Chapter 32 - The Severed Umbilical
"Dante!"
Claire Ellison did not scream as a panicked civilian; she shouted with the ferocious despair of an admiral watching her flagship sink with everything she loved locked inside its hull.
Around her, the cavern was tearing itself apart. Sterling’s scuttle charges, planted strategically along the foundation pylons of the underground facility, began their sequential detonation. Chunks of five-ton reinforced granite plummeted from the vaulted ceiling into the dry-dock basin, sending geysers of brackish water into the air.
"Admiral! We have to egress! The ocean is flooding the bay!" Lieutenant Vance, his tactical gear shredded and smoke pouring from his rifle's suppressor, grabbed Claire by the tactical vest to haul her back from the edge of the abyss.
"Get your hands off me, Vance!" Claire snarled, ripping herself free with trained lethality. She holstered her sidearm, unclipped her rebreather apparatus from her field pack, and strapped the full-face dive mask over her features. "DEVGRU Team Two, extract to the extraction coordinates via surface shaft B. That is a direct order!"
"What about you, ma'am?!"
"I’m going after my family."
Without hesitating, Claire turned and sprinted toward the secondary dry dock bay—a smaller, pressurized lock that held the facility’s deep-submergence infiltration craft: a black-hulled, titanium-hulled tactical submersible designated *Nautilus-4*.
Before she could hit the airlock cycling button, the water in the primary bay churned violently. A black-gloved hand clamped onto the edge of the grated catwalk.
Claire drew her weapon, barrel tracking down—and froze.
Dante pulled himself out of the foaming water with agonizing effort. His tailored clothes were shredded, his face bruised and pale from the freezing temperature of the deep trench water, but his dark eyes burned with an unrelenting, terrifying fire. In his left hand, clutched tightly against his chest, was an auxiliary tactical transceiver ripped from the severed umbilical.
He coughed up saltwater, rolling onto his back, his breath coming in ragged gasps. "Did... did you really think... a few thousand gallons of cold water... could kill me, Claire?"
Claire dropped to her knees beside him, her professional exterior cracking for half a second as her fingers gripped his soaked lapels, checking his pulse and his torn shoulder. "You're bleeding out, you arrogant bastard."
"I’ll bleed out when Sterling is dead and my son is back in my arms," Dante rasped, his teeth bared in a savage grin. He looked at the *Nautilus-4* sitting in the flooded launch tube thirty feet away. "Tell me that tin can has torpedoes."
"Better," Claire said, hauling him to his feet and throwing his uninjured arm over her shoulders. "It has a hull-breaching magnetic clamp and an atmospheric lock. We catch that submarine before it reaches three thousand meters, or Leo suffocates when Sterling scuttles it."
Behind them, an explosion ripped through the master control room. Sterling had fled, leaving behind a detonator that triggered the facility’s emergency sea-valves. Millions of gallons of Atlantic sea-water roared through the fractured blast doors, transforming the cavern into an inescapable whirlpool.
"Move!" Claire commanded.
They tumbled through the hatch of the *Nautilus-4* just as the catwalk collapsed into the depths. Claire slammed the pneumatic hatch shut, spun the dogging wheel until the seals hissed airtight, and threw herself into the pilot's seat.
Dante collapsed into the co-pilot’s harness, strapping himself in with one hand while using his teeth to tighten a combat tourniquet around his shredded shoulder.
"Sonar online," Claire announced, flipping the master power toggles. The twin turbines of the infiltration sub whined to life with high-frequency electricity. "I have the *Leviathan*'s acoustic signature. She’s descending fast down the San Lorenzo Trench. Heading two-seven-zero. Depth: six hundred meters and dropping."
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"Punch it," Dante growled, his gaze fixed on the sonar screen where a tiny green dot represented the ghost ship carrying their bloodline. "Hunt them down."
***
