Vortex

Featuring Logan Steele, a steel-nerved, hydrogen-haunted protagonist in the tradition of Clive Cussler, James Rollins, Andy Weir, and Tom Clancy, Vortex delivers a rare combination of extreme science and action-survival. Logan Steele is a commercial diver who thrives under pressure. Two hundred feet down, where darkness swallows sound and oxygen becomes currency, he’s built a life on going where others won’t. His best friend James Winterbourne—paralyzed from a mining collapse Logan once pulled him from—has called him to inspect Ascentis Energy’s revolutionary saltwater-to-hydrogen facility on the Gulf Coast. But what should be a routine assessment becomes one of the greatest manmade disasters in history. A detonation deep beneath the salt mine shatters the seafloor. The Gulf pours into the breach, creating a gargantuan whirlpool powerful enough to swallow oil rigs and drag ships to the bottom—the same inexorable force that drained Lake Peigneur in 1980. As rescue operations collapse into chaos, Logan realizes the explosion was no accident. The timing was too precise, the damage too calculated. Somewhere in the wreckage of America’s flagship energy project, a Russian operative has orchestrated a catastrophe that reaches far beyond industrial sabotage—the opening salvo in the new energy war. And the saboteur isn’t finished. With the vortex widening and the Gulf swallowing ships, barges, and pleasure craft whole, Logan must rely on every skill forged in a lifetime underwater—not just to save those trapped in the maelstrom, but to hunt an invisible enemy already planning his next strike. The ocean demands nothing but competence. The enemy demands everything else.