“I appreciate it, Vazquez,” I said. “I’ll just take a quick look at these two, and then we can get them out of your way.”
Vazquez blinked several times and cleared his throat before he spoke. Maybe he wasn’t used to being addressed in a normal tone of voice.
“Oh, uh, sure. Thanks. I mean, you know, no big deal. I’ll be through here ’fore too long.”
“OK, finish up, Vazquez,” Larsen interjected. “We’re going to fire up the engines soon.”
He swept his right arm in an exaggerated arc toward the corpses. “Have at it.”
I stepped around Vazquez, who was squatting now, checking something along the bottom battery rack. The two dead crewmen on the other side were oriented in opposite directions: one faced aft, lying on his back, and one faced forward on his stomach.
The left arm of the one facing us was pulled up to his lower abdomen, and the opposite hand lay at his side, bloody, as if it had been crushed. Even in death, the man’s muscles appeared taut and powerful. His knees were bent at about a right angle, making it seem as though he had expired while doing sit-ups. He was young, maybe the same age as the crewman in the control room, and his black hair was trimmed to quarter-inch bristles.
The face, though, was the most striking feature about this corpse. His eyes bulged in their sockets, the eyelids wrenched open as far as they would go, the dilated pupils staring at the ceiling.
And the rest of his face matched. His lips — like the others’, they were discolored, I noticed — were pulled away from his teeth, leaving his mouth frozen in a silent scream. Flecks of blood were evident on his chin and cheeks. I kneeled down for a closer look: the red dots still glistened.
“Uh, ma’am? That’s the one I fell on,” Vazquez said.
I looked up at him. “How did you fall on him?”
“I was at the forward end of the compartment, and I turned around and my foot got stuck in his legs.” He shrugged, and traces of crimson crept into his cheeks.
“No, I mean, how did you land?”
“Oh. Well, I was pulling my weapon around on my back, and my right hand got kind of tangled in the strap.” I heard Larsen snort behind me. “So I tried to catch myself with one hand, but I was, like, falling sideways. My hand landed on the guy’s chest, and I sort of rolled to the side. I swear to Jesus I ain’t moved him, though.”
I planted my left hand on the deck and pantomimed pushing myself to the side and turning my body.
“Like this? All your weight was on your arm, and your hand was on the corpse?”
He nodded. “Yeah, exactly.”
“Did anything happen when you hit? Did you hear any bones break? Tell me what you remember.”
The color spread further across his face. “I didn’t feel nothing break when I landed. But he… the body kind of coughed, like, and there was a little blood sprayed out. I got some on my face. Wait, he ain’t alive, is he?”
The SEAL’s distraught expression seemed inappropriate on a person loaded down with military paraphernalia.
“He’s been dead for a while. Ice cold. But inside his body, the fluids don’t evaporate because they’re not exposed to the outside air. They take longer to dry up. He had some blood in his lungs or throat, and when you hit him, the pressure forced air up through his mouth and took some of the blood with it. Don’t worry about it.”
I had a feeling I could autopsy this crewman and find out what the insides of all the other corpses onboard looked like. Vazquez’s accident may have offered me an inadvertent look at what I’d read in the medical examiner’s report later.
“I didn’t want to mess anything up for the, you know, investigation,” Vazquez said.
“Right,” Larsen said. “Vazquez, go on and finish getting this battery array squared away. Doctor, do you want to look at the other one here? I’ll tell you right now, though, that these two aren’t the main event.”
I stood up and took a picture of both corpses without bothering to tell Larsen to move out of the frame.
The second dead crewman told a now-familiar story. No visible wounds. Lips and nail beds showed signs of cyanosis, and I’m sure the toes would have too, if we had bothered to take off his lug-soled boots.
This was a young one, too, his head shaved bald. After rolling him over, I could see that his eyelids were clenched shut. The rest of his facial muscles were slack, leaving his mouth open a few degrees.
“OK, where’s the main event?”
Larsen laughed. “You’ll know it when you see it.”
Stepping around the bodies, he moved to the forward end of the compartment. His wide frame eclipsed most of the hatch opening, but I could see figures moving in the next room.
On the other side of the portal lay a charnel house. Two SEALs walked among the bodies, stepping over or around the tangle of limbs. A quick count told me there were eighteen corpses. It was tough to tell, though, because several lay atop each other or were lost amid intertwined arms and legs.
The room was about the same size as the upper half of the engine room, making up for a lower ceiling with greater length. The left half of the room was devoted to eating and cooking.
A kitchenette with a griddle, two burners and an oven took up the aft-most corner. Forward of it were a floor-to-ceiling steel refrigerator and a pantry that was a foot or so deep but stretched the length of the compartment. Three square tables were set in front of the pantry, surrounded by stools bolted to the deck.
The opposite wall was all bunks. Three racks, most covered by curtains, were mounted at about ankle, waist and shoulder height.
And sprawled throughout were the bodies.
There seemed no pattern to their distribution at first. The corpses were oriented in myriad directions and unnatural positions. Face-up. Facedown. On their sides. Draped over the edge of a counter. One seemed to be sitting against the bulkhead, deep in thought, his forehead resting against his knees.
I took a picture, my hands moving without conscious direction.
“Pretty fucked-up, huh? Some shit went down here.”
As more of the scene began to register in my brain, some of the randomness dissipated. There was a concentration of bodies around the hatch to the next compartment forward. Many of them lay parallel to the sub’s long axis. The ones closer to the center of the room were arrayed in more varied alignments. And just a handful of the dead were in the aft end.
Half wore a full uniform or jumpsuit; the rest had blue pants and T-shirts. For the first time since boarding the ship, I saw signs of major violence. Blood soaked through clothing. Walls and furniture were, in places, coated with gore.
Larsen poked one of the bodies with a booted toe. But he watched me as he did it.
“It’s like they decided to have a WWF match in here. Same kinda shit in the forward battery bay. Hey, you guys find any weapons here?”
The nearest SEAL turned from the galley, where he was checking the pipes around the stove and oven. He had the broad shoulders of a middle linebacker and a nose that looked as though it had gotten the business end of a stiffarm. From several yards away it was hard to see his teeth, but I guessed they might have suffered some damage in the process.
“Couple of pistols. We pulled the mags. No rounds in the chamber… doesn’t look like they’d even been fired. And one guy had grabbed a knife from over here. That’s all.”
“Have you moved any of the bodies?” I asked. As twisted a mess as this was, there might be something useful concealed in the chaos.
“What?” The SEAL turned to me as though he’d just noticed my presence. “Sure we did. I cleared these guys away from the galley so I could check the wiring.” He pointed his chin at a pile of three crewmembers a few feet away from where he stood.