Execute. Maybe not the greatest choice of words.
“I believe you. Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”
After a long silence, he replied, resting one hand on a torpedo’s flank.
“I’m confident in my men. And I never doubt we’ll win any fight, even when we’re outgunned.”
“I want to ask you something before we go up there,” I said.
He nodded. “Go on.”
“I’m confident in you and your men. But if things… if the fight doesn’t go the way we want it, if Campbell and I are the only ones left, what then?”
He had thought about this, too, because his lips pursed as he bit back a quick answer.
“What?” I asked. “Tell me what you were going to say.”
Larsen sighed and looked at the floor, further destroying his supernatural aura. He was just a man, the gesture told me. A man whose first words a few minutes ago had been, “We’re running out of options.”
“I will tell Campbell this personally. I’m going to collect C-4 from everyone and give it to him,” he said. “I know this sounds shocking, all right?
“If we get wiped out, Campbell is going to detonate the plastic explosives. That much bang is going to breach the hull, and… well…” Sometimes suicide was rational, I thought.
He needed me to say something. “It’s OK,” was all I could manage.
I wasn’t choked up by shock, as he had expected, but by a feeling of utter hopelessness that had swept over me. I pictured Campbell packing a wad of C-4 onto the bulkhead over the bed. Setting a timer, hands steady. Sitting there, watching it count down, the numerals from the device reflecting in his green eyes.
“If we can’t kill the Serpent, there’s no way you two can survive. Even if it doesn’t come after you, it’s in control of the boat, and that’s unacceptable. It can’t be allowed to escape.”
“It can’t be allowed to escape,” I repeated.
“Don’t try to stop Campbell. Even with his injuries, he still can—”
“I won’t try to do anything. I’ll sit there next to him.”
I would, too. I could see myself added to the scene, and my despair deepened.
“But it won’t come to that,” Larsen said. I could tell he meant it, but again, the words were insubstantial to me.
He waited for me to speak. Then, after squeezing my shoulder, he walked by, leaving me staring at the Dragon's dormant torpedo tubes. The executive officer’s body lay a few feet away. Is this how he had felt after the captain warned him of the consequences of the Serpent’s escape?
What had he thought as he turned the valves? As he listened to the hand-to-hand fighting below him? As he chained the…
“Wait!” My yell ruined our secrecy, but I was too excited to notice Larsen’s anger as he paused on the stepladder.
“What? Keep it down, Myers.”
“Come here,” I said, walking toward him. He stepped back down to the deck but didn’t move.
“Look,” I continued, pointing.
“Yeah, it’s a closed door. Explain what you’re thinking, Myers, because we can’t afford to-”
“No, it’s not just closed. It’s chained!” This time I contained my exuberance in a stage whisper. “Locked and chained! If we go through there, you guys can get behind him. Attack from two sides.”
“Come on. Unless we blow the lock up, which would obviously be dangerous in a room full of torpedoes, we’re not getting it off. This door is worthless to us.”
“But there’s a key to the lock. And I think we can find it.”
“I’m listening.”
“Either the captain or Lee chained this door up because they were the only ones who knew the plan for trying to prevent the Serpent’s escape. So one of them has a key to this thing. We already have the captain’s key ring.”
Larsen moved back up the ladder. Even though he had expressed confidence before, there was more urgency and less resignation in his movements now.
“You search the XO. Where are the captain’s keys?”
“In his room. Campbell might still have them.”
He disappeared through the door, and I walked over to Lee’s body. It had stiffened up since I first examined it, but the suit was loose-fitting. I was able to pull it down past his waist without too much trouble.
I had never searched a corpse in the dark. It might have been macabre in different circumstances, but now nothing-not the body, not the torpedoes, not the eerie, dead stillness of the immobilized sub-spooked me. All that mattered was finding new hope for survival.
But his pockets held nothing. Shit. We’d have to toss his cabin, and without direct lighting, that would be a long, frustrating exercise.
It turned out to be unnecessary. Larsen’s light bobbed back into the torpedo room, and he knelt next to the lower hatch, trying the keys on the captain’s ring. It didn’t take long.
“Got it.” The words were whispered, not yelled, but they conveyed a sureness that, this time, resonated through me. We had drawn an ace.
Grimm entered the compartment as Larsen and I disentangled the chain from the door’s locking mechanism.
“Did you find it?” He saw what we were doing and didn’t wait for a reply. “We divide up. Two teams, two men each.”
Larsen finished with the chain, handed it to me and stood. “Yeah. The lower-deck group has three compartments to get through, but they’ve got to be as stealthy as possible. Even breathing too hard could fuck this up. We need to make it think we’re only coming from one direction.”
“The attacks need to be simultaneous.”
“Of course.” The men weren’t addressing one another, just thinking aloud. Between them, the plan continued to take shape. “When the flanking team is in position, they’ll signal and attack. The other team will hear the signal and enter the room.”
“What if the Serpent makes the same noise as the signal?”
“Team B — that’s the flankers — they’ll bash the hatch cover with the wrench there. Three times.”
“Then they’ll go.”
“Yes. Both doors open at the same time, both point men enter. It can’t cover two hatches at once.”
But it could attack one man. Whoever was closest, perhaps. This wasn’t going to be a casualty-free operation unless the Serpent was paralyzed with surprise.
“Gotta be careful of friendly fire, though,” Larsen said. “We can saw this cocksucker in two, but the first men through the hatches are going to be looking right at each other.”
“It might use one as a human shield,” I said, Jakes’s tortured face flashing through my thoughts. “You have to-”
“We will,” Larsen said. “This is it. This is when we win, no matter what the cost. If it means shooting through me, I want my men to do it. Whoever’s first through the door might get killed right off the bat. There’s no guarantee it’s going to be indecisive. It might just pick a door and attack.”
“But it’s our best shot,” I said.
“No,” Grimm replied. “I’d say it’s our only shot.”
XII
Reyes and Grimm were crouched by the hatch next to Jakes’s corpse. No giggling in the tent now. Neither seemed aware of my presence at the other end of the room. The light from their guns was trained on the door a few feet away, turning them into silhouettes against a gray background.
They were waiting for the signal. So was I.
I had a job in this operation. After they went into the electrical compartment, I was to shoot anything that tried to move from there into the control room. Not “anything not wearing black” or “anything that doesn’t give the correct signal.” Anything. If the SEALs won and survived, they’d return through the lower deck. Larsen wanted to make sure that at least one escape route was inaccessible to the Serpent.