“There’s nothing else we can do! Haven’t you figured that out?” Larsen said.
“He’s right,” I said. “It’s only going to get stronger and smarter, and if we let it take the initiative, we don’t have much of a chance.”
“Oh, really?” It was Grimm’s turn to be irritated and condescending now. Maybe he’d learned it from Larsen. “How would you know whether we have a chance or not? There are seven of us and only one of it.”
“Eight, actually, including me. But one of those eight can barely lift a pen, let alone an assault rifle,” I said. “You let the Serpent decide the rules, and we’re playing a losing game. Simple as that. But if we make it react instead of attack, we have a built-in advantage.”
“And we know what it wants,” Larsen said. Back to step one.
“Sure, fine. We know it wants us off the boat, and we know it wants her. Correction, we think it wants us off the boat and wants her. Even if those guesses are right, how do we use them to our advantage?”
Grimm had conceded, even if he didn’t realize it. Maybe now we could decide on a course of action instead of chasing our tails around the control compartment. I beat Larsen to the answer.
“We take advantage of its insanity. Set up a situation that seems too good to be true but is too enticing for it to pass up.”
“Right, yeah, got that. Any specific ideas about how to pull it off?” Grimm again responded to me by speaking to Larsen.
The lieutenant was gone, lost in some tactical wonderland in his head. We watched him in silence.
“OK,” he said. “Myers, you’re going to be bait.”
Bait. I didn’t like to think of myself as a worm on a hook, but it was our best chance of luring it into a trap. I knew that. And most worms weren’t armed, I thought, feeling the barrel of the .45 dig into my back where I had tucked it into my jeans.
“The trap,” he continued, “is going to be the forward torpedo room.”
“Wait, hold on.” Grimm hadn’t objected to using me as a lure, but this wrinkled his face with consternation. “The forward torpedo room? There’s only one way in there.”
“Exactly. And only one way out.”
“The problem, sir, is that the ‘one way’ happens to go through the fucking control room. Are we really going to let the enemy walk through the most important area on the ship? What if it decides to just close the hatches to the compartment?”
“Then we storm that room, have a big shootout, game over.”
Grimm wasn’t convinced. “Look, I don’t care how sex-crazed this thing is, if it gets the chance to control the boat, why wouldn’t it take it? The Serpent is the smartest thing on the sub, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you said?”
Now he was addressing me. It was uncanny how much he resembled Larsen’s old persona.
“Sure, its IQis probably twice as high as any of ours. But-”
“Shut it, Grimm,” Larsen interrupted. “Even if it stays in the control room, and I don’t think it will, we can attack from two sides. Myers is in the forward torpedo room, holding a .45 behind her back.” Damn straight I would be. “Campbell is where he is right now, in the captain’s quarters.”
Grimm wanted to protest again. But Larsen’s verbal pre-emptive strike left him squirming in his chair, swallowing his words. His dark eyes were mutinous.
“Campbell’s in there. Ridder’s in the officers’ mess. The rest of us, we head aft, to the engine room. Then we descend to the lower deck and go forward. Except for one man, who crams himself all the way aft in the engine room, between the powertrains. Beneath that little overhang? You know where I’m talking about? He stays there and watches.”
Grimm seemed a little less upset. But he couldn’t stop himself this time.
“We’re leaving the guy to go one-on-one with the Serpent?” he blurted.
“First, it’s not the Serpent. It’s just a guy who’s been infected with the Serpent.”
Who cares? I thought. Call him Ishmael, it doesn’t matter even a tiny bit for our purposes. Larsen had arrived at the same conclusion.
“Oh, hell, I don’t care. Let’s keep calling it ‘the Serpent.’ That’s not important. The guy in the engine room isn’t going one-on-one. See, the hatch to the electrical compartment is open. And so is the one to the battery bay, the one right in front of our guy on the lower deck of the engine room. So he can see the men covering him, look them right in the eye.
“But what he’s really watching is the upper deck of the control room. Because he’s waiting for the Serpent to run through into the next compartment.”
“But how is it going to know Myers is up there?” Grimm said. “Are we going to announce it on the PA or something?”
“No need.” I could handle this one. “It knows I’m here already, trust me. Its senses are way jacked up, and if it hasn’t heard my voice, which is doubtful, it certainly can smell my pheromones.”
My comment transformed Grimm into a skeptic again.
“Smell you? Are you serious? It’s going to smell the bait like an animal in the woods and just walk into the trap? I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”
“If we had told you yesterday about what was going to happen after we boarded this boat, would you have believed us?” Larsen said. “Of course you wouldn’t have. This virus thing goes beyond our training and experience. But it’s real, because we have nine dead SEALs to prove it.”
“It’ll know I’m there. It will also be drawn to the forward torpedo room because it offers more opportunities to jettison his competition.”
I tried not to think too hard about the second point, but Vazquez’s screams still lingered in my ears.
“The Serpent’s a fucking fruitloop,” Grimm said. The SEAL had to believe what we were saying, but, by God, no one was going to stop him from belittling our quarry.
“No doubt about that,” I said.
Larsen picked up his narrative again. “So it’s going toward Myers. As soon as whoever’s in the engine room sees the Serpent pass through, he signals the other four guys. They form up in the engine room.”
“And attack from behind?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
His answer made me uncomfortable. If the monster is rushing toward me, I want the good guys right on its ass. The .45 was reassuring, but I’d feel better if my assailant were distracted by, say, automatic gunfire from its exposed flanks.
“But relax, Myers, you’re not alone.” He put a comforting hand on my forearm. I couldn’t believe it. “The two guys covering the passageway are the signal, and they’re also what we’re counting on to make sure the Serpent never gets to you. When Campbell sees it, he opens up.”
“From his bed?” Grimm said.
“Yeah. He shoots through the doorway. And that signals two things. One, it tells Ridder to swing into the passageway and open fire. Two, it tells the guys in the engine room to charge forward. The Serpent’s not going to make it to the torpedo room. I think it most likely will run from Ridder’s fire-no way to dodge bullets in a confined space like that-and the other guys’ll catch it coming through the hatch into the control room. Boom.”
What he didn’t say, but what I knew his military mind was thinking, was that if it somehow made it to the torpedo room, the game would also be over. There was only one functioning door in that compartment, and the SEALs could just crouch there and blast the Serpent from a protected position. The bait might get eaten, but they’d trap their animal.
Grimm had warmed to the plan. He hadn’t said anything, but his face was clear and unworried as he considered the details.
“You’re right: if it decides to stay in the control room, we can attack it from two sides. So… basically, we’re clearing out, giving it a shot at something it really wants, then attacking its flanks. No place to go.”