Chapter 46 - BLOOD IN THE SALT WATER
“Mom?” Ethan asked, his voice cracking as he saw the blood drain completely from Margaret’s face. “Mom, what does he mean? Dad’s submarine sank twenty years ago. The Navy found the wreckage off the shelf. We buried an empty casket.”
Margaret didn't answer immediately. Her fingers went to her neck, where an old silver chain held a tarnished brass key—the key Thomas had given her three days before his final classified deployment aboard the *USS Proteus*.
“They found the *hull* of the Proteus,” Margaret murmured, her voice barely louder than the dripping water in the tunnel. “They never recovered the black box. And the Navy classified the autopsy reports of the salvage team.”
“You knew?” Ethan yelled, rising to his feet, Noah clinging to his neck. “All these years, you knew Dad wasn't dead?”
“I didn't *know* anything, Ethan!” Margaret fired back, her composure cracking for a single, raw second before snapping back into diamond-hard resolve. “I suspected the military was running black-budget hydrophone research, but Thomas swore he was on standard patrol. If he survived... if he was part of what Apex built here...”
She stopped. A low, rhythmic mechanical thrum began to vibrate through the curved walls of the drainage pipe. It was not water. It was the cavitation of a multi-blade marine propeller idling just beyond the outflow pipe at the cliffside.
“They’re already at the exit,” Ethan whispered, stepping behind his mother.
“Stay behind the curve of the pipe,” Margaret ordered, drawing her weapon and checking the tunnel ahead with deliberate, sweeping motions. “If it’s Miller’s recovery team, they’ll use flashbangs first. Keep Noah’s eyes covered.”
They crept twenty yards down the slick brick incline until the tunnel opened into an ancient sea cave carved into the base of the coastal cliffs. Outside, the Atlantic was a tempest of roaring black waves and churning white spray, illuminated by the sweep of a violent offshore searchlight.
Moored against the rocky ledge inside the sea cave was a vessel that belonged to no official naval fleet.
It was a sixty-foot stealth submersible, painted in matte-absorbent black, with no registration numbers, no flags, and no markings. Its upper conning tower was open, venting warm diesel exhaust into the salt spray.
On the rock ledge beside the submersible stood three armed operators in black maritime tactical gear, their submachine guns raised, sweeping the mouth of the tunnel.
And standing between them, holding a handheld transceiver and staring directly into the dark opening where Margaret stood, was a man in his late sixties.
He had Ethan’s jawline. He had Margaret’s dark, calculating eyes.
“You took your time getting through the conduit, Maggie,” the man called out over the roar of the surf.
May you like
Thomas Miller. Her husband. The ghost who had been dead for two decades.
***
