“What the hell just happened?” The shouted words floated out of the darkness behind me.
I spun, trying to find the source, but slipped on Ridder’s blood and sat down hard.
I was facing the steering station, and my gun was pointing at nothing. An empty hatch, pulled out of the black by a flashlight beam from behind me.
“Campbell, relax. Stay where you are,” Larsen yelled. Shit. Of course the voice was Campbell’s, emanating from the captain’s cabin.
“What’s going on? My flashlight is… I can’t get it to turn on.”
“We’ll take care of that in a second. Sit tight. There’s been some kind of failure in the electrical system.”
A failure? As if it had just occurred by itself.
“Grimm, tell me what just happened,” Larsen said, returning his attention to the control room.
“Power’s gone.” Grimm was back together. One trauma had shattered him, the next had given him resolve. “Probably a fuse or two.”
“Just local?”
“I doubt it. I can’t feel the engines anymore. Can you? The air’s stopped circulating, too.”
I found that if I didn’t let my eyes be drawn to any of the lights, I could make out the shapes of all the SEALs. Grimm was standing just to the left of the aft doorway, his height giving away his identity. Larsen had moved to that end of the compartment and was crouched to the right of the other three men.
“He pulled the plug,” Chief said.
“Yeah. No lights, no engines… nothing. Chief, go check our depth,” Larsen said.
Moretti had been standing next to Larsen. He detached himself from the group and walked over to the helm.
“Will any of the instruments be working?” I pulled myself upright using the seat next to me.
“Damn near everything in here is analog,” Moretti said as he moved past me. “Outside of taking a hammer to them, these gauges don’t stop ticking. They don’t need power.” He paused, examining the readings.
“Hovering, sir. Rock-solid at one-eight-zero feet. We’re coasting, at two knots and slowing.”
“So the situation-”
“Is all fucked up,” Reyes interrupted Larsen, who just laughed.
“It is, isn’t it?” the lieutenant said. “Stuck in a submarine with no engines, no air conditioning, not even enough light to read a Penthouse. Fortunately, we brought our own nightlights. This ventilation business, though… Grimm, you know how much air we got to breathe?”
“Half a sub? Five… six of us? We can live for hours.”
“It can outlast us, though,” I said. “If we just sit here and do nothing, we can last for hours. It’s a matter of conserving oxygen. But if we try to do anything, the air gets burned a lot faster. And just like the Serpent survived the chlorine gas, it can survive a little carbon dioxide.”
“It’s started the clock on us, huh, Doctor?” Reyes again.
“I’d say so. It’s trying to force our hand.”
“Smart,” Larsen said. “It’s got better senses than us, so it takes away the light. It’s got better lungs than us, so it takes away the air.”
“Hey, sir? If it’s still in the electrical control room, it can hear what we’re saying.”
“So the fuck what? Can it even understand English? It’s not like we’re discussing national secrets here. I’m sure it didn’t expect us to not notice we were in the dark and running out of oxygen.” But as he spoke, Larsen moved over to Grimm and flashed several hand signals in the beam from his gun barrel. He ended by pointing aft.
Reyes and Moretti seemed to understand what had taken place. The chief again took up station near the door, while Grimm and Larsen strode toward-and past-me. I grabbed Larsen’s arm, but he put his finger to his lips before I could speak. He pointed to his eyes. OK. I was looking at him.
He pointed at himself, then Grimm. Used two fingers to imitate legs walking. Pointed forward. Grimm’s light caused shadows to flutter across the walls from the eerie pantomime.
Larsen and Grimm were going to the forward end of the ship. Got it.
Then he held out his hand, palm up, in front of him and started drawing shapes on it with the index finger of his other hand. What?
I shook my head and shrugged.
He tried again. Tapped the side of his head, then did the hand-drawing thing again. There was something familiar about the action. And then I had it: he was tracing football plays on his palm, like a sand-lot quarterback.
Now I nodded. He put his finger to his lips again. They were trying to be covert. It made sense; if the Serpent were indeed in the next compartment, it could hear us plot in the control room. So they were going as far away as they could and working out our next move.
Grimm stepped through the hatch, and Larsen was about to follow. Then he turned, pointed at all of us and made talky-talky motions with his hand. Act normal. Don’t let the Serpent know anything’s up.
And he, like Grimm, ducked into the hallway, and their lights and footsteps receded. Even though I knew-or at least assumed-that they’d be coming back, dividing our already paltry forces made me uneasy.
I fantasized about writing a report on all this, each word barricading the Dragon into the past. I wanted to walk into Charlie’s office, through the door reading DIV. SUPERVISOR that was always open, and toss a report on his desk. We had a routine. I’d stand there, and Charlie would put on some reading glasses, run a hand through his curly gray hair and thumb through the report’s first few pages. Then he’d look up, invite me to sit as if he’d forgotten I was there and ask me, “What did you see between the lines?” I’d fill him in on the “outside the assignment” observations I’d taken in, providing a larger context for what I’d done and the people I’d worked with. For both of us, this was the most interesting part of the endgame, where I could speak in unofficial terms about subjects that weren’t officially supposed to exist.
I knew there would be a certain tangible comfort-one I yearned for-in our conversation, and in obscuring the most jagged details of this assignment with several pages of technical jargon and filing the whole experience away. But I had to survive it first.
Moretti and Reyes weren’t paying any attention to me. Both still waited by the aft hatch, their lights and concentration focused on it.
Reyes crouched in front of it; the chief was off to one side. They didn’t want to give the Serpent a clean shot at both of them at once, I guess. I sat down between them, my back against the nav periscope’s cool, polished surface.
Moretti looked at me, his face turned into a caricature by the light beneath it.
“Making yourself comfortable?”
“Why not?” I replied, laying the .45 in my lap. “I can shoot just as well from down here. Maybe even get a better angle through the hatch.”
Reyes sat down too, without comment.
“What are you doing, Seaman?”
“She’s right. I can see through the doorway better this way. And here,” he said to me, pulling something from beneath Jakes’s legs, “if you’re going to cover the door, cover the damn door.”
He handed me Jakes’s rifle.
“It’s an MP-5, 9mm, 30 shots in the mag,” he continued. “The selector on the side there’ll tell you whether it’s set for single, burst or full auto fire.” I knew all of that, of course, but if it kept him talking and not focusing on the dead man lying nearby, he was welcome to run through its entire design history.
I saw motion to my right and realized Moretti had sat, also.
“I’ve never killed anyone sitting down,” he said. “But I don’t like the idea of being killed myself when I’m not on my feet.”
“I know this thing is fast — we all saw that,” I said. “But I don’t see any way it can open the door and attack us before we get a shot at it. We’ve got a big defensive advantage.” The bigger gun hadn’t boosted my courage, but it felt comfortable in my hands. And I believed what I said: we’d see the hatch wheel turn and have plenty of time to react before the Serpent could do anything more than be a target.