Page 74 of All The Way Under
“Oh, no pressure, then.” Another bead of sweat rolls down my face. “Crank the AC, would you?”
Nolan and Catherine are out on the water. I could hear them starting the boat when I walked through the kitchen. Brody must have told him we needed the house alone. Little did they know it wasn’t for anything fun.
Brody doesn’t reply. He does as I ask, and I bury my whole brain into this dilemma. I know what I need to do to get it working. It’s just a matter of time and a lot of testing. Instead ofbeing a little side project to distract me, this will have to be more important.
He sets a glass of water down on the coffee table in front of me. “Unless you’d rather have beer. Or tea.”
I shake my head. “Brody,” I say, looking up, meeting his gaze. “I know the Navy already has tech like this. What exactly do you need me to tweak?”
He pauses, searching for words.
“Under the radar,” he says. “We need to be all the way under.”
I know what I’ll call, it at the very least.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
brody
The Atlantic isa graveyard at night. Cold. Dark. Quiet. Especially because the waters surrounding the SEAL base are protected by guards to keep civilians out of our water and off our training beach.
Our Zodiac boats skim just inches above its surface, slicing through the chop like a whisper. The only light comes from the soft, purple—yes, purple—glow of the navigation system blinking at my knee. Four SEALs. Two Zodiacs. No plan B. No screw-ups. We have one chance to do this our way before the big Navy cascades in and fucks this up, bringing more attention to Saylor and me.
This is personal in many different ways for me.
ALL THE WAY UNDER IS ACTIVE.
I have stared at these words more times than I could count.
The system is almost completely Saylor’s brainchild—quantum satellite triangulation fused with inertial AI nav that can hold position in a hurricane and fool every eye in the sky. It doesn’t just tell us where we are, it tells us wheretheythinkwe are. Phantom cloak mode makes our boat appear as a wandering fishing trawler two miles northeast of our actual location.
I love this system so much that I helped Saylor as much as I could with testing, trials, and backend engineering. I was the main person spearheading the deal to sell ATWU to Naval Special Warfare. They wanted it straight away, of course, because nothing like it exists in the world.
Saylor made her own millions on the deal, so it was easy to tell her mother to beat sand with regard to returning to college. Saylor made this possible, and my name as a co-creator probably wasn’t earned, but I still have pride in the part I played in making this a reality together. I hate that she is on land, pacing around a smelly operations van, waiting for a voice in her earpiece that tells her I’m not dead. And that her firstborn works as it is supposed to.
Mark sits beside me, chewing on a piece of gum like it owes him fucking money. “You hear that?”
I narrow my eyes to hear better. I hate that it’s my thing.
“Nothing,” I reply, speaking over the chop.
“Precisely.” He grins, adjusting his rifle. “Not even greedy beak bastards. They know something’s about to go sideways. The gulls are always honking.”
Mark is second-in-command on this operation for a reason. Smart in more than one way. Steady in all the ways. He’s also funny when I forget how to be, which is often. He’s like a Nolan while I’m at work. If something bad happens, Mark will be the guy dragging my ass out.
The other Zodiac, fifty meters off our starboard, holds Reyes and Dalton, two SEALs I trust with my life and no one else’s. We are operating tonight as a four-man team for one simple reason: to keep the noise down. Fewer people die if this mission goes bad.
We are hunting pirates. Ravelo and the new crew he put together when we decimated the others—his first crew, his family.
I explained to my team that these are not the rum-swigging, AK-waving kind of pirates. These guys are smarter. Former contractors, warlords, opportunists, or so my research showed.
Ravelo and his crew hijacked two US Coast Guard interceptors and stole enough military-grade weapons to arm a small country. Just to show he could, and as a threat to the Wyndhams, he kidnapped a billionaire tech exec and his bodyguard. No ransom has been paid yet. We did get, addressed to me, a livestreamed proof-of-life video from what looks like a lobster trawler turned fortress. This is why it’s personal. Motherfucker.
We are here to end this charade before there’s a third act.
“Range?” I ask, squinting into the darkness.
Mark casts a glance at the nav screen. “Six hundred meters. They’re drifting off Deadman’s Elbow, just west of the inlet. Looks like three boats—main command vessel, center mass, two flankers. Same location as thirty minutes ago. Either they’re getting sloppy, or they think we’re too dumb to find them.”
