My mother told security I wasn’t important enough to sit near the front at my brother’s Navyyyy

At 02:40 on a moonless Tuesday morning, six months into the Western Pacific deployment, the Combat Information Center of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln was bathed in the dim, electric blue glow of thirty tactical radar consoles.

The room smelled of chilled electronics, ozone, and cold navy coffee.

I stood at the central multi-function display table, wearing my green naval flight suit with my rank insignia pinned to the soft collar, a headset resting over my left ear.

Beside me stood Rear Admiral James Vance and the Carrier Air Wing Commander, their eyes fixed on a high-definition thermal satellite feed displaying a remote, rocky cove along the northern coast of Batan Island.

"Telemetry is confirmed, Admiral," I said, my voice crisp, flat, and devoid of emotion as my fingers manipulated the digital tracker on the console. "Target vessel is an eighty-foot unflagged coastal freighter. They entered the territorial limits forty minutes ago. Thermal imaging indicates they are transferring specialized radar-jamming components to an indigenous maritime militia vessel hidden in the shoals."

"Where is our insertion element?" Admiral Vance demanded, leaning over the glowing map.

"SDV Team One, Platoon Delta, is currently submerged four hundred yards off the reef line," I reported, pointing to three tiny green transponder dots pulsing on the hydrographic grid. "They executed a wet launch from the Green Bay at twenty-three hundred. Team leader is Lieutenant Miller; primary scout swimmer is Petty Officer Carter."

The radio speaker mounted above the console crackled with static.

A tight, compressed digital burst sounded through the encrypted satellite channel, decoded instantly by the ship's signal processing suite:

“Viper Actual, this is Delta Lead. We have boots on the outer reef. Primary target is visual. But we have an anomaly. Repeat, tactical anomaly.”

Admiral Vance tapped his headset. "Delta Lead, this is Viper Actual. State the anomaly."

“The target vessel has an auxiliary security detachment on the cliffs, sir. Four armed hostiles with thermal scopes. They were not on the regional satellite sweep. If we approach the cargo bay from the surf line, the swim pair will be in an open kill zone within thirty seconds.”

The room went dead silent. The Air Wing Commander cursed under his breath, reaching for the red strike-warning phone to scramble an F/A-18 alert package from the flight deck.

"Scrambling aircraft will take twenty-two minutes, Admiral," I interrupted, my voice cutting through the rising panic like a diamond edge. "By the time the strike package reaches the cove, the hostiles will have compromised the team in the surf."

"What do you have, Emily?" Vance snapped, looking straight into my eyes.

"We have the hydrographic acoustic conduit," I answered without hesitation, pulling up a secondary layer on the ocean floor mapping screen.

"Three hundred meters south of the reef, there is a submerged lava tube that bypasses the cliffside line of sight completely. It was mapped during the nineteen-seventy-eight geological survey. The entrance is eight feet below the low-tide mark, terminating behind the natural sea arch inside the cove."

"Is the passage navigable with closed-circuit rigs?"

"It’s tight," I replied, my eyes locked on the tiny green pulsing dot marked SWIMMER TWO — R. CARTER.

"It’s twenty-four inches wide at the restriction point. But Ryan trained on the cold-water subterranean obstacle course at Kodiak. He can clear it in four minutes."