Chapter 16 - The Graveyard of Ships
The frigid Atlantic water swallowed them instantly, pulling them down into darkness. The shock of the cold nearly ripped the air from Daniel's lungs, but the iron will of a father kept his arms locked around his child.
Above them, debris burned on the churning surface, casting eerie crimson shadows down into the depths. Searchlights from Hayes’s cutter swept back and forth like predatory eyes across the waves.
Daniel kicked with all his strength, pulling them downward toward the skeletal shadow of a sunken iron freighter wedged between the reef walls thirty feet below.
He knew the wreck—the *SS Aurelia*, sunk during a hurricane in the 1970s. Its rusted hull formed underwater air pockets within the inverted engine compartments.
Lungs burning with searing agony, Daniel slipped through a fractured bulkhead into the submerged cargo hold. He surfaced inside a dark, foul-smelling air pocket beneath the overturned steel ceiling, coughing violently.
Lily gasped for air, coughing against his chest, but miraculously she was conscious.
"You were so brave, Lily," Daniel whispered, shuddering in the icy water, treading carefully to keep her head above the waterline. "You did so good."
"Daddy... I saw the light," she whispered, her tiny teeth chattering violently.
"That's just the searchlights, sweetie. They won't find us in here."
"No... not up there," Lily pointed down into the crystal-clear darkness below their dangling feet.
Daniel looked down through his dive mask.
Deep beneath the sunken freighter, embedded into the ocean trench, lay an unnatural, glowing grid of illuminated underwater tunnels. Massive pneumatic supply tubes connected a centralized underwater research sphere to an offshore oil drilling rig anchored far off the continental shelf.
Platform Tartarus wasn’t an oil platform. It was a submerged black laboratory.
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And right beneath the freighter's keel, an automated sub-aquatic docking hatch opened with a low, mechanical hum, sending a column of bubbles spiraling toward them.
***
