I Was The Janitor Scrubbing Floors While My Son Graduated. The Rich Parents Laughed At My Stained Uniform. Then The 4-Star Admiral Froze When He Saw The “Black Ink” On My Wrist, Dropped His Salute, And The Whole Base Went Silent.

CHAPTER 1: THE INVISIBLE MAN

The fog rolling off the Pacific Ocean that morning felt heavy, like a wet blanket trying to smother the excitement buzzing around Naval Base Coronado. To everyone else, it was “Graduation Day.” To me, it was Tuesday. Which meant I had trash cans to empty before I could watch my son become a man.

I adjusted my cap, pulling the brim low. My name tag, M. Cole – Facilities, was crooked. I didn’t fix it. I kept my head down, pushing my cart past the gleaming rows of white chairs set up on the parade deck.

“Excuse me, you missed a spot,” a woman’s voice clipped at me.

I stopped. She was wearing a dress that cost more than my car, clutching a designer bag. She pointed a manicured finger at a scuff mark on the asphalt near the VIP section.

“I’ll get that right away, ma’am,” I muttered, grabbing my mop.

“Honestly,” she whispered loudly to her husband, a man in a tailored suit who didn’t even look at me. “You’d think for a ceremony this important, they’d keep the help out of sight until after the Admiral speaks.”

I gripped the mop handle. My knuckles turned white. The help.

If only she knew.

If only she knew that the scuff mark she was worried about was nothing compared to the scars crisscrossing the skin beneath my cheap gray uniform. If only she knew that the “help” had once held the lives of men like her husband in the palm of his hand in places that didn’t exist on any civilian map.

But I swallowed the bile. I wasn’t Sergeant Major Mason Cole, decorative myth of Task Force 7, anymore. I was just Mason. The janitor. The widower. The dad who worked double shifts scrubbing latrines so his son, Aiden, never had to worry about student loans or an empty fridge.

I finished the spot and retreated to the shadows, standing behind the last row of bleachers. I found my folding chair—the one with the rusted leg—and set it up where the shadows of the grandstand would hide me.

Then, the drums rolled.

The recruits marched in. A sea of white and blue. And there he was. Aiden.

He was in the third row, second from the left. His chin was up, his back straight as a steel rod. He looked so much like his mother it actually hurt to look at him. He scanned the crowd, his eyes searching. He wasn’t looking at the VIP section. He was looking for me.

I raised my hand, just a little, from the shadows. He saw me. A tiny, almost imperceptible nod. That was enough. My chest swelled so hard I thought my ribs might crack. We made it, kid. We made it.

CHAPTER 2: THE ADMIRAL’S GAZE

The ceremony was standard Navy pomp. Brass bands, flags snapping in the wind, speeches about honor and courage. I’d heard it all before. I’d lived it. I’d buried friends who died for it.

Then, the loudspeaker crackled.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the Commander of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Thomas Sterling.”

The crowd hushed. Even the seagulls seemed to go quiet.

Admiral Sterling walked onto the platform like he owned the very air we were breathing. Four stars on his shoulder boards glinted in the sudden break of sunlight. He was older than I remembered—grayer, a slight limp in his step—but those eyes were the same. Predatory. sharp. Assessing threats in milliseconds.

I sank lower in my chair. Please, not him. Anyone but him.

I hadn’t seen Sterling in fifteen years. Not since “Operation Tempest.” Not since the night the helicopter went down in the Hindu Kush and the world went black. I was listed as ‘Retired – Medical.’ I was supposed to be a ghost.

Sterling began his speech. It was good. Powerful. But as he spoke, I noticed something. He wasn’t looking at the notes on his podium. He was scanning the crowd.

He was looking for something. Or someone.

I pulled my collar up, trying to cover the tattoo that crept out from under my sleeve—a jagged, faded black trident wrapped in barbed wire. The mark of the Unit.

