Campbell still was sitting in the bed, I saw as we walked down the hallway, and he managed a wave with his free hand. At the end of the corridor was an oval of faint, unsteady light. It was the hatch, its shape defined by the light from Larsen’s gun.
Climbing through after Moretti, I saw the lieutenant standing at the opposite end of the compartment, where I had waited for the Serpent to fall into our baited trap. The dark shapes of the torpedoes seemed to point to him, as though he were standing at an altar or in front of a throne.
Larsen waved us over, and when we stood a few feet away, he began speaking in a voice just above a whisper.
“We’re running out of options.” That wasn’t the encouraging message I had been looking for. “The Serpent can keep the engines off-line, can keep the air scrubbers off-line and can prevent us from fixing any of it.”
“What about the diving controls? We’ve got those in the control room,” Moretti said.
“Yeah. But without electrical power, we can’t do anything except an emergency blow. So all of a sudden a foreign sub surfaces off the coast of Virginia-so long, ‘top secret.’ Don’t bother, Doctor.” He had seen me take a breath. “I know secrecy isn’t our biggest priority anymore. But the other problem is that the Serpent could be off the boat the second we broke the surface. There’s an escape tower like the one in here,” he said, pointing to the hatch over our heads, “in the aft torpedo room. I think we all can agree that allowing this thing to reach shore would be a disaster.”
“Can we call for help? What about that underwater telephone thing?” I asked.
“Without electricity, it’s just a useless chunk of metal.”
“So… what? What do we do?” Moretti asked.
“We consider the tactical advantages. Grimm and I have been over all this, forward and backward. We have the numbers. We can get the initiative. But no matter what, it will be the defender. All we can do is hope that our hand trumps the Serpent’s.”
“Wait a second. So we’re just going to charge in there after it?” I said. “We don’t expect you to participate. You can stay in the control room, just to make sure it can’t get in there, no matter what. And we’re not ‘charging in.’ We have a plan, and we’ll execute it.”
“Tell us the plan, then.” Moretti couldn’t quite cover up the disappointment in his voice.
“As I said, we’re not going to rush into a bad situation. We’ve got its location pinned down for the first time: the Serpent is in the electrical control room.”
“Whoa,” I said. “That’s a huge assumption. The hatch is shut. It could be anyplace on this boat aft of the control room.”
“Well, we heard it banging around,” Moretti said. “It’s working on the electrical systems. Or messing them up more. Whatever. The point is, it’s making a lot of noise. It’s in there.”
“But what’s stopping it from leaving before we launch our attack? Or from slipping out the aft door the second it sees us turning the wheel on the forward hatch?”
“Calm down. We know it’s still there. And we made sure it wasn’t going to get out of that compartment without us knowing. I can’t even take credit for that one.
“When we were preparing to storm into the control room, Grimm grabbed a belt off of one of the Koreans and tied a wrench to one end. Then he tied the other end to the dogging wheel on the engine-room side of the aft hatch. As we ran through there-he was the last man through-he closed the door and sealed it.”
I was getting the picture. “The wrench lies on the floor. But the wheel has to spin for the door to open, and if that happens, the wrench gets picked up and dropped back onto the deck repeatedly by the belt.”
“Making a loud noise that, without the engines running or anything, we could hear all the way up here,” Larsen finished.
That was clever. And in all the time we had been sharing campfire stories in the control room, we’d never heard the wrench banging on the floor.
“So like I said, we know where it is.” The lieutenant wanted his confidence to be contagious, to infect us with its fervor. But I seemed immune. “That puts us on an even footing with the Serpent, whereas before, it knew where we were, but not vice versa.”
“What we need are some stun grenades,” the chief mumbled.
“You’re not bullshitting. Open the hatch, lob a few through, wait for the bang and follow it with some bullets. Unfortunately, that’s not one of the cards in our deck.”
“What about a door-busting charge? We could toss one in there and-”
“Nope. We thought about that, Chief, and the problem is, it might wreck something in that room that we need in working order. After we kill the Serpent, we have to be able to bring this boat back online. If the Serpent’s out of the picture, secrecy becomes our number one goal.”
So we were back to just charging through the hatch.
“The way we make this work is by creating the same effect as a stun grenade, though. This thing’s senses are all pumped up to superhuman levels. If we start shooting and pin it down with the lights, the sudden noise and flashes will fuck with it enough to get us all in the room before it can fight back. From there, we can engage it on our terms.”
That was a gamble. Larsen was hoping the Serpent’s abilities would work against it. But so far they had proved most effective against us.
“That’s the plan?” I couldn’t stay quiet. “Open the door and pull the trigger? Hope you hit something this time?”
Larsen and Grimm had already explored this territory, I could tell. The lieutenant was patient, nodding.
“It’s not ideal. But we have certain advantages, and this allows us to use them. Since we don’t have the luxury of waiting it out or regaining control without a fight, we have to act.”
Larsen’s face, drained of color by the indirect lighting, was emotionless. The effect was that of a scarred, disembodied head floating in the darkness, granting us wisdom from the spirit world.
Moretti turned his light on me, destroying the illusion.
“I know you don’t think this makes any sense,” he said. “But we’re SEALs. We do impossible jobs. And as weird as it sounds, we’ve trained on how to enter and secure a one-door room. That’s the situation we’re facing now. So we’re not just relying on blind luck.”
“You have to think logically about it. We’d like to get on its flanks-but we can’t. We’d like to attack from several angles-but we can’t. We’d like more of an element of surprise-but… do you follow?” Larsen said, poking his palm with a finger as he made each point. “We do have a few aces, though, and now’s the time to lay them on the table.”
He was making the same argument over and over. And I was incapable of thinking about it anymore.
“Fine. We charge the Serpent and overwhelm it,” I said.
Larsen was waiting for more from me. I had nothing left.
“Remember, it doesn’t know we’re coming, and we have superior numbers. That means-”
“Enough, Chief. I know what it means, and I believe you guys. So go do it. Let’s get it over with.”
The SEALs glanced at each other, unsure how to handle the abrupt lack of resistance. Larsen recovered first.
“That’s exactly right, Myers. No reason to hesitate. Chief, go fill Campbell in. He’s going to stay where he is for this operation. Except… don’t tell him out loud. Write it down on the notepad he’s got in there.” Moretti turned to leave, then paused. “I can’t wait to kill this bastard.” The words floated across to us as Moretti continued out of the compartment. And I could tell then that they were more sincere than anything else he had said to me.
After Moretti was gone, Larsen addressed me again.
“I can tell you’re not thrilled with this plan. But it’s the best one we can execute under the circumstances.”