I laid the dead man’s hand back on the floor and slipped the prints into a protective sleeve.
When the SEAL’s ritual was finished, he turned to me, but his gaze caught on the corpse on the floor.
And I almost hit my head on the torpedo behind me when a disembodied voice exploded into our metallic environs.
“Doctor, get to the control room. You need to see this.”
The SEAL saw my reaction. He made no effort to suppress his smile as he searched the wall for a moment and detached a handset from it. Its coiled, black cord led to a shoebox-sized speaker mounted in the midst of the controls he had been engrossed in.
“Conn, forward torpedo room. Area is secure,” he said into his fist.
“Torpedo, conn. Roger. Did the doctor hear me?”
Turning to me, the SEAL raised his eyebrows. Maybe a leer, maybe just a silent inquiry.
“Ma’am? He wants to know if you heard. I’m not sure what to tell him.”
Jesus.
“Yeah, I heard him. Tell him I’ll be right there.”
III
There was a SEAL leaning against the wall in the hallway to the control room, a hard, purposeful presence that was out of place in the corridor’s false opulence.
When I had passed through it on the way to the torpedo room, it had seemed cramped for more than one person at a time to use. That first impression was correct; we both had to turn sideways to allow me to pass. But the soldier didn’t seem to mind as my breasts brushed across his torso, and his eyes probed the neckline of my sweatshirt in a futile attempt to get a better view.
After I had squeezed by, I could hear him shuffling behind me as he moved back to the middle of the hallway. I had a pretty good idea which direction he-and his eyes-were facing.
Larsen was waiting for me in the control room next to the forward periscope. Four other SEALs, their weapons slung across their backs, were swarming over the equipment, flipping switches and adjusting knobs. Their voices punctuated the work with curses and an occasional gauge reading.
“Did you enjoy your trip to the torpedo room, Doctor?”
Rolling my eyes was out of the question. I settled for a shrug. Larsen blinked a couple of times. Maybe he expected more.
It was the first clear look I’d gotten at his face. It was hard and mean and dotted with hundreds of old acne scars. Nose had been broken. Chipped incisor, no cap. His right eye seemed to open a bit more than the left. The result of a wound?
“I hear you made good use of your time,” Larsen continued. “Found the murder weapon, huh?”
“I found the pistol I think was used to shoot the man we found in here,” I said, moving closer to Larsen as one of the soldiers shouldered his way by me. “There still are a lot of things to consider.”
“Are there? Well, you’re in luck: I think we’ve got more for you to investigate. Put it this way, we found a great place to put this guy so we can run the boat without tripping over his ass,” the lieutenant said as he pointed his chin at the corpse on the other side of the room. “Come on.” Larsen turned, dodged a SEAL and walked over to the aft hatch. He swung himself through without looking back. I moved after him, tossed my bag into the next compartment and followed it.
When I stood, I almost hit my head on Larsen’s equipment belt. He was standing just inside the hatch, facing me.
“Hey, watch your step, Doctor. Don’t want to have an accident.” He grinned, ogling me with a crooked expression that contained more condescension than happiness.
I couldn’t pick up my bag without repeating the awkward movement. “Is this where we’re going?”
“No,” he said, taking a step back and gesturing around. “This is the control room for the electric engines. We’re just passing through.”
A couple of SEALs were following the same sort of routine as their counterparts in the adjacent compartment, examining and adjusting banks of switches, tapping on the faces of balky dials. Two floor-to-ceiling banks of white circuit breakers gleamed at the aft end of the compartment.
Larsen already had walked away and was hauling himself through the hatch. The illumination in the next compartment reduced him to a silhouette.
Once I stepped through, I could see why. The lighting in this compartment was dazzling compared to the dusk of the rest of the submarine. Two angular engines, each the size of a Cadillac, squatted on either side of a walkway down the center of the compartment. A SEAL was kneeling in the middle, tinkering with one of the greasy beasts.
Ducts, pipes and conduits crawled along the walls and ceiling, all leading to the engines. The compartment’s floor was set a few feet lower than that of the electric control area, creating a higher ceiling and the illusion of spaciousness.
At the aft end was another hatch. To our right was a ladder leading down. Through the grated walkway I could see another black-clad figure tinkering with the machinery below us. Metallic hammering rang through the room.
“How’s it looking, Martin?” Larsen said.
The SEAL in front of us turned and dragged the back of his hand across his forehead, leaving a faint trail of machine oil on the pale skin. Carolina-blue eyes bracketed a razor-thin nose.
“Everything’s in pretty good shape. Couple of loose wires up here, but nothing serious. We could go right now if we had to. Miller’s downstairs checking the powertrain. Hey, Miller!”
The hammering stopped.
“Yeah?”
“What’s the situation down there?”
“I think we’re good to go. Gimme a few more minutes.”
“That’s fine, Seaman. Just make sure we can get to port without throwing a rod,” Larsen said.
That seemed to end their conversation. Larsen grabbed the side rails of the ladder and slid down through the hole. After slinging the bag over my shoulder, I climbed down after him.
The lower deck seemed an inverted reflection of the upper level. The bottom halves of the engines were set in the ceiling, and a strip of deck led between the wide pillars of equipment they rested on. The lighting and walkway above cast a weird grid of shadows through the area.
The SEAL we had heard from above — Miller, I guess — was whacking a domed cover on the left-hand engine. His watch cap was stuffed into a back pocket, but a head covered with a uniform thickness of wiry black hair created the same effect as a hat. He paused when Larsen stepped onto the deck and nodded, his doughy face slick with sweat.
Larsen turned to me. “We’re heading back forward. Through there.”
He pointed at the bulkhead behind me, and I saw another hatch. This one was as close to human-sized as any I had encountered on the boat.
A SEAL stood on the other side, his olive skin turned sallow by the anemic overhead bulbs. He was up on his tiptoes, trying to look at something to the left, outside my field of view.
“Vazquez,” Larsen said as he followed me through the hatch.
The SEAL turned. He had a graceful, almost child-like face. Deep-set brown eyes, no scars, nose had been broken several times. His mouth stayed closed when he wasn’t talking.
The three of us were standing between two racks of rectangular, green boxes that stretched the length of the compartment. The top shelf was mounted about chest height, and I recognized notations for voltage and resistance printed on one of the boxes. Batteries.
The open space in the middle seemed about as wide as the center of the torpedo room. Behind Vazquez, I could see two figures clad in blue uniforms splayed on the floor.
“Lieutenant, the aft battery bay seems operable, sir. I ain’t seen any major damage, and we should have enough juice to turn over the diesels.” He looked at me. “You here to look at the bodies? They was laying there just like that when we came through. I didn’t… I mean, I tripped and fell on top of that one, but I ain’t moved them.”