Sterling paused mid-sentence. The silence stretched out, uncomfortable and heavy.

He had stopped scanning. His gaze had locked onto the back corner.

Onto the shadows.

Onto me.

My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. He can’t see me. I’m a janitor. I’m nobody.

But Sterling stepped away from the microphone. He ignored the protocol officer who stepped forward nervously. He walked down the steps of the podium, his dress shoes clicking rhythmically on the pavement. The entire graduation formation—hundreds of sailors—stood frozen at attention. The parents whispered, confused.

“Where is he going?” the woman with the expensive bag hissed.

Sterling didn’t stop. He walked past the Senators. Past the Captains. Past the rich parents in the front row. He was walking in a straight line toward the garbage cans. Toward the back.

Toward me.

I stood up. My instinct was to run. To vanish. But my legs locked. Discipline, burned into my DNA, took over.

Sterling stopped five feet from me. The crowd parted like the Red Sea, turning to stare at the janitor with the mop bucket.

The Admiral’s eyes dropped to my wrist. He saw the ink. The faded black trident. He looked up at my face, studying the lines, the gray stubble, the tired eyes.

“Mason?” he whispered. The microphone on his lapel picked it up, booming his voice across the silent parade deck. “Master Chief Cole?”

The whispers exploded around us. Master Chief? The janitor?

“You have the wrong man, sir,” I said, my voice rasping. “I’m just here to watch my son.”

Sterling didn’t blink. His face, usually made of stone, crumbled into an expression of pure shock—and something that looked like heartbreak.

“The wrong man?” Sterling said, loud enough for the whole base to hear. “You think I’d forget the face of the man who carried me three miles through hell with a bullet in his lung?”

The woman with the designer bag dropped her sunglasses.

Aiden, standing in formation, turned his head. He broke protocol. He stared at me, his eyes wide.

Sterling took a step closer, ignoring the dirt on my uniform. He looked at the mop in my hand, then at the stars on his own shoulder.

“You disappeared, Mason. We thought you were dead. And I find you here… pushing a broom?”

“I had a promise to keep, Tom,” I said quietly, using his first name. The crowd gasped. “I had to raise the boy.”

Sterling turned slowly to look at the graduating class. Then he looked back at me. He slowly raised his hand.

But he didn’t point.

He saluted.

A slow, four-star salute. Directed not at the flag, not at the officers, but at the janitor.

PART 2: THE AWAKENING OF GHOST ACTUAL
CHAPTER 3: THE WALK OF SHAME (AND GLORY)
The silence that had fallen over the Naval Base Coronado parade deck wasn’t peaceful; it was suffocating. It was the kind of vacuum that occurs right before a shockwave hits. Admiral Sterling’s salute had effectively sucked the air out of the lungs of two thousand spectators.

I stood there, the wooden handle of the mop slick against my sweating palms. For seventeen years, I had perfected the art of being invisible. I was the gray blur in the hallway. The noise of a vacuum cleaner after hours. To be seen—truly seen—felt less like an honor and more like being stripped naked in a blizzard.

The Admiral lowered his hand slowly, his eyes wet, his jaw set in a line of grim determination. “We thought we lost you in the Kush, Mason. The wreckage… there was nothing left.”

“There was enough left to make a promise,” I replied, my voice raspy, unused to commanding attention. I shifted my weight, and the cheap rubber of my janitorial boots squeaked on the asphalt—a stark contrast to the polished leather surrounding me.

The crowd began to fracture. The spell broke. The murmurs started as a low hum and quickly escalated into a roar of confused speculation. Phones were out. I could see the lenses. Hundreds of black eyes staring at me, recording, streaming. ‘The Janitor General.’ ‘The Mystery Hero.’ The captions were being written in real-time. My anonymity was dying a violent death.

Aiden was the first to move. He broke formation completely, ignoring the frantic gestures of his Chief Petty Officer. He walked toward me, his face a kaleidoscope of emotions: shock, confusion, and a terrifying amount of hope.

