He nodded at Larsen, who crouched and looked through the grated floor. Below us were two more SEALs, one of whom was covering the aft door with his rifle while the other bent over a piece of machinery a few feet away. The one watching the door glanced up, saw Larsen, and made three quick gestures.
Larsen moved to the ladder and climbed down as I watched. When he reached the bottom, he looked up and gave me the “clear” signal.
I followed him, coherent thought obliterated by the torrent of noise from the engine. The sound and the room’s brilliant lighting made me want to duck, to run, to get away from the interruption of the submarine’s dull interior.
On the bottom deck, Larsen already had opened the hatch and was aiming his rifle through it. He stepped into the battery bay: after crouching and waiting for his OK, I joined him.
The door clanged shut behind me, and I felt my body relax as the engine’s fury was diminished by the steel bulkhead.
We were standing in a room I had been in before, and in which function, not comfort, was king. But compared with the officers’ quarters-and occasional trips to the control room-the slight change in surroundings felt like a trip to an open meadow.
Larsen was at the opposite hatch, scanning the galley.
“Vazquez! What the fuck are you doing?” he yelled.
I tensed and scrabbled for the door latch behind me.
There was a response from the other room, but it was made incomprehensible by the two rooms’ acoustics.
“I don’t care if you’re hungry-this boat isn’t secure! What the fuck could… no, don’t talk anymore.” Larsen had straightened up now and stepped through the doorway.
I moved forward, around the two bodies I had examined earlier. Larsen continued to scream in the galley, his vitriol directed to my left, out of my field of vision.
“Put the goddamn bread down and get back on station, sailor! I want you by the forward hatch covering CAMPBELL’S MOTHER-FUCKING ASS!”
Vazquez jogged across the galley and stopped near the door at the end of the room opposite me. His swarthy complexion was flushed, and he was sweating.
Larsen waved at me to follow him. He didn’t look at Vazquez as he stepped into the forward battery bay.
The SEAL tried to smile at me as I passed, but the expression died on his face and never made it to his brown eyes.
In the next compartment, Campbell stood facing us, flanked by the two-tiered racks that stored half of the sub’s batteries.
“Sir, what was going on out-”
“Fucking Vazquez was over by the food locker gnawing on a hunk of bread. Unbelievable.” Larsen held up a hand to stop the question forming in Campbell’s mouth. “Tell us what you found.”
Campbell had been trying to maintain a poker face, but he was too pale to pull it off. His voice matched his pallor as he pointed into the space between the racks on the port side.
“It’s… well, I came in here and started going through the captain’s pockets. I finished without any problems. But as I stood up, I saw Martin.”
Larsen had taken a step toward the rack before Campbell finished.
“Goddamit,” I heard him say under his breath. Then, louder, “God damn it!”
Over his shoulder, I could see what Campbell was referring to. It was Martin, the SEAL who had been working in the engine room.
There were bruises on his neck, but he hadn’t been strangled. He was lying on his right side, chest toward the bulkhead, on the lower battery shelf. His head, however, faced the opposite direction, toward us.
“What the fuck, Doctor, was his neck broken?” Larsen said.
“Could be postmortem,” I said. “But I doubt it. The bruising’s not going to occur like that if it happened after he was dead. So yeah, looks like someone snapped his neck.”
“Like a pretzel,” Larsen said. “Like a-” He stopped, grasping the bridge of his nose. When he spoke again, his voice was level, empty of emotion.
“I need you to learn everything you can about what happened to him, Christine,” he said. “Campbell will cover you. When you’re finished, call up to the control room, and I’ll send down cover for you two to return to the top deck.”
He swung himself into the galley area and gestured for Vazquez to follow him.
I turned to Campbell. “What happened here?”
“It’s just like I described. I was standing up, and I saw the body. Then I called the control room.”
“You haven’t moved it?”
“Moved what… oh. No, I haven’t moved the body.” He looked at the floor, then back at me. “What happened to him?”
“You got a flashlight?” I asked. He unclipped the light from the barrel of his rifle and handed it to me. I turned it on, shining the sterile white beam on the body. “I don’t have any of my stuff down here. So this is going to be pretty inexact.
“Legs appear intact. No visible wounds there. Same with the torso. Look, I can’t get to the body at all to examine it. There isn’t any indication he died of anything except a broken neck.”
“That’s all you can tell?”
“That’s all I can tell about the cause of death,” I said, trying not to hear the desperation in his voice. “But tell me this: how do you carry your weapons when you’re not planning to use them?”
“Like this,” he said, slipping his rifle under his left arm and onto his back. Its strap now lay across his chest.
“That’s the position Martin’s weapon is in,” I said. “See?”
The SEAL’s rifle was lying with him on top of the batteries, about a foot and a half away from his contorted face, its strap still looped across his chest.
“He was surprised. Thoroughly surprised,” I said.
Campbell’s gaze was fixed on the weapon. “He didn’t even get a chance to fight back.”
“No. But it was quick,” I lied. It may have been instantaneous, or he may have suffocated to death, his frantic attempts to breathe stymied by a severed spinal cord.
“Why is he in there?” Campbell asked.
“Impossible to tell. But we have to surmise that he was thrown, not shoved in, because of the possibility of electrocution. You couldn’t touch him once he was touching the batteries.” I paused, drumming my fingers on the flashlight’s barrel. “Could be that whoever did this threw him between the battery racks, hoping he’d blend in with the rest of the corpses. But his head lolled back and gave it away. That’s just a guess, though.”
“His head… how could someone do that?”
I couldn’t tell whether Campbell wanted a motive or a physical mechanism. A clinical answer seemed best. I felt a sudden compulsion to do anything I could to eradicate the mixture of wonder and fear I heard in his words.
“It would take a lot of strength. But remember that Martin was surprised. He didn’t have a chance to resist. If you suddenly apply a bunch of torque to someone’s head-well, the attacker would have to be very strong, but not superhuman.” I didn’t add that Martin’s injury would have been fatal long before his head was facing the wrong way. If murder was his assailant’s only intent, the injury was far more brutal than necessary.
“And we have to just leave him there. Dammit!” Campbell was angry now. It comforted me. “He deserved better than that. But we’re gonna find who did this. Right, Doctor?”
“The attacker is on the submarine, obviously,” I said. “They’re not getting off until we surface.”
“Yeah, and we’re not gonna surface until we find that asshole,” Campbell said, pushing past me to the aft door.
“Hey, Campbell?” I asked. “I don’t get it. Why were you guys so cavalier before, when Miller and Martin were just missing, but now you’re all out for blood? What’s changed?”
He remained facing away from me. I could see droplets of sweat suspended in the red bristles of his hair. “You don’t understand. Everything’s changed now.”