He didn’t say anything, waiting for an explanation for my question before he answered it.
“Because what if it’s just me, I’m the only one left?” I continued. “Or what if we’re in danger of losing the sub, not to our enemies’ spy satellites, but to the Serpent itself? If it kills us all, we’re dead and Patterson doesn’t get his intel.”
“If the Dragon is in danger of falling out of our control, I’ll think about using the UQC,” he said. “But it’s not going to happen. Now, I hate to cut this conversation short, but I have to go lead my men.”
And I was an outsider again. At least he hadn’t told me to get out of the control room.
As I looked around, however, I saw how unreasonable such an order would be-not that he would hesitate to give it anyway. There were six men in the room now. That left three elsewhere; I assumed they were in the electrical compartment, to which the hatch now was closed.
Seven people in here, including one unarmed civilian. Larsen and Matthews were conferring near the steering controls. The chief was seated at the nav table with the smaller of the two men I first had encountered amid the corpses in the galley. He chewed on his lip as he scribbled on a piece of paper. Hispanic features, tattoo of a fist on the right side of his neck. That would be Reyes, then. Another man was operating the helm. Campbell was still at an unused workstation, staring at nothing.
The moment when I met Larsen and the other SEALs now seemed distant, as much a part of an alternate reality as my home back on land.
What about the Serpent? We had seen it face-to-face now and had some kind of a report on its capabilities.
My question about its clothes, however, hadn’t been as meaningless as Larsen had thought. I couldn’t figure out why its shirt was ripped and tattered, as Vazquez had described it. First of all, why would it be wearing any clothes at all? Did the technicians who packed it into the refrigerator have an overreaching sense of modesty?
Second, even if it had been wearing clothes, why were they ripped? It had already undergone its physical transformation, so wouldn’t it be dressed in items that fit it?
One explanation kept hammering at me, demanding to be let to the forefront. I told myself I didn’t want to give it precedence because there still were other avenues to consider. But there was a much stronger, much more human reason for trying to avoid it. Fear.
Because if this “improved human” were indeed still improving to the point where it was growing out of its clothes, we all had a lot to be afraid of. Every moment we waited, it was getting stronger and, I had to assume, smarter. So maybe Larsen was right in wanting to launch another search-and-destroy mission as soon as possible. He just didn’t realize the depths of his wisdom.
I crossed to the other side of the compartment. No one I passed looked at me. Neither did Campbell, who was at the workstation next to the one
I sat down in, running his fingertips over the blued finish of his rifle.
All the SEALs were focused. And that was good. I just doubted they were thinking about the situation from every possible angle. It was a skill I had learned not in the classrooms of Georgetown, but at the countless crime scenes I had stepped into since then.
If you succumb to tunnel vision, you lose. Period.
In a fetid Guatemalan hallway overlooking a village square, I had seen mortal evidence of that mistake. I remembered the sun scalding my eyes as I walked from my jeep, accompanied by three Army Rangers and a local officer. Four American-trained counter-insurgency troopers-sent to the village for some noble purpose, their commander had assured me through a flinty-eyed interpreter-lay dead, head to toe. Their assault rifles had full magazines. None had struggled with his attacker. Blood soaked into the floorboards from four slit throats, the air thick and wet with its coppery smell. A single set of red footprints led away from the corpses.
It had seemed an impossible crime; four men with automatic weapons overcome by one with a boot knife. But as I waited in the tiny, patchwork airport for my flight back to civilization, puzzling through what I had seen in the village, I remembered a flier posted on an adobe wall near the square. “Desfile el sabado.” Parade Saturday. The day the soldiers’ bodies had been found. I could feel a connection.
A few phone calls filled in the rest. The parade’s purpose was to celebrate the opening of the district’s new, communal deep well. Its champion was the village’s mayor, noted for his socialist leanings. The parade would culminate with a speech in the square.
My job was to explain it all, and I did. I had felt satisfaction and disgust as I delivered my report to Charlie, who would pass it on to some Special Forces commander in South America, who would use it to help future assassins avoid the same fate. The case, more than most of the others I had worked on, had almost overwhelmed my love for my work and its challenges. I typed up a resignation letter and for nearly a month debated handing it to Charlie. But I didn’t.
What I told him: The four soldiers had been moving into position to either shoot the mayor or just ignite panic by firing into the crowd. As they moved through the hallway, intent on murder, someone had slipped in behind them. He killed the man at the rear of the column, and the three in front had been too confident, too fixated on their task and tar-get-“hunter’s hard-on,” fighter pilots call it — to notice as the body was lowered to the floor in silence. And they had died the same way, one by one, oblivious, their life spraying out into the afternoon as cheers outside concealed the sound of their last gurgling breaths.
What were the SEALs fixating on? Victory. That was clear in their posture, their attitude toward ass-kicking. Larsen also wasn’t allowing himself to get too distracted by the specifics of each fatality. In his view, that was my job, to pore over the reports he let me hear and tell him what had gone wrong. But even that was starting to fade. He wanted to know what the Serpent was and where it was, not how it had done what it did.
That was a mistake. Know your enemy-who had said that? It was applicable here. No other parameter was changing. Not the battlefield, not the conditions, not the combatants, unless you counted our dwindling numbers as a change. So to ensure victory, we needed to know more about the one unknown: the Serpent itself.
The thing that was most troubling about it was its brain. If the person the Korean scientists had used as a subject was at least of average intelligence, we were up against a genius now, a murderous Stephen Hawking. If it wanted us dead, the Serpent could find a way to make it happen.
So it was acting according to some plan. Was there a pattern? It had killed two engine-room crews. So it wanted the sub to stop, to lose power. Or maybe it was just working its way toward the control room. It wanted to take over the sub-that much made sense.
No one on the outside was expecting communications from us. If the Dragon changed course, maybe got within a mile or so of shore and then stopped, no one would investigate until it was too late. The Serpent would have made it to land by the time another boarding party arrived. I had no illusions that it was incapable of swimming that far.
Stop it, Christine, I told myself. I was making a trap of assumptions, creating walls that could keep the truth from being seen. This thing was insane, right? Hadn’t the report said that? Basing my model of the Serpent on rational motives was like trying to build a skyscraper out of gelatin.
Even serial killers, however, had motives, reasons for their behavior. The rationality in those reasons lay in the heads of those who were driven by them. We on the outside could only look for patterns-that all-important word again-and try to divine what twisted mechanism was at work.