“I pulled a guy out of the forward hatch,” said the other SEAL. He was about the same height as the first but looked willowy in comparison. Long neck, slight overbite. Some kind of a tattoo on his neck.
His eyes fluttered up and down my body, settling on my face with great reluctance. “He was sort of half-in, half-out.”
“Which half was in this room?” I asked.
“The upper body. His stomach was square on the lower edge of the hatch.”
“So what can you tell us, Doctor?” Larsen said, following his words with an amused glance at the second SEAL.
“Bunch of dead sailors,” I said. “What’s in the next compartment?”
“Campbell’s in there,” the stockier SEAL said to Larsen. “Just more of the same.”
“It’s the forward battery bay. You want to see it, Doc?” the lieutenant asked.
I nodded. “Why not? I want to at least make sure the whole crew is accounted for.”
“We’ve found thirty bodies. Doesn’t hurt for you to double-check, though,” Larsen said, picking his way through the carnage as he walked toward the compartment’s forward hatch. “Don’t want any angry Koreans jumping out of the shadows at us.”
The two SEALs’ attention already was refocused on their examination of the room. As I followed Larsen, I heard one of the SEALs grunt with exertion. The sound was accompanied by a meaty thud as another corpse was moved out of the way.
We emerged into a copy of the room Vazquez had been working in. The major differences, however, were the fans of blood on the batteries and the dead sailors draped across the equipment.
“Shit,” I said, hearing the word before I realized I had said it. “Are you sure those weapons they found hadn’t been fired?”
Larsen turned to me, his brown eyebrows raised. “Looks like your professional opinion agrees with mine. ‘Shit’ is right. As in ‘it hit the fan.’” There was a SEAL standing between two bodies in the middle of the compartment, applying a wrench to a tube mounted on the ceiling. He had taken off his watch cap, revealing a red buzzcut. As we began speaking, he stopped and faced us. I took note of an unblemished face, high cheekbones and a jawline that defined but didn’t dominate his face. Some Native American in him, despite the red hair.
“No firearms in here, sir. Just eight stiffs and a bunch of ruined batteries.”
“Ruined?” Larsen said, frowning at the soldier. The expression made his cheeks look even more ravaged.
“Yes, sir. First of all, there are a couple of bodies sort of wedged back across the lower racks on both sides. And there’s a ton of water damage. We reconnect these to the electrical system, we’re gonna get a big-time short, if not a fire. Gas issues for sure.”
“Dammit. ’Scuse me, Doctor.” Larsen shouldered his way past me to the hatch we had just passed through. “Talk to Warrant Officer Campbell, take pictures, do whatever. I have to go figure out how to get this boat to port.” He disappeared through the portal.
Campbell shrugged at me. “What do you want to know?”
“Did you move anything?” I was tired of asking this question, and I wasn’t expecting his answer.
“Actually, no. Well, the ones on the deck I’ve had to slide out of the way a couple of times. But I haven’t even thought about trying to fish these guys out,” he said, kneeling and pointing between the two racks to my left.
I crouched and let my eyes adjust to the dimness under the top battery rack. Lying against the bulkhead, facing away from us, was a dead crewman. He looked as if he were using the batteries as a makeshift bed. I could see some dark stains on the wall by his head.
“There are two more on the other side, plus one flopped over the top rack. Four on the deck. Do you… what kind of ideas do you have about what happened here?” Campbell stood and leaned against one of the racks’ vertical supports and motioned around the room with his left hand.
No blood around the corpses on the floor. But one of them was lying on something. I took a picture, then tugged the object free. It was a gas mask and had been trapped under the man’s midsection.
“Yeah, there’s a couple more of those between the racks. Not near the bodies, though,” he said.
“Hmm.” I tried to allow the scene’s chaos to gel into a theory. “Well, it’s tough to say what happened. I understand that the initial boarding party found chlorine gas, though. And I’ve been told that a battery accident can cause the gas. So maybe you can help me figure this out… how would such an accident take place? What would have to happen?”
He smiled and gestured at the ceiling with the wrench. “Shit, that’s easy, ma’am. These pipes up here? Just about all of ’em failed. I’ll bet they sprayed water all over the goddamn place in here. Soak all of these cells in saltwater, and you got big problems.”
“Where do the pipes go? How did they fail?”
“That I’m not completely sure about. See, this isn’t, like, a standard Romeo boat. The North Koreans bought most of their fleet from China and Russia, but their last few Romeos they’ve built themselves. Tried to improve on the design, I guess.”
“Yeah, I read that, too. This is a modified Romeo class. But…”
“We’ve actually been trained on the operation of a Romeo boat. Capturing a hostile submarine is one of our possible missions, and these things are a dime a dozen, especially with third-world navies. So I can tell you that the big stuff is laid out the same way. The battery compartments are where they should be, the control room’s where it should be, the engines are, too… you see what I’m saying? What they changed were a bunch of details, like hatch locations, ladders, some crew quarters, stuff like that. And when you rearrange details, little changes sort of ripple through the design.”
He whacked the ceiling with the wrench, the discordant sound dying in the cramped space.
“And it looks like one of those ripples was that they needed to relocate some low-pressure seawater piping. I’ve never heard of a submarine design since World War II that had water pipes anywhere near the batteries. I’m not sure if you noticed in the aft battery compartment, but there aren’t any pipes on the ceiling… just a bunch of electrical conduits. But here they are: water pipes. Like I said, I don’t think any of them held up. And you can see the result.”
I nodded. “So… they just broke?”
“Nah. I told you, these are low-pressure. No way they fail all by themselves.”
“But obviously they did burst,” I said, squatting next to the nearest body, a khaki-clad figure with insignia boards on its shoulders. “What would cause the failure?”
“Well, ma’am, I have a theory. I’ll bet you money these pipes tie into one of the ballast tank manifolds. They’re supposed to carry water from the tanks only when they’re not open to the ocean. So they’re not designed to be exposed to pressure at depth. You following me?”
“So far, yeah.”
“Well, if you set about ten valves in the wrong position, then overfilled the ballast tank or tanks that these run to, then you get high-pressure seawater running through pipes that aren’t designed to handle it. Pop,” he said, illustrating an explosion in air with his hands.
“Uh-huh. And then the water sprays all over the batteries. What’s the first effect of that?”
“Shorts, probably. I don’t see any signs of fire. And, of course, chlorine. They dodged a bullet with hydrogen. That separates out of seawater, too. You get a boat filled with hydrogen and oxygen, one spark’ll turn it into a Roman candle.”
I gazed at the corpses on the deck and sighed.
“Valves to the wrong position, overpressured lines, and then they burst. So where are these valves? What are the chances that they’d be set in the wrong position inadvertently?”