toward me. "The feed you intercepted didn't originate from overseas. It was bounced through three dummy satellite relays in Reykjavik, but the source was domestic."
May you like
He tapped the glass. A set of blinking coordinates resolved over the map of the eastern United States.
"She’s in Virginia," Vance said. "The Carter family’s old colonial estate near Shenandoah. And she didn't just take bearer bonds from the Reserve, Elena. She took the master recovery cipher for the federal banking exchange."
