“Nothing more relaxing than fly-fishing,” I said. “Beer cooling in the stream, fish tugging at your line.”
“Hear that, Chief? You’re in. I’m out of the picture.”
“No way, Reyes. She’s out of both of our leagues. A doctor, remember? Not spear-carriers like us. We don’t even know her first name.”
“It’s Christine.”
“What’s up, Christine?” Reyes said. “I’m Dom.” It was an odd set of introductions, done with words but no eye contact.
“And your first name isn’t Chief, is it?” I said to Moretti.
“Just Carl.”
“We call him ‘Chief’ because that’s what he is-master chief petty officer-and he thinks he’s a badass,” Reyes said.
“Quite a title.”
“Well, I’m quite a guy,” Moretti replied. “I keep everyone in line when the officers aren’t looking.”
As he finished his sentence, we no longer were sitting in total darkness. It was only for an instant-subliminal, almost-but there had been an increase in the room’s ambient light. The moment was accompanied by a bang from the other side of the closed hatch, and a hiss that was audible even through the tempered steel.
“What the fuck?” Reyes had snapped from a sitting position into a crouch, his rifle never leaving the door.
“It’s a fuse. Sounds like one blew. Everything in here turned on for a split-second,” Moretti said. He delivered this news with the same inflection he had told me his name and rank. “The Serpent is tinkering with the works over there.”
He was right, I realized. The indicators and screens must have switched on just long enough to add a few watts of illumination to the compartment. The overhead lights hadn’t come to life.
“What’s it doing?” Reyes hadn’t changed positions, his legs coiled beneath him.
“Who knows? Who cares? Can’t do anything about it except sit here and wait for our air to run out.”
“Yeah,” I said, picking up Moretti’s angle. “Just relax. It’ll have to come through that door sooner or later, and then you’ll get your chance to shoot it.”
Reyes caught on now, too. The less the Serpent thought we were worrying about it, the lower its guard would be when we made our move. And it didn’t hurt our mental well-being to whistle in the dark, either. “OK. I’m cool. So what were we talking about? The chief?”
“Why would we do that? I’m boring. Just another ex-English major with an assault rifle. Now, the doctor here, I’ll bet she could tell us some stories.”
“Seriously, call me Christine. I’m not operating on you or anything.”
“What kind of doctor are you?” Reyes asked.
“Two kinds. I’m a physician; that is, I have a medical degree. But I also have a doctorate in psychology. That just makes me a psychiatrist, one of millions.”
“Jesus! How long do you have to be in school for that?”
Moretti chuckled at Reyes’s amazement.
“Eight years. But I started a year early. Then when I was done, the CIA hired me.”
“Uh-oh. She’s going to have to kill us now, Reyes.”
“Calm down,” I said. We were back in camp again, our man-made surroundings as insignificant as they were invisible. “It’s all aboveboard. I’m a federal employee, just like you two.”
“So what do you do?”
Ah. That was crossing the line, wasn’t it? But hell, the three of us had seen enough already to fill ten classified reports.
“That, I’m really not supposed to talk about. But I started as a profiler. A couple of years in, some people higher up the food chain decided I had an aptitude for forensics and nudged me in that direction. So I’ve been doing that for the last eight years. Basically, it’s the same thing I’ve done here. Go over a crime scene, check out all the physical evidence, examine the corpses. Then figure out who did the killing, and why.”
“For the CIA?” Reyes wasn’t going to let it go.
“Reyes, you dumbass. Her job is cleaning up after people like us, I think, and I’m pretty sure we should leave it at that if we want this conversation to go anyplace.” Moretti winked at me.
“Fuck! I hate this shit! I hate this pretending!” Reyes’s yell was unexpected and shrill. “I fucking want to grab the Serpent and just squeeze. Choke it. Then shoot it. Then jump on its head until it splats like a fucking watermelon. But we’re sitting here, talking like we ain’t on the wrong end of a-”
“Reyes! Shut up! Belay that talk right now, or I’ll come over there and flog your ass.”
The seaman was looking over at Moretti now, his face unsure whether it wanted to be angry, afraid or dejected. But he was quiet. The tension hung in the air between the two men like invisible electric lines.
The graphic violence in Reyes’s words shocked me. Where had it come from? Did all the SEALs have this same savagery packed away inside them?
“Reyes.” Now I was a therapist. I tried to soften my voice, use it to create safety and certainty in our dark prison. “You’re OK. Listen, I want you to tell me something. When you think back to when you were growing up, what is a golden moment that jumps out at you? When you were having fun, just being yourself and not worrying about anything? When everything was right?”
He blinked. “What?”
“I know you’ve had those times. We all have. See, you’re never stuck someplace unpleasant, not as long as you’ve got your brain with you. You always have access to the things that make you happy.”
He was listening now, wanting to believe. “Well, uh. Jose and I, we’d go down to the park. If you go around dinnertime, it ain’t so crowded. So the sun’s going down… ”
“The smog makes the sun orange that time of day,” Moretti interrupted.
“Yeah, exactly. Everything’s kind of glowing. But we’d play 21-that’s a basketball game-until it was too dark. Then we’d go home and have dinner after Dad closed up the store for the night. It was perfect.”
“I told you about the trout stream,” Moretti said. “There is a place in upstate New York, near Ithaca, that as far as I know, the rest of the world never discovered. A buddy of mine showed it to me. You can’t even drive there. You have to park by the side of the highway, then hike for maybe a half-hour, and then all of a sudden you’re on top of this beautiful gorge with a crystal stream at the bottom. Talk about happy places. If I could somehow retire there, I’d get myself discharged right now. Maybe slap an admiral or something.”
“Then what would you do?” I said.
“Fish. Drink. No plans beyond that. It’s kind of the way I live my life. The Navy is the longest commitment I’ve ever made to anything. And I can tell you, honestly, that qualifying for SEAL school changed my life. Other than doing nothing and trout fishing, there’s no job I’d rather have.”
“Why?”
“There are, what, six billion people in the world? One thousand of those are smart enough, strong enough, to be a SEAL. Do the math. And look at the operations we’re trusted with,” he said, glancing around the darkened control room. I couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic. “I’ve never been part of something so important before.”
“I hope you get back to that stream sooner rather than later,” I said. Reyes was nodding. I had calmed myself, too. Our recollections had touched a part of me that had been overrun by the Dragon’s horrors. But before I had finished that bit of introspection, there was motion behind us.
We turned and saw Grimm, squinting into the beam from the light on my gun, step through the forward hatch. He pointed at me and Moretti, then jerked his thumb back the way he had come. Grimm stood to one side as we passed. He was going to stay in the control room, which was good, because I didn’t think Reyes could handle being alone with his thoughts, let alone repelling an attack by the Serpent.