He looked up as I swung myself into the room, then stood as he saw my expression.
“Is there a problem?” he said.
“No, no,” I said, waving him off. “I just need to check something in here.”
Looking at the hatch in person, I saw what had caught my attention in the photo: A chain, each link the size of a child’s fist, was wrapped five or six times around the dogging wheel’s lower edge and a nearby pipe, secured with a fist-sized padlock. The pipe had bent a degree or so.
“Hey, could you come here for a minute?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said as he moved in behind me.
“What’s your name?”
“Seaman Richard Jakes. Why do-”
“OK, Richard. Is this setup, with the chain and the closed hatch, is this normal?”
The odor of gun oil and perspiration washed over me as he leaned over my shoulder.
“Nope. These things… you’re not supposed to be able to lock them? I don’t know why you’d chain it up like this.”
“Huh.” That was all I could manage to say as my mind churned through the information.
“On the other hand, ma’am, it’s not like this is a state-of-the-art boat or nothing. Maybe it kept swinging open, or wouldn’t stay open, or something, and they just secured it like that to keep it out of the way. You never know. I’ve seen North Korean equipment before, and they can find a way to cut corners with just about everything.” He straightened. “Is that what you needed?”
“Yeah, Richard, thanks,” I said, snapping a picture of the chained door and bent pipe. “I think I’m done here. I’ll get out of your way.”
He stepped back a few paces as I moved over to the ladder. “I don’t see anything else unusual in here, if that’s any help. Besides the dead guy.”
“Thanks,” I said again, already halfway through the hatch.
Young was at the aft end of the hallway now, squatting and talking to someone in the control room. He didn’t seem to notice as I returned to the officers’ mess area.
I sat back down and closed the door.
The mental filmstrip I had for the three body-strewn compartments was shapeless and filled with gaps. So much fighting… but over what? And why had the forward battery bay hatch been sealed?
I tried to picture the sailors grappling with each other, punching, rolling on the floor. Green death billowing from the forward battery compartment. Some had brought gas masks, but they had been lost in the fray.
Why had the crewmen stayed? Why, their lungs burning, stomach muscles tearing as they tried to cough away the searing pain in their chests, hadn’t they run? The chlorine had no doubt infiltrated the rest of the submarine, but not in the concentrations that must have been present around its source.
But two men had run. One went to the control room in a bid to surface the ship. The other shot him. My impressions of those events were much clearer, but their motivations still were lost in the haze of the battle on the lower deck.
Start from the beginning. Pipes burst over the forward battery bay. Chlorine begins roiling from the spoiled batteries.
Oh, Christ, this wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I didn’t know whether that was the beginning or not. My imagination was supplying most of the details.
Facts. Just plant the facts in a blank script, and see whether they connect to one another and form a plot.
I rubbed my temples, trying to massage away the sudden spears of frustration and stress.
There had been some kind of conflict in three compartments on the lower deck. How did we know that? Because there were dead people tossed about the rooms, some of whom featured visible injuries.
All the officers except one lay among the devastation there. Lee had made it to the forward torpedo room. But the lower door from the battery bay was locked. Did he chain it shut behind him? No, it was locked when he fled the fight because he entered the control room at its aft end and continued to the torpedo compartment. There was one sliver of storyline.
Maybe Lee wasn’t involved in the fight, though. Maybe he came from another part of the ship, farther aft. Except he died as a result of chlorine inhalation. There wouldn’t have been enough of the gas in the rest of the sub to have caused that kind of massive pulmonary damage so fast. So he must have been in the thick of the violence at some point.
Same thing went for Ahn. Everyone onboard had been part of the struggle in three chlorine-saturated rooms.
And I knew the burst pipes were a deliberate act, or an act of gross incompetence. Who would instigate a chlorine accident on a submerged submarine? It was a desperate move that seemed to guarantee the demise of whoever arranged it. The thirty corpses proved the truth of that.
Lee had left the fight to shoot Ahn. Why had Ahn left the fight? To surface the submarine. Why would he do that? Or, more important, why was he the sole crewman who sought to do so?
I pushed those questions to the side as I felt my imagination begin to dump speculation into the blanks.
All the other hatches I had seen had been open during the fight. So an escape route was open. But, again, no one tried to flee. There was a motive there. The pain and fear chlorine inflicted was too much for a person to just shrug off. The sailors stayed in the area for a reason.
Now my thoughts were beginning to chase each other around in my head. Anchored in the center of the whirlpool, however, was one image I couldn’t let go of: the biohazard symbol on that refrigerator in the forward battery compartment. An electronic lock, its technological complexity decades ahead of any of the sub’s other equipment.
That told me something important was inside. And the stated reason for this sub’s importance was the weapons research it carried. I shook my head and allowed myself to fall over the edge into a supposition. It was a small one, I told myself, and could be changed later as evidence warranted.
The locker held whatever intelligence information the United States was so keen on getting. Nothing else on the boat presented any value to a nation that hadn’t fielded a diesel-electric sub in fifty years.
If that were true, it might explain the motivation for a free-for-all on a submarine. It might also offer a reason why someone triggered a gas accident that submariners would consider the stuff of black nightmares.
Not a concrete reason, for sure, but it provided a small glint of rationality in what otherwise appeared to be a scene of wanton violence.
The door swung open, and Larsen walked into my forensic daydream.
He sighed as he sat, pushing himself down the bench and hoisting his legs onto it. I could hear his neck crackle as he swiveled his head.
“Tough day at the office, Cap’n Nemo?” I said.
He looked up at me. If I had been standing, his expression would have made me take a step back. Then it melted away and he laughed.
“Nemo. Right.” He let his head loll back and closed his eyes. “You know, this submarine capture business is one of our most peripheral missions. I mean, I imagine that someone who studies violence for a living knows that SEALs spend most of their time conducting covert operations in places where conventional forces would fail. Rescues, high-value target elimination, demolition, intelligence gathering, you know. Not taking over antique submarines.”
I winced and nodded at the “violence for a living” comment. I deserved it this time.
“I mean, hell, this is only our fourth time aboard a boat like this,” Larsen continued, opening his eyes and focusing them on me. “I’m not sure where they found a spare Romeo lying around, but they did, and we worked on its operations. We had general training on the operation of a sub, and knew the layouts of several more advanced models… Russian nuke boats, mainly. But then these North Koreans decide they want to give Uncle Sam an early birthday present and head over here in their submarine to deliver it. So, of course, we learn how to take control of such a boat, just in case they lose their nerve at the last second or something.”