“Dad?” he asked, stopping three feet away. He looked at the Admiral, then at the mop, then at my face. “Dad, why is the Commander of the Pacific Fleet saluting you? Why did he call you… Master Chief?”

Before I could answer, the security cordon dissolved.

“Excuse me! Excuse me!”

The voice was shrill, cutting through the heavy emotional atmosphere like a serrated knife. It was Mrs. Van Der Hoven, the woman with the designer bag who had scolded me for the scuff mark earlier. She was pushing her way past a Marine guard, her husband trailing behind her like a deflated balloon.

She stopped in front of Admiral Sterling, breathless, her face flushed. She didn’t look at me; she looked through me, aiming her outrage at the Admiral.

“Admiral Sterling, this is highly irregular!” she announced, her voice trembling with indignation. “This… this staff member was disrupting the view. We paid a donation to the chaotic fund for these seats, and I hardly think turning the ceremony into a reunion for the custodial staff is appropriate!”

Sterling turned his head slowly. He didn’t blink. He looked at her with the cold, dead stare of a man who has ordered airstrikes on coordinates that contained bad men and good hostages.

“Ma’am,” Sterling said, his voice dropping an octave, terrifyingly calm. “Do you know why you are breathing free air today?”

“I… excuse me?” she stammered.

“Do you know why the grid stayed on during the Cyber-Crisis of 2018? Do you know why the dirty bomb in Seattle didn’t go off in 2015?” Sterling took a step toward her. “It is because of men like the one standing next to you holding a mop. You are standing in the shadow of a colossus, and you are complaining about the view.”

Mrs. Van Der Hoven paled, her mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. She finally looked at me. Really looked at me. She saw the scars on my neck that I usually hid with my collar. She saw the way I stood—not slumped, but coiled.

“I… I didn’t know,” she whispered.

“That,” I said softly, “was the point.”

I turned to Aiden. “We need to go. Now.”

“Not yet,” Sterling interjected, signaling his security detail. Four heavily armed Masters-at-Arms surrounded us instantly, facing outward. “The base is compromised, Mason. If I recognized you, the facial recognition software on a hundred civilian smartphones just did too. The feeds are live. You’re trending on Twitter in three continents by now.”

My stomach dropped. Khalid. Or his brother. Or the Cartel. Or the Russians. I had a list of enemies longer than the graduation program.

“My truck is in the employee lot,” I said, my mind automatically shifting into tactical gear. Condition Red.

“Forget the truck,” Sterling barked. “Beta Protocol. Get them to the Citadel. My office. Now!”

As the guards ushered us forward, moving us rapidly through the stunned crowd, I looked back one last time. The folding chair I had sat on—the broken one—was overturned. My mop bucket was left behind, a lonely sentinel in the middle of the parade ground.

The janitor was gone. Mason Cole was back. And I hated it.

CHAPTER 4: THE BLACK BOX AND THE GHOST
The “Citadel” was what the sailors called the reinforced command center beneath the Admiral’s administration building. It was a windowless bunker of concrete, steel, and humming servers. The air was recycled and cold, smelling of ozone and stress.

Aiden sat at the edge of a massive conference table, his hands gripping his knees. He looked like a child again, waiting for a punishment he didn’t understand.

Admiral Sterling stood at the head of the table, pacing. He had dismissed everyone except his most trusted Intelligence Officer, a sharp-eyed Lieutenant Commander named Evans, and two Marine guards at the door.

“Seventeen years,” Sterling muttered, pouring a glass of water he didn’t drink. “I attended your funeral, Mason. I gave the flag to… well, there was no one to give it to. We put it in the archives.”

“I took Aiden that night,” I said, leaning against the concrete wall, crossing my arms over my chest. I felt exposed without my work jacket. The tattoos on my arms—the map of my sins—seemed to glow under the fluorescent lights. “The fire at the safehouse in Virginia? That wasn’t an electrical fault.”

