The two SEALs in the electrical control room had been joined by the ones I had seen tidying up the galley. None of them glanced at me as I slipped through the compartment, their heads bowed to panels of blinking lights and quivering indicator needles.
I squatted and wiggled into the control room. It was a maelstrom of activity, with SEALs flipping switches and calling out gauge readings to one another. There was no sign of the dead crewman.
Larsen stood unaffected in the center of the action, his arms crossed, watching his men work. He did nothing to indicate he had seen me emerge into the scene.
“Time?” he asked, keeping his eyes focused on the SEAL settling into the steering station.
“Ah… 0450 hours, sir,” came a voice from the left side of the control room.
“We need to get down,” Larsen said, again speaking to the air in front of him. “Find out what the status on the engines is.”
“Aye-aye, sir.” The SEAL who responded was standing at the station to the left of the helm. His posture seemed hunched and predatory, and I realized he had to duck just to stand in the compartment. He reached up to a metal box mounted on the wall next to his head and depressed a switch. I recognized it as part of the intercom system I had encountered in the forward torpedo room.
“Engineering, conn. How’re the engines coming along?” he said.
A tinny voice responded from the speaker. “Conn, engineering. We’re ready to go on both shafts.”
The lanky SEAL turned to Larsen. “Sir, engineering reports that the engines are ready.”
“Very well. Start the diesels.”
“Engineering, conn. Fire ’em up,” he said into the speaker.
“Aye-aye, sir,” it replied.
I heard a clang from the compartment I had just left. Crouching, I could see that the SEALs had sealed the hatch at the aft end of the room.
Then a vibration tickled the soles of my feet. It stopped, started, then erupted into a rumbling crescendo. The deck hummed with unseen energy, making it seem as if we were in the belly of some slumbering monster that had coughed and awakened.
“All ahead one-third,” Larsen said.
“All ahead one-third, aye,” the SEAL next to the helm replied. The man standing at the control station advanced two chrome levers mounted on a waist-high panel to his right.
Without any reference point, I was caught off-guard by the sudden shift in my personal inertia. We were moving.
“Prepare to dive and snort,” the SEAL commander said.
“Prepare to dive, aye,” came the reply. The hands of the SEALs on my side of the room flitted amid the snarls of pipes and valves there.
“Uh, excuse me. Could you move a little bit?” a voice said behind me.
It was Campbell, looking almost apologetic. “I need to get in here.”
Larsen turned, bracing himself on the forward periscope, and acknowledged my presence.
“Doctor, we don’t have room for you in here. Go to the officers’ mess in the next compartment. Young will show you where it is.” He pointed to the forward hatch, then swung himself back to his original position.
“Sure, no problem,” I said, though my words seemed drowned out by a room full of indifference. I dodged my way to the hatch and into the hallway on the other side. The SEAL I had seen in my first trip through still filled the cramped space, leaning against the bulkhead. That must be Young.
He looked like a perfect California surfer dude, with an effortless tan and features that would make cheerleaders melt. His face had no flaws that I could see, besides the lechery in his gray eyes.
Young raised his eyebrows. “Coming through again?”
“Which one of these doors is the officers’ mess room?” I said. His eyes now seemed fascinated by the GEORGETOWN written in blue across my sweatshirt.
“Yeah, it’s this one,” he said, peeling his gaze from my chest long enough to point at the forward-most door on the left. “You probably want to go in there and have a seat. Now that we’re underway, we’re gonna dive pretty soon. It could get… rough.”
“Right, thanks,” I said, trying to compress myself as much as possible while I shuffled past him.
“You need a hand? Diving in a submarine ain’t like riding a subway.”
“No, I’m fine.”
The door looked like a man’s shoulders would brush the edges of the frame when he passed through. The room on the other side was compact as well. It was about as long as a picnic table and arranged the same way, with uncushioned benches fixed on the walls around it. There was enough space inside the door for two people to stand side-by-side, but everyone else in the room would have to sit.
The room’s walls matched the hallway, their brown surfaces gleaming with artificial wood grain. A hutch for making coffee or tea was set in the wall to the right of the door, and the walls were bare except for four black-and-white photos of a submarine, one on each wall. It was the Dragon, I assumed.
I tossed my bag on the table’s white laminate surface and slithered in, leaving the door open. As I sat, my stomach and inner ear told me that my world was reorienting.
The change was subtle at first. The engine vibration seemed to take on a deeper, more muted timbre. I could hear water rushing into ballast tanks, metal creaking under new stresses.
And then my bag began to slide across the table. I held onto it, feeling gravity tug me toward the bow of the sub, and glanced up as I saw a figure move into the doorway. It was Young, his eyes glittering in the hallway’s gloom. His smile revealed a single flaw: a mouth full of aimless, crooked teeth.
“Going down?” he said.
IV
The world leveled itself out before too long. Young watched me the whole time, chatting at the side of my head through the doorway.
“Yeah, this feels like about fifteen degrees. Not too steep, you know, or we’d just keep going down. Couldn’t stop. These old boats are weird that way.” He paused and listened for a moment. “Almost there. We’re not going very deep because we’re using the diesels. There’s this big snorkel thing that sticks up above the water and gets air so we can use the engines. So we’re only, like, sixty feet down.”
I turned to him and flashed a tight-lipped smile, then began sifting through the items in my bag.
“Only sixty feet down,” he continued. “But it’s still dangerous. We get a hull leak, we might not come back up. Or if the snorkel fails, the engines’ll suck up all the air in the boat. Zzzzzzwhup! Hey, what’s that?” I had pulled the Tokarev out as the dive ended and the floor once again represented where “down” was.
“Norinco M 213.” I laid it on the table, then set the bags of shells and casings down next to it.
“Shit, lady, you can’t just bring a gun with you when-”
“It’s evidence,” I said, speaking to the pistol as I held its bag up to the light. “Would you mind giving me a few minutes to myself? I need to look through all of this stuff. Thanks.”
“Sure, whatever,” he said, and after a moment I heard him step back down the hallway.
By the time I had emptied the duffel, the tabletop was all but covered by evidence bags. The light was better in here: four bulbs’ illumination was diffused by square, white covers.
I had a gun, which looked as though it had been fired twice. I had a dead crewman, who looked as though he had been shot twice. Fine. Who shot him?
Flipping through the index of pictures on my camera, I found the one I was looking for and held it next to the sub’s dossier. The man was wearing an officer’s uniform, and… he was indeed an officer. Lee Tae-Uk, the ship’s executive, had been the one holding the gun in the forward torpedo room. Although he wasn’t smiling in my picture, his broad nose and thick eyebrows were unmistakable.