Larsen walked over to the nav table and sat down, motioning me into the seat of the adjacent sonar station. Ridder had returned to the helm. If he had found anything unusual or interesting in our exchange, he had shown it by keeping his eyes forward and his body stationary.
“So what advice can you give me about this thing?” Larsen said after I was seated.
“I’m not sure yet. What happened back there? I mean, obviously, I heard the intercom, all the screaming and stuff.” I struggled to fight off another wave of trepidation. “Who was with Vazquez? Campbell. Who else?”
“Matthews. He’s dead. We… we had to leave the body back there. Like the others.”
“Matthews, Campbell, Vazquez. Do you know who was on point? How the group was organized?”
Larsen shook his head, picking at the surface of the table as he looked at me. “I don’t know for sure. I’d guess Matthews was in front. His body was in the torpedo room-we could see it through the hatch.”
“You didn’t go into that compartment?”
“No. Campbell was in the area between the engine room and the torpedo room, lying face-down, feet pointing aft.”
Larsen had been paying attention to me as I investigated earlier. He knew what I wanted to know before I asked it.
“Facing forward. OK. What’s in the compartment he was found in?”
“Nothing important. Storage lockers. A short bulkhead of bunks. A bilge-pump station. Why?”
“Just trying to set the scene a little. So Campbell was in there. Matthews was in the torpedo room… did you get a good look at him? Could you tell what had happened?”
“He was kind of curled up on his side, facing us. Blood all over the place. His face was sort of smashed in. But we knew he was dead because his neck had been ripped open, almost all the way around,” Larsen said, emotion slowing his speech. “Like I said, though, I just got a short glimpse of the compartment. We grabbed Campbell and retreated.”
“No sign of Vazquez?”
“You heard what happened to him.”
“But did you see any indication of a struggle? Anything like that?”
“There was a cap, a stocking cap like this,” he said, pointing to his own head, “lying on the deck near the tubes.” He closed his eyes for a moment. I saw the orbs jittering behind their lids, trying to reconstruct an unpleasant memory. “And the port side tube door was smeared with blood. The starboard door was open.”
“Did you see the Serpent?” It couldn’t have gotten past them, and such a massive presence would have been hard to miss.
“That’s the thing,” he said, looking at the tabletop. It was the first time I could remember him being unwilling to make eye contact. “We didn’t… I mean, we were just recovering Campbell. That was our first priority, you know? We were focused on him. I didn’t want to risk sending any of us into the torpedo room with Campbell lying right there.”
He was embarrassed. And judging by the twitches along his jawline, he was angry that he was embarrassed. The SEALs had rushed in to try to rescue their comrades and abandoned the idea of containing the Serpent on one part of the sub at any cost.
“But nothing was visible through the hatch?” I cut him a little slack. No point in continuing to prod him in a tender spot.
“No. Nothing moving, nothing in our field of view. We got Campbell, we pulled back, and nothing got past us.”
“What about Campbell’s rifle?”
“Huh?” His eyes returned to mine.
“Campbell’s rifle. He didn’t have it when you guys brought him back. Was it on the floor by him?”
“Shit. No, it wasn’t. The Serpent must have it now.”
“No need for stealth anymore. It knows we know it’s there.”
The million-dollar question was forming on his lips, but I beat him to it.
“This is all speculation, all right? I don’t think we really need to know exactly what went down back there at this point, but here’s my guess: The
Serpent was in the torpedo room. Matthews entered first, and the Serpent attacked him, probably using Matthews’s own knife to kill him before he could react. Vazquez tried to engage, but the Serpent incapacitated him. Threw him against the wall, maybe, or just hit him. I think he survived initially because the Serpent still was dealing with Matthews’s struggles.
“Campbell, meanwhile, is bringing up the rear and sees all this.” I knew I was presenting a much more concrete-sounding story than the evidence warranted. But the movie theater in my head had opened again and was showing yet another horror flick. “I doubt he tried to climb into the torpedo room. Whether he did or not, the Serpent shot him, maybe with Matthews’s rifle. It drops Matthews and moves over to Campbell— remember how ungodly quick it is — and bashes him with the butt of the rifle. But it doesn’t finish him off.
“Why? Because Vazquez is regaining his senses. The Serpent knows Campbell isn’t an immediate threat, so he returns to Vazquez and… and…”
Larsen was engrossed in my narrative, his mouth open.
“And what?” he asked.
The movie faded. I was back in the control room, looking at a black-clad SEAL’s confused expression over the nav table.
“To a certain extent, we know what happens next. I think he broke some of Vazquez’s bones to make him fit in the tube… his collarbones, maybe? And then stuffed him in the torpedo tube and shot him out.”
“Dear God. Every time I think about that it seems worse.”
“Yeah. I know.” I was trying not to let my imagination place me inside Vazquez’s body. I didn’t want to know how he felt as he was mutilated, what was going through his mind as the tube door slammed shut, cutting him off from light, air and life. “But that’s not why I stopped. I’m thinking. Trying to understand why the Serpent broadcast the whole thing to the rest of the boat.”
“To scare us?”
“That seems the most obvious answer, doesn’t it? A little psychological warfare, trying to tell the rest of us what it’s going to do when we finally meet it face-to-face.”
“You think there’s something else?” No sarcasm this time. It seemed an honest question.
“We keep ignoring the fact that it’s insane. We can’t always ascribe rational motivations to its actions. I think, more than any tactical advantage, it just wanted us to know it was there, let us into its world. Serial killers do this all the time-subconsciously leave reminders, clues about where they’re coming from. Keep in mind that ‘where they’re coming from’ is an extraordinarily bizarre place. You and I can’t go there, nor would we want to. But the more they tell us about it, the more we learn about them. And the more we learn about them, the easier it is to catch them.”
“Or kill them.”
“That too. I think that’s the best plan for the Serpent, don’t you?” Graveyard humor. Neither of us laughed.
“OK, Myers. It’s trying to give us a glimpse at its ‘world,’ whatever that is. Can we use that against it?”
I nodded. “I think we can.”
“Goddamn, there has not been enough good news today. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“It wants us off the sub.”
“Off the sub? I don’t get it.”
“Why would it go through the trouble of shooting Vazquez out the tube? Why not just snap his neck and be done with it?”
“I wish it had.”
“Me too. But instead of just killing him, it went through a fairly elaborate procedure. And based on what you told me you saw, I think it was in the process of doing the same thing with Matthews when your team opened the hatch from the engine room and went in after the other men.”
“It wanted to shoot them both out?”
“Yes. It hadn’t had access to the torpedo tubes before, or any other way of physically removing its victims from the boat. But this time it did.”