Sterling stopped pacing. “The Syndicate?”

“The Syndicate,” I confirmed. “They found us. Sarah… she didn’t make it to the safe room. I did. With the boy.”

Aiden made a small, choked sound. I looked at him, my heart breaking.

“You told me she died in a car crash on the I-5,” Aiden whispered, his voice trembling with betrayal. “You told me a drunk driver hit us.”

“I lied,” I said, keeping my voice steady, though my insides were screaming. “I lied to keep you from looking over your shoulder every day of your life. If you knew they murdered your mother, you would have wanted revenge. And revenge gets you killed. I wanted you to have homework, and prom, and heartbreak over girls, not… not this.”

I gestured to the bunker, the guns, the war room.

“But here we are,” Sterling said grimly. He tapped a console on the table. A holographic display flickered to life in the center of the room. It showed a map of the Pacific, red dots pulsing in the South China Sea.

“We didn’t just bring you here for a reunion, Mason,” Sterling said, his tone shifting from friend to Commander. “We have a crisis. A Tier-One event.”

“I’m retired, Tom. I scrub floors.”

“Not anymore,” Sterling said. He swiped the screen. A grainy image appeared. It was a satellite photo of a submarine surfacing in dark waters. But it wasn’t a normal sub. It was jagged, matte black, designed to absorb sonar.

“Is that…” I squinted, stepping closer. The silhouette was unmistakable.

“The Leviathan,” Sterling said. “The prototype stealth sub your team was supposed to have destroyed in Operation Tempest.”

My blood ran cold. “I rigged the charges myself. I watched the cavern collapse. That ship is buried under a mountain of rock in North Korea.”

“Apparently not,” Sterling said. “It surfaced forty-eight hours ago. It hailed us. It didn’t ask for the President. It didn’t ask for the UN.”

Sterling looked me dead in the eye.

“It asked for Ghost Actual.”

The room went silent.

“Who is skipping it?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” Lt. Commander Evans spoke up for the first time. “Voice modulation software. But they broadcast a code key.”

Evans typed a command. A sound filled the room—a rhythmic, dissonant series of metallic clicks and hums.

Aiden covered his ears. “What is that?”

I knew what it was. I felt the sound in my teeth. It wasn’t a code. It was a rhythm. Tap. Tap-tap. Scrape.

“It’s a lullaby,” I whispered, my face draining of color.

Sterling frowned. “Excuse me?”

“It’s the rhythm Sarah used to tap on the crib when Aiden couldn’t sleep,” I said, my voice barely audible. “She… she made it up. No one else knew it. Just me and her.”

I looked at the screen, at the black monster floating in the ocean.

“Whoever is on that boat… they were in my house,” I said, the realization hitting me like a physical punch. “They know everything.”

“Or,” Sterling said, dropping the bombshell he had been holding back, “they know you’re alive because they’ve been waiting for you to surface.”

Suddenly, the red lights in the room began to flash. A siren wailed—not a drill siren, but the high-pitched scream of a Perimeter Breach.

“Report!” Sterling yelled at the comms officer.

“Sir! We have a vehicle breaching Gate 5! High speed! It’s… Sir, it’s a delivery truck, but thermal shows six heat signatures in the back. They just blew past the sentries!”

“They’re here,” I said, grabbing a sidearm from the table—a Sig Sauer P226—without asking. The weight of it felt familiar, comforting and terrible all at once. I checked the chamber in one fluid motion.

“Who?” Aiden shouted, standing up, panic rising.

“The past,” I said, grabbing his arm. “Stay close to me. Do exactly what I say.”

“Mason, stand down!” Sterling ordered. “My Marines will handle this.”

“Your Marines look for soldiers,” I said, moving toward the door. “These guys aren’t soldiers. They’re cleaners. And they’re here to wipe the floor.”

