The fall should have been the whole emergency.
A sailor overboard on an active carrier deck is enough to freeze a ship’s blood. The alarm went out in less than five seconds. Orange markers were thrown. A rescue swimmer team moved before command finished the first order. People shouted Lexa’s name from the deck even though the sea swallowed sound and distance faster than fear could carry it.
Lexa surfaced once, coughing hard, one arm striking through the water. The carrier towered above her like a steel cliff. Waves slapped her face. Fuel sheen and foam moved around her shoulders. For a moment, she seemed disoriented, turning in the water as if trying to understand how the deck had vanished beneath her feet.
Then her hand went to her vest.
At first, the sailors above thought she was reaching for a flotation tab, a radio, maybe a light. But what came out of the pocket was dark, compact, and unmistakable enough that the men nearest the rail recoiled.
A grenade.
Someone yelled it before command could stop him.
“Grenade! She’s got a grenade!”
Weapons came up along the rail. Not all at once, not cleanly, but with the ugly speed of panic. A sailor in the water holding a grenade near a carrier during a man-overboard recovery was every nightmare folded into one image.
Lexa saw the rifles.
She looked up from the sea, hair plastered across her face, blood at one corner of her mouth from the fall. Her expression was not wild. It was furious, stunned, and terrified by what she had just found in her own gear. The grenade was in her right hand, held above the water like evidence she could not afford to lose.
From the deck, David shouted first.
“She brought it aboard!”
The words hit faster than any wave.
“She was going to hit the ship!”
Lexa’s face changed.
Even from the rail, men could see it. Not because she looked guilty, but because she understood the trap at the same moment the ship did not. She had been pushed overboard. A grenade had been planted in her vest. Now she was in the water, holding the very object that could make every camera, every witness, and every fearful report describe her as the threat.
Her thumb hovered near the top of it.
Not because she wanted to throw it.
Because she did not know what David had done to it.
“Hold fire!” a voice roared from above.
Rear Admiral Thomas Olsen stepped onto the deck from the island access door with two armed masters-at-arms behind him. He moved fast for a man in his sixties, but what stopped the deck was not his speed. It was his voice.
“Hold your fire! No one shoots!”
David turned sharply.
The blood drained from his face.
He had not expected Olsen there.
Nobody had.
The admiral looked down at Lexa in the water, then at the grenade in her hand, then at David.
And in that one look, David understood that the fall had not happened in an empty moment.
Olsen had been watching.