It can’t be just a coincidence that the drone landed where it did. Maybe the entity in the Gulf knows the marker is there and doesn’t want us to find it. All I do know is that the enemy vessel will rise to meet the winter solstice. When the entity within realizes its drones have not detonated, it will go after Guardian’s array, attempting to destroy it.

I cannot allow that to happen.

I’m sorry for running out on you like this. Last night was the greatest night of my life. I don’t want it to be our last. I love you, I always will …

—Mick

She stares at the letter. “This … this isn’t fair. Does he expect me to just wait here?” Dominique chases after the President. “I need to get to Chichén Itza—”

“Sir, something’s happening out there.” A crowd gathers around the UAV monitors.

Dominique grabs Chaney’s arm. “Take me to him. You owe me that.”

“Dominique, he specifically said no. He made me promise—”

“He needs me. He needs my help—”

“Mr.President, we’re recording a seismic event,” a technician reports, “7.5 on the Richter scale and still rising—”

Chaney places a hand on Dominique’s shoulder. “Listen to me. One way or another, we’re going to destroy whatever’s in that vessel, do you understand? Mick’s going to be fine.”

“Sir, the Scranton is hailing us.”

Aboard the USS Scranton

Commander Bo Dennis raises his voice above the thunderous rumble of the undersea earthquake. “Admiral, the entire seafloor’s breaking up. Electromagnetic interference is increasing—”

A sonar technician presses the headphones to his ears. “Skipper, something’s rising from that hole, something huge!”

An immense blast of antigravity pulses outward from beneath the remains of the iridium object, the invisible wave repelling the mass away from its sixty-five-million-year-old resting place, punching it upward through a mile of fragmented limestone. Like a monstrous cannonball, the titanic mass of iridium, more than a mile in diameter, ascends straight up through a billion tons of debris, the decimated seafloor crumbling within the vacuum of the rising colossus’s wake. The mammoth upheaval decimates the surrounding seafloor, sending seismic ripples racing across the entire semienclosed basin of the Gulf of Mexico, as the Campeche shelf and surrounding seafloor suffer the equivalent of a 9.2 magnitude earthquake.

The expulsion of the alien vessel gives birth to a series of deadly tsunamis, the killer waves racing away from the epicenter toward the pristine beaches of the Gulf like a ring of death.

“Skipper, the alien object has now cleared the seafloor—”

“Firing solutions plotted, sir, she’s too big to miss.”

Commander Dennis holds on as the sub rolls hard to port. “Helm, keep us clear of the debris field. Chief, firing point procedures, make tubes one and two ready in all respects.”

“Aye, sir. Tubes one and two ready.”

“Match sonar bearings. Shoot tubes one and two.”