CHAPTER 5: THE JANITOR’S WAR
The elevator ride up from the Citadel was agonizingly slow. I had the gun tucked into the back of my waistband, hidden by my gray janitor’s shirt. Aiden was behind me, breathing fast.

“Dad, I don’t know how to shoot,” he stammered.

“Good,” I said without turning. “Shooting is the easy part. Knowing when to stop is the hard part. You’re not shooting anyone today. You’re moving. You’re my cargo. Do you understand?”

“Cargo. Okay. Okay.”

The doors opened into the lobby of the Administration building. It was chaos. Officers were running toward the exits, alarms blaring.

“We need to get to the marina,” I told Aiden. “The main gates are kill zones. They’ll have snipers on the overpass. They want to box us in.”

“The marina? That’s two miles away!”

“We’re not walking.”

I scanned the lobby. A group of sailors were taking cover behind the reception desk. Through the glass front doors, I saw black smoke rising from the parking lot. The “delivery truck” had rammed a barricade and exploded, creating a diversion.

Standard tactic, I thought. Create chaos, flank the target.

“Down!” I shoved Aiden behind a concrete pillar just as the glass front of the lobby shattered.

Thwip-thwip-thwip.

Suppressed fire. 5.56 rounds chewing up the drywall where our heads had been a second ago.

Three men moved through the smoke. They weren’t wearing military fatigues. They wore maintenance uniforms—pest control. They blended in. Just like me.

“Identify,” Aiden whispered, his voice cracking.

“Contractors,” I murmured, peeking around the edge. “Private military. expensive. Highly trained. No morals.”

I looked at the mop bucket standing in the corner of the lobby. A plan formed.

“Aiden, when I move, you run for the stairwell to the basement garage. Count to three, then go.”

“Dad, what are you—”

“One.”

I grabbed a fire extinguisher from the wall.

“Two.”

I pulled the pin on the extinguisher and hurled it across the lobby floor. It skidded, spinning, stopping right in the path of the advancing gunmen.

“Three!”

Aiden bolted. The gunmen turned their weapons toward his movement.

I stepped out, raised the Sig, and fired one round.

I didn’t aim for the men. I aimed for the nozzle of the fire extinguisher.

BANG.

The extinguisher exploded in a cloud of white chemical powder, instantly filling the lobby with a blinding fog. The gunmen started coughing, firing blindly into the whiteout.

I moved into the cloud. This was my element. Fog. Dust. Confusion. I wasn’t the janitor anymore. I was the Ghost.

I low-crawled, feeling the vibration of their boots on the floor. I grabbed the ankle of the first man, yanking it with all my strength. He fell hard, his head cracking against the terrazzo floor. I was on him before he stopped sliding, disarming him and delivering a precise strike to the carotid artery. He went limp.

One down.

The other two were firing wild. I grabbed the fallen man’s radio.

“Target secured,” I said into the mic, mimicking the dead man’s voice perfectly. “Moving to extraction.”

The shooting stopped. The other two hesitated.

“Marco?” one of them called out.

I stepped out of the fog, right next to him.

“Polo,” I whispered.

I pistol-whipped him across the jaw. He dropped. The third man swung his rifle, but I jammed the barrel of my pistol into the ejection port of his weapon, jamming it. A swift kick to the knee, a shove, and he was down.

It took six seconds.

I stood over them, breathing hard, the adrenaline flooding my system. The chemical dust settled on my gray uniform, making me look like a statue.

Aiden was standing by the stairwell door, staring at me. He looked terrified. Not of the gunmen. Of me.

“You… you just took out three guys,” he whispered.

“I swept the trash,” I said, holstering the gun. “Let’s go.”

CHAPTER 6: THE HIGHWAY OF TEARS
We made it to the basement garage. The Admiral’s personal vehicle—a heavy, armored SUV—was waiting. The keys were in the lockbox I knew Sterling kept under the fender. Old habits.

