Chapter 2 - The Ghosts of the Deep.The scent of expensive champagne in the ballroom suddenly morphed into the phantom stench of burning diesel and ozone.
My mind violently pulled me back to that merciless night, three months ago, off the Spratly Islands.
The USS Artemis had been hunting a rogue freighter when the ambush hit us out of nowhere.
It wasn't a standard torpedo strike; it was a sabotage charge, planted deep within our engineering sector.
The explosion had ripped the ship’s lower intestines apart, plunging us into a chaotic darkness filled with screaming metal.
Water had rushed in like a ravenous beast, freezing and unforgiving.
I remembered the faces of the young sailors, terrified and looking to me for salvation as the water rose past our knees.
The main egress hatch had warped from the blast, its hydraulic servos completely melted into useless slag.
If that hatch remained sealed, twenty-three men and women would drown in the dark.
I had thrown my body against the wheel, my bare hands gripping metal that was rapidly heating from the fires below.
The skin on my palms had hissed and blistered, the smell of my own burning flesh filling my nostrils.
“Go!” I had screamed, my voice tearing my throat raw as I wedged my shoulder into the burning frame to keep it open.
One by one, they had slipped through the narrow gap, escaping the rising deluge.
When the final sailor made it through, the structural integrity of the corridor finally gave way.
The bulkhead had collapsed, pinning my left side and dragging me down into the freezing abyss.
I should have died in that mechanical tomb, miles beneath the surface of a contested ocean.
But a rescue diver had found me entangled in the wreckage, my heart barely beating, my body mangled.
I had spent two months in a classified military burn ward, enduring surgeries that tested the very limits of my sanity.
During that agonizing recovery, Naval Intelligence had brought me the debris fragments from the sabotage charge.
The serial numbers on the detonator components traced directly back to Vance Global Logistics.
My father’s company had supplied the weapon that nearly slaughtered my crew.
I blinked away the flashback, the warmth of the ballroom returning to my skin.
I looked at Arthur Vance, the man who had sold out his own country—and his own daughter—for a defense contract.
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He was staring at me like he was seeing a ghost.
I smiled, cold and devoid of mercy, knowing that I was exactly that.
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