“To the forward torpedo room. I want a look at it and those other areas before the rest of you come onboard. I’ll work my way back through the ship.”
“You’re just supposed to examine the control room. We discussed it on deck.”
“Well, now I need to examine other parts of the ship. And I need to do it before the evidence I’m looking for has been disturbed or lost. I realize that wasn’t part of the original plan, but Lieutenant Larsen can deal with that after he gets down here.”
“We need to stick to the script. I can’t let you just go off on your own.”
I shrugged, but I think he missed it as I squatted down and hooked a leg through the door.
“We need to stick to the plan,” he repeated, and I heard him take a step toward me. “Just follow the directions, OK?”
I envisioned myself darting through the hatch and jogging down to the torpedo room. Then that image was replaced with one of him grabbing me by the collar and hauling me back into the control room before I got my other leg through the doorway. Larsen would love to come down the ladder and see me tied to a chair or something.
Sighing, I extricated myself from the hatch and stood in front of him.
“Look, I’m sorry about the helicopter thing. I got carried away, and that was my fault. I understand that you have orders and that we have a plan. You were supposed to secure the area before I boarded the sub, right? And you did that. So now, why don’t you come with me and secure the areas I need to inspect? Then, when we’re sure there’s no one waiting to jump out of the shadows at me, you can come back to the control room.” I raised my eyebrows and smiled. Just a harmless lady doctor.
“But Lieutenant Larsen…”
“Grimm, we both heard what he said. But the situation has changed since we were standing on the deck, right?” I gestured around the control room. “I’ve gotten some important information in here, but to make it worth anything, I have to check other areas of the ship. And I have to do it before the scene is disturbed. Do you understand that?”
He shifted his weight and started to say something, but I cut him off.
“So now we just have to apply the original plan to the modified situation. It doesn’t make any…” I halted, searching for a phrase with enough military jargon to bolster my point. “… any operational sense for us to wait in here when there are more important things I need to do in other parts of the boat. You can cover me, or whatever, but I need to get to the torpedo room. And…”
This time he waved away the rest of my sentence.
“You’ll follow me. I’ll enter each compartment, ensure that it is secure, and then tell you when it is safe to enter. If I tell you to go back, you go back. Clear?”
“Sure. Yes, perfectly clear.” I stepped out of the way and let him get at the hatch.
I doubted it was designed for someone as tall and broad as he was, but he didn’t hesitate at its mouth. He grasped the top of the frame, thrust both legs in and let their momentum carry his upper body through.
All I could see through the portal as I squatted next to it were the backs of his legs. In a half-crouch, he moved down the hallway. Each step seemed deliberate and deadly as he held his stubby assault rifle at face level.
At each doorway, he paused, brushed the area around the knob with his left hand, then shoved it open with a sudden, violent thrust of his arm. After scanning the room on the other side for a few seconds, he stepped back and closed the door. There were six of them, three on each side of the corridor.
When he got to the end, he dropped into a lower stance and peered into the next compartment through another hatch. This one seemed like it may have been designed for more comfortable use; it was oval and a third larger than those in the control room.
Without looking back, he shouted, “Clear!”
I shoved one leg through, wormed my torso after it, then pulled myself up and planted my other leg on the deck.
The thirty-foot compartment was all hallway. The floor and ceiling were the same as those in the control room, featureless metal under a canopy of pipes and wires. But the walls were fake wood panels the color of a dark wine. I guess that was what passed for luxury on a submarine.
As I passed the doors, I examined them. All but one were outfitted with brass nameplates screwed into the surface about five feet off the deck.
I arrived at the end of the corridor, and Grimm held up his left hand, clenched into a fist. I stopped.
He leaned forward, poking his head and gun through the doorway. Over his shoulder, I could see that the floor of the next compartment seemed to be about three feet lower than the passage in which we stood.
Grimm pulled himself back into the hallway, sat down and hooked his legs through the hatch opening. He scooted up and ducked his upper body into the other compartment so he was sitting on the edge of the portal.
His back filled the entire opening, and I could see it flex as he looked around the area. Then he took two steps down and away from the hatch, leaving the back of his head at eye level.
He moved away from me, sweeping the room with smooth arcs of his rifle.
This was the torpedo room. It looked more spacious than the last two compartments. I could see the fins of eight torpedoes, four on each side, mounted on racks along the walls.
Grimm continued to move away from the hatch. He stopped fifteen or twenty feet away, still facing toward the bow.
Then he straightened, letting his rifle drop to waist level. He gestured over his shoulder at me with his free hand. “Room’s clear. Come check this out.”
This time, I emulated Grimm’s method of entry. I found myself sitting at the top of a four-step ladder overlooking the compartment. Glancing down, I saw another hatch mounted just to the right of the ladder’s base. It was closed. Chained shut, actually.
My initial impression of the room had been correct. It was vast compared to the equipment-congested control room and claustrophobic hallway we had just passed through.
The center was empty except for some chains dangling from machinery on the ceiling. The space was wide enough for three men to stand shoulder-to-shoulder. Along the walls were two torpedo racks, one on each side of the room. The eight weapons they held managed to look fat and sleek at the same time, their long, shiny exteriors stretching twenty feet from snub noses to four raked fins.
The far end of the compartment — the bow — was tapered. Even the floor sloped upwards. Six tubes were packed into the space, joined by a web of controls, dials and gauges. All their doors were closed, the red levers on their exteriors set in the same horizontal position.
“Come on, Doctor, you want to see this.”
The eager voice snapped my attention back to Grimm, who still was facing away from me. As I walked over, he stepped to one side.
In front of him was another dead body. This one clutched a black semi-automatic pistol in its right hand.
“Did you touch anything?” I asked.
“You saw me. I just walked in here.”
The man was lying face-down. He was wearing a khaki shirt, short sleeved, with insignia sewn onto the shoulders. From the waist down, however, he was dressed in some kind of a yellowish rubber or coarse fabric suit. The top half of the suit was pulled down, its arms splayed about his midsection.
“I need to take some more pictures. Can you stand behind me again?”
“Actually, I’m going back to the control room. Do whatever you need to do here. Looks like… five more minutes you got.”
I didn’t speak SEAL, but I understood what he was trying to do. When Larsen came onboard, Grimm was going to be where he was ordered to be. I was on my own.
He walked across the compartment, pulled himself up the ladder and disappeared through the hatch.
I moved toward the approximate center of the room and started photographing. I took in the torpedoes, the tubes. A hatch was set in the ceiling toward the aft end of the room, its red and white dogging mechanism forming a three-dimensional bull’s-eye. Forward of the hatch dangled equipment that seemed designed to help the crew hoist the weapons into their launch tubes. Around it all snaked the now-familiar background of exposed conduits and caged lights.