I threw Aiden into the passenger seat and peeled out, tires screeching.

“Where are we going?” Aiden yelled as we blasted out of the garage, swerving around a confused MP vehicle.

“North,” I said. “I have a safe house in the Mojave. Off the grid.”

“Dad, stop!” Aiden grabbed the dashboard. “We can’t just leave! You’re a fugitive now? What about the Navy? What about the Admiral?”

“The Admiral can handle a political mess,” I said, checking the mirrors. “He can’t handle a hunter team.”

We hit the Coronado bridge. The view was spectacular—the blue water, the white boats. But in the rearview mirror, I saw two black sedans weaving through traffic, closing the gap.

“They’re tailing us,” I said. “Get down.”

“Dad, talk to me!” Aiden screamed. “Who are they? Why did they kill Mom? Why are they here?”

I slammed on the brakes, causing the SUV to skid. The lead sedan behind us couldn’t stop in time. It slammed into our rear bumper.

I threw the car into reverse and floored it.

CRUNCH.

The armored SUV crushed the sedan’s hood like a soda can. I shifted back to drive and gunned it, using the momentum to spin the sedan into the guardrail.

“They killed your mother,” I said, my voice cold, detached, focusing on the road, “because I refused to let them sell a nuclear trigger to a rogue state. I stole the trigger. I hid it.”

Aiden stared at me. “You… you have a nuke?”

“Not a nuke. The key to one. It’s safe.”

“Where is it?”

I looked at him. I looked at the tattoo on my arm. The coordinates hidden in the design.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “What matters is that they think you might know where it is. That’s why they didn’t kill you in the lobby. They were trying to kidnap you.”

Aiden went silent. The reality of his life—the lies, the janitor job, the “poverty”—cracked open. He realized he wasn’t just a poor kid who got into the Navy on hard work. He was the heir to a secret war.

We cleared the bridge and hit the highway. I wove through traffic at ninety miles an hour.

“There’s a helicopter,” Aiden said, pointing up. “Is it ours?”

I glanced up. A black chopper, low altitude. No markings.

“No,” I said. “It’s theirs.”

A side door on the chopper slid open. A man leaned out with a rifle.

“Hold on!”

I jerked the wheel to the right, taking the SUV off the highway and down a steep embankment. Dirt and rocks sprayed everywhere. The suspension groaned. Bullets kicked up dust where we had been a second before.

We hit the service road below, bouncing violently.

“Map box!” I shouted. “Glove compartment! Get the flare gun!”

Aiden fumbled with the latch. “I got it!”

“Open the window. Shoot it at the chopper. Aim for the intake!”

“I can’t! It’s moving too fast!”

“Just shoot it, Aiden! Do it!”

Aiden leaned out the window, wind whipping his face. He pointed the orange plastic gun up at the screaming metal bird. He pulled the trigger.

The flare arced up, a brilliant streak of red phosphorus.

It missed the intake. But it hit the cockpit windshield.

The pilot flinched. The chopper banked hard to the left to avoid the blinding light. Ideally, the rotors clipped a power line tower.

SCREECH-BOOM.

Sparks showered down like fireworks. The chopper spun out of control, crash-landing in a field a hundred yards away.

I slowed the car. Silence returned, except for the hissing of our radiator.

Aiden slumped back in his seat, shaking uncontrollably. He looked at the flare gun in his hand.

“I… I brought it down,” he breathed.

“You saved us,” I said, reaching over and squeezing his shoulder. My hand was shaking too. “You did good, son. You did good.”

CHAPTER 7: THE TRUTH IN THE ASHES
We abandoned the car under an overpass three hours later. I wiped it down. We walked five miles to a truck stop where I had an old Chevy pickup stashed under a tarp—another contingency plan I had hoped never to use.

It was night now. We sat in the cab of the truck, parked in the darkness of the desert. The stars were bright.

