“And I want in on that mission, sir. This thing owes us some blood,” Vazquez said, looking up at Larsen, then me, his brown eyes glittering. I felt my insides recoil at the intensity behind them, as if his gaze had groped at some deep, personal part of me.
“We’ll make it pay, Seaman, don’t worry.” Larsen turned his attention to me, and his next words were not surprising in the least. “So what do you think of all this, Doctor?”
“Well, you were with Fire Team Bravo, right?” I said. Campbell wandered over to an empty workstation and sat down. Vazquez returned to the nav table, picking at the bandage on his arm.
“Yeah. I was on point.” Larsen tugged at his ear as he spoke. I could see dense musculature rippling under his close-fitting black sweater. Even when he was trying to calm down he looked deadly.
“So what did you see when you arrived in the galley?”
“Exactly what both of them described. To the right of the hatch, two bodies: MacDonald and Tracy. To the left, Vazquez, sitting against the back of the stove. Campbell was down on the floor next to him, trying to make sure he was OK. Reyes had walked a little farther into the room and was covering the forward part.”
“Wait, Reyes? Who’s Reyes?”
“Seaman Dom Reyes. They call him ‘Muchacho,’ or ‘Chacho’ for short.”
I remembered the name now. “Go on.”
“He was covering the forward area. Ridder, the other man in Bravo, was standing behind him and to his right, covering the starboard bulkhead where the bunks were.”
“And there was no sign of the Serpent.”
“Besides the two dead men and a third covered in blood? No, no sign at all.”
“Come on, Larsen.”
“We didn’t see it, OK? It might as well have turned into a bat and flown away.”
“Everyone was in the galley compartment?”
“That’s affirmative.”
“Did anyone shut the aft hatch after you came in?”
“What are you getting at?”
I held my hands up in a warding-off gesture, preparing for the anger I expected. “Well, if you didn’t close the door, the Serpent could have gotten past you and your men and into a different part of the sub.”
“Shit.” There was no anger in his voice, just disgust. “You’re right. We could have trapped it in there. But even with the doors open, there’s no way it could have slipped through. Not with four people looking for it.”
“It would seem that way,” I said. “But from everything Vazquez has told us-and he’s the only one who’s seen this thing and survived-it’s not subject to normal rules of movement and visibility. I can’t think of a logical way it could have run by you. Our situation seems to be getting less and less logical with each passing minute, though, doesn’t it?”
“You got that right,” Larsen spat.
“How about afterward? Did you guys close the hatches behind you when you came back up here?”
“Pigfucker!” His yell made a couple of the men in the compartment turn around, but he ignored them. “We were too busy trying to stay tactical, and Vazquez was hit. It seemed a lot worse then. So, basically, no. Except for the aft hatch of the electrical control room, all the doors still are wide open.”
“More ground to cover.”
“Yeah, no shit. We’ll get it next time, though. The tactics were sound; if Tracy and Mac had been more careful or if Vazquez had gotten a lucky shot, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” I sensed a little revisionist history in his comments. It was almost as though he were figuring out how to word a report about what had gone wrong.
“May I offer a suggestion?” I asked.
“Can’t hurt.”
“Don’t go after it again. Sit tight in the control compartments. Wait until we get to shore, and then you can send in a wave of shock troops. Or shore personnel can just flood the whole thing with nerve gas. There’s no reason to risk any more of your men.”
He was shaking his head, sighing.
“That’s not an option. Believe me, if I thought we could take care of this thing without putting my men in harm’s way-especially given what we know now about what this thing is capable of-I’d do whatever it took. Unfortunately,” he said, jerking a thumb aft, “if the Serpent wants to kill us all, it can do so. Just start a fire in the fuel area. Or if it’s not feeling suicidal, it can get into the electric motors and pour water on them or something. And then we’ll be back to square one, because we’ll have to get back into the engine room to start up the diesels.”
“So you can’t let it go.”
“No. It’s got to be stopped, killed, or at least contained in a compartment where it can’t threaten us or our mission.”
I looked around the control room. The SEALs seemed restless. Vengeance was in every eye, every clenched jaw. Vazquez’s face remained fixed in a predatory stare that radiated across the room at me.
“What about the Rickover? All this gunfire, they’ve got to be thinking about sending-”
“They aren’t. They’re not going to interfere unless someone tries to sink us, and there’s no way for them to board this piece of shit without us surfacing anyway.”
“Well… how far are we from shore?” I asked, turning to Larsen.
“Not as close as either of us would like. Chief!” Larsen called across the compartment. The SEAL directing the helmsman strode over to us, stuffing his cap into his back pocket. His head was shaved and shimmered with perspiration.
“Yes, sir?” the man said. His brown eyes regarded me for the barest instant before coming to rest on his superior.
“How much progress have we made? When can we expect to put in?”
He half-laughed. It was the sound of utter cynicism. “We’re making six knots, and that’s being generous. When we were running the diesels, we were making about eleven. Seven on just the one. Add it all up, and-the last time we checked the chart, anyway-we were seventeen nautical miles from port.”
His scenario was a little better than the one Campbell had outlined.
“Three hours,” Larsen said to neither of us.
“That’s right, sir. About that long. We crank up the amps, we can cut that in half. But we’ll run out of juice before we get there.”
“No more estimations, Chief. Sit down with Reyes and figure out the top speed we can make to reach port as quickly as possible. No margin of error. No safety net. I want to exhaust the batteries when we pull into our slip. Clear?”
“Yes, sir. Reyes! Come over here,” the chief said, scooting around me and gesturing Vazquez off the nav table.
Larsen’s intense gaze seemed lost someplace outside the control room.
“Lieutenant Larsen?” I said. He faced me, but he still was looking through me, searching, I guessed, for some plan to preserve us. Then he blinked.
“Yes, what?”
“Is there any way we can send for help?”
The idea was now attractive to him at some level. I could see the novelty of it register in his face. But then he shook his head.
“No. Not a chance. I told you before, it would compromise our secrecy.”
“But if-”
“But if secrecy weren’t our goal, Myers, we’d just tow this scow back to port, and we wouldn’t be onboard and, let’s see,” he said as he counted the names on his hand, “Young, Henderson, Wilkes, Miller, Martin, Tracy and MacDonald wouldn’t be dead.”
“That’s a big sacrifice,” I said, not looking away.
“No shit.” But there was no regret in his voice. “Sometimes, though, we don’t get to do things the easy way. Obviously there’s something important on this sub, and I think you’ll agree with me when I say that the rest of the world does not-repeat, does not-need to know about it.”
“Are there any circumstances in which you’d compromise the element of secrecy?”