VI
As I walked back to the officers’ mess, I marveled at how little resistance Larsen had presented. I had expected a speech about how I was asking him to risk the lives of his men for some puny piece of information I had been too stupid to deal with myself. And he hadn’t even asked what the missing evidence was.
I couldn’t figure him out, and it made me uneasy. It was impossible to count on him being either helpful or hostile. Was that deliberate? Or was he an unpredictable jerk to everyone? I didn’t like being kept off-balance. When you try to figure out the motivations of the dead, they don’t change while you’re working. Living people are harder to analyze.
I sat down on the bench, which was still warm.
The submarine’s jarring combination of human and mechanical stenches had faded from the foreground of my senses, I noticed. And my world had shrunk to one thirty-foot hallway. It was easy to forget that there was another reality beyond the metal and wan lighting.
It might have been subconscious. My mind, knowing how terrifying and inhospitable the environment I was submerged in was, focused on other things. The conduits on the ceiling were solid, tangible, arranged by human hands. The deck’s grayness added to its solidity. When you stood on it, you weren’t underwater. You were in control, on unyielding steel.
As I let my thoughts drift, I felt the floor once again flutter with vibrations. So they had gotten one of the diesels running.
The fact settled in my brain, accompanied by an abrupt feeling of disjointedness. The engine had started. Oh, good. In my house, the startup of my air conditioner registered in the same way. But that house, that life… they seemed separated from me by more than a few dozen miles of ocean.
I didn’t feel far from home. I felt like home was a dream, and the sub’s confining, protecting walls were my real here and now. Claustrophobia and fears of drowning weren’t a part of this world. And it wasn’t as though I were ducking them, trying to keep my mental energies focused on other things. Those worries were, like the sea, shut out by the submarine’s pressure hull. There was no other way to deal with them.
In a more academic setting, the phenomenon I was witnessing in myself would have made a fine research paper.
Amid these abstractions swam a table full of evidence. Fingerprints. Blood. A gun, shell casings, bullets. Photographs. And it all meant… what? They were artifacts of actual events, immutable actions that had already occurred. But the events, however concrete they may have been to their participants, were growing more and more ephemeral to us here in the present.
I could tell Patterson who shot whom on the Dragon. The obvious murder had an obvious answer.
“Lee kills Ahn, tries to escape,” I muttered to myself.
I imagined an invisible audience in the room, the ship’s officers gathered there listening to me try to surmise how they died.
Chlorine. Most of them had died in an invisible, inescapable torture chamber. Their throats burning, their lungs screaming for oxygen as they filled with blood and acid.
A few had died faster, their heads staved in by massive blows. One had been strangled, right? I thought back… yes. In the forward battery bay. Those were easier to deal with. Common violence. Humans had a facility for dispatching one another, and their work was simple to discern and examine.
But aside from the most brutal psychoses, our species didn’t off one another without reason. Territory. Property. Anger. What did all the men in the Dragon's belly die for? What was the rationale behind their demise?
Larsen’s voice cackled in my head. “Mutiny, you dumb bitch,” I heard, my mind supplying the pejorative and the smirk with which it would be delivered.
On a gut level, mutiny worked. The Dragon's mission had been one of treachery to its crew’s home country. That implicit treason was bound to chafe, to create second thoughts.
Had the captain ordered them to turn around? Had half the crew, so close to a new life in the United States, rebelled and fought him?
But the scalpel edges of reason eviscerated this scenario. If there had been a battle for control of the ship, why had none of it centered around the control room?
As the possibilities whirred through my mind, a word kept slithering to the top: serpent.
It was dark, its enigmatic nuances shrouded in shadows and secrecy. Lee’s diary and the note from Yoon indicated that it was at the heart of whatever conspiracy they had launched. The answer, the serpent’s nature and identity, was someplace on this boat, and that fact taunted me.
The sound of the footsteps in the hallway outside must have been buried in the strata of my thoughts. I didn’t notice that a SEAL was standing in the doorway until he spoke.
“Doctor, Lieutenant Larsen needs you in the control room, ASAP.”
I glanced up, the shards of my theorizing scattered by his words. “What?”
“Something’s come up.”
“Right,” I said. I tried to collect myself, to focus on his clean-shaven face, its surface gleaming with a sheen of perspiration. He held his rifle across his chest, one finger resting on the trigger guard. No, it was inside the guard. “What happened?”
“The lieutenant will tell you,” he said as I stood up.
The urgency in this voice set something off inside my chest. It was the feeling of a patient who sees a terrified expression on her doctor’s face.
“Let’s go,” I said.
Inside the control room, Larsen and Matthews were discussing something over the nav table. Both men seemed intense but not angry.
Larsen looked up as the SEAL and I entered.
“Doctor, you and I are going down to the forward battery bay.” He straightened and nodded at his junior officer. “Matthews, you have the conn. You know what to do if Miller is found.”
“Yessir,” the other man said. He stood, and I realized he likely was the tallest person on the sub. Angular features and a hooked nose like a beak. He had tiny eyes wedged into deep sockets in his narrow face. The bone structure wouldn’t look much different without skin.
“Christ in a whorehouse,” Larsen mumbled as he gestured me closer. “You remember the procedure when Grimm was securing the first few compartments?”
“Yeah,” I said, frowning.
“That’s how it’s going to work now. I’m going first into every room. When the room is safe to enter, I will hold up my hand like this,” he said, making an “O” with his thumb and first finger. “Keep behind me at all times. If I start shooting, don’t run. Stay down. If you’re near the hatch, duck back through it. OK?”
“Got it. But-”
“Not now. Just follow me.”
He made eye contact with Matthews again, and the act made me shudder. Larsen’s glance had contained just a whisper of something I hadn’t yet seen on this submarine: fear.
We moved through the electrical control room. Its occupants stood at their stations, acting focused and industrious. But I could feel everyone staring at us as we passed through. Larsen interrupted the silence as he got to the aft hatch.
“Word of warning-it’s going to be really loud in the engine room. Impossible to talk. So just watch me carefully, all right?”
“OK,” I said. He had waited for me to reply, and his sudden show of concern raked across my already jangled nerves.
I was aware that the vibration in the deck had become joined by an identical noise, a sort of rumbling hum that permeated the air. As he opened the hatch, it exploded in a tooth-rattling flood.
Stepping through the hatch after him, I plugged my ears and watched him close the door. In front of us stood Young, his rifle in hand. His face was smudged with grease, the grime standing out like fresh bruises.