I opened a cooler in the back seat and handed Aiden a bottle of water. He drank it in one go.

“So,” Aiden said, wiping his mouth. “The janitor thing. The ‘don’t draw attention’ thing. It was all training.”

“Situational awareness,” I nodded. “Discipline. Humility. I taught you to notice the small things because the small things are what get you killed.”

“And the Admiral?”

“Sterling is a good man. But he represents the machine. The machine uses people like me until we break, and then it replaces us. I didn’t want you to be a spare part, Aiden.”

Aiden looked out at the desert. “But I signed the papers, Dad. I’m in the Navy now. I’m part of the machine.”

“You were,” I said. “But after today? You’re something else.”

I rolled up my sleeve. I took a knife from my boot.

“Dad, what are you doing?”

“The coordinates,” I said, pointing to the tattoo. “They aren’t just for the trigger. They’re for the Leviathan. The sub.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The sub didn’t just surface to threaten us,” I explained. “It surfaced because the automated systems I installed on it… they reset every fifteen years. If the master code isn’t entered, it broadcasts its position to everyone. The bad guys found it because the timer ran out.”

I looked at Aiden.

“I need to go back out there. I need to sink that boat for good. If the Syndicate gets the tech on board… the world changes. And not for the better.”

“You can’t do it alone,” Aiden said. “You’re old, Dad. No offense. But your knees pop when you stand up.”

I chuckled darkly. “Thanks for the reminder.”

“I’m coming with you,” Aiden said. It wasn’t a question.

“No. It’s too dangerous.”

“You said I’m not a spare part,” Aiden said, his voice hardening. “You raised me for this. You just didn’t tell me. I know the comms protocols. I know the tech. You’re the shooter, Dad. But I’m the connection. You need me to hack the sub’s system.”

I looked at him. Really looked at him. He wasn’t the boy who graduated this morning. He was a young man who had shot down a helicopter and walked away.

“If we do this,” I said, “there is no going back to the mop bucket. There is no going back to the quiet life.”

“I never liked the quiet life anyway,” Aiden smiled, a jagged, tired smile.

I started the truck. The engine roared to life, a rough, defiant sound in the quiet desert.

“Set a course for the coast,” I said. “We have a submarine to hunt.”

CHAPTER 8: THE GHOST RETURNS
Two days later.

We stood on the deck of a trawler off the coast of Baja. Admiral Sterling had come through—unofficially. He provided the boat, the gear, and the cover.

I wore black tactical gear again. It felt heavy, yet like a second skin. I checked the suppressed MP7 in my hands.

Aiden sat at a console we had rigged up in the cabin. He was typing furiously, headset on.

“I have a signal,” Aiden said. “Active sonar ping. Range, two thousand yards. Depth, four hundred feet.”

“That’s them,” I said.

Sterling’s voice crackled over the radio. “Mason, you have a window of one hour before the Chinese fleet arrives. If you don’t scuttle that sub by then, we have World War Three.”

“Understood, Tom,” I said. “We’re going in.”

I looked at Aiden. He looked terrified, but his hands were steady.

“Stay on the boat,” I ordered. “Guide me in via the drone. Once I plant the charges, I swim out, and you detonate. Do not hesitate. Even if I’m not clear.”

“Dad—”

“That’s the order, Sailor.”

Aiden swallowed hard. “Aye, aye, Chief.”

I pulled on my rebreather mask. The world narrowed to the sound of my own breathing. I stepped to the edge of the boat. The dark water swirled below, cold and unforgiving.

For seventeen years, I had been Mason the Janitor. I had cleaned up other people’s messes.

Tonight, I was cleaning up my own.

I looked back at my son. He gave me a thumbs-up.

I tipped backward into the black ocean. The cold hit me, waking up every nerve ending. As I descended into the darkness, toward the metal beast waiting in the deep, I smiled.

The Janitor was dead.

Ghost Actual was hunting.