Chapter 69 - The Abyss Awakens
The revelation hit me like a physical blow. The *Dauntless*—my crew, my officers, the men and women who had stood by me when my family tried to tear me down—were now hostages under Vance's boot.
And Vance was going to use my own flagship to destroy the evidence of his thirty-year crime spree, cementing my legacy as a traitor while he walked away hailed as the heroic Admiral who neutralized a rogue captain.
"Jackson, tie him to the railing," I ordered, turning back toward the command deck.
"Captain, what's the plan?" Jackson asked, his face smeared with grease and sweat as he secured Ross with heavy-duty zip ties. "The *Dauntless* has forty-eight Tomahawk cruise missiles and full anti-submarine warfare suites. We can't out-shoot her, not with our damaged reactor."
"We aren't going to out-shoot her," I said, my voice ice-cold. "We're going to surface directly underneath her keel."
I hurried back to the helm, stepping over the shattered glass and debris. I pulled the master power switch, overriding the safety interlocks on the *Leviathan's* secondary emergency ballast blowers. High-pressure air blasted through the tanks with an ear-splitting roar, forcing thousands of gallons of seawater out through the belly vents.
The massive rogue submarine shuddered, breaking free from the silt of the Devil’s Trench. Like a wounded leviathan rising from the depths of hell, we began an uncontrolled, high-speed ascent directly toward the surface.
Two thousand feet.
Fifteen hundred feet.
Eight hundred feet.
On the tactical acoustic display, the massive signature of the USS *Dauntless* sat anchored directly above us, her phased-array radar sweeping the horizon, completely unaware of the ghost rising from the abyss below her.
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"Brace for emergency surfacing!" I screamed, pulling the manual depth planes hard up.
The *Leviathan* broke the surface of the North Atlantic like a breaching whale. Millions of gallons of white foam and saltwater cascaded off our black titanium hull under the moonlight. The concussive impact threw our bow upward, coming to rest a mere forty yards off the starboard side of the *Dauntless*, our jagged, battle-scarred conning tower towering over the waves like an obsidian monument.
