Eddie said, “Hey, look at the bright side. Maybe he’ll infect them, send them to the bottom, One.”
“Yeah,” muttered Pettit. “Like the Montana. Goddamn spy. Goddamn turncoat. Hail the conquering goddamn traitor.”
But that’s not what happened.
Because ten minutes later, as we watched, stunned at one more turn of events, they shot Del Grazo as he argued with them on their deck.
TWENTY-THREE
They shot him.
It happened like this.
First we watched the Chinese sub surface, an immense dark moray eel shape with greenish current flowing past, and occasional bergy bits. Then the hatch opened and fur-hatted soldiers climbed out onto the deck, followed by two crew members wearing bulky-looking hazmat suits.
Eddie saying bitterly, “Looks like Zhou believed you about the sickness on the Montana.”
Eyeing the suits, I recalled the circular motions of Del Grazo’s arm earlier on the monitors, when his back was turned. I understood what he’d been doing suddenly. I’d seen it enough in hospitals. His left arm — from behind — straight out. His right arm making little circles.
“He was taking samples,” I whispered.
Eddie spun toward me. I nodded. “Mucus. Sweat. Blood.”
Eddie looked thoughtful. “Zhou did ask us to send blood samples over for analysis. Trying to sound helpful… but… do you really think they believe it’s a bioweapon? That we have a bioweapon that got loose?”
“I don’t know what to think,” I said. My whole body hurt from the fight with Del Grazo. I limped when I walked. My head pounded.
Now through the monocular I saw a head — Del Grazo — appear above Zhou’s deck on the far side, body shielded from us. The Chinese must have thrown him a rope ladder, and he’d climbed up, and now stood.
I made sure the Marines had all weapons lowered. The sub was Chinese territory, not to mention that it carried torpedoes, and a pissed-off Captain Zhou.
“Nobody shoots,” I said.
“Why did he do it?” said DeBlieu, as if unsure to be enraged, baffled, or both.
“Who knows? Money? Sex? Who the hell knows? But I’m sure there will be one heck of an investigation to figure it out when we get back.”
Del Grazo, on deck, seemed half bent from his exertions, getting his breath back, I imagined, as he glanced our way, and I also imagined him feeling a surge of triumph, relief, maybe superiority. I remembered the rage in his face as he tried to choke me. I wondered if he felt trapped, his options over, his traitorous dreams in shambles. Del Grazo left with a life, but one he’d live far from home, in a foreign land.
I watched him pull something from his parka pocket. I adjusted focus, trying to see better. Larger images like his body grew blurry. But the object in his hand crystallized into what looked like a ziplock bag.
Meanwhile, the Chinese stayed back from him except for the hazmat guys, but even they approached gingerly, stopped ten feet away, and extended a metallic retractable arm, mechanical pincers to grab the bag, and bring it back.
“They’re disinfecting it,” said Eddie as the hazmat figures started spraying the outside of the bag, then wiping it off, with great rigor. Then spraying again.
Del Grazo took a step toward them, clearly wanting to reach the protection of the inside of the submarine. But the soldiers jerked up their bullpup assault rifles, as if to pantomime, Stay back.
The Del Grazo silhouette halted in the shadow of the tower, looking like one of those Indonesian shadow puppets, a figure half hidden by translucent curtain, arms out, frozen, mid-step.
Eddie narrating, as if we couldn’t see it anyway. “He looks like he’s arguing, Let me aboard! I did what you wanted! You promised!”
Two figures appeared on the bridge of the sub, the high point, looking down at Del Grazo, like priests atop an Aztec ziggurat. I adjusted focus again. I saw fur hats with red stars pinned in front, faces beneath them. I’d never seen Zhou, at this particular angle, but I was pretty sure I was looking at him and his British-accented translator. Yes, it was the translator, because I saw the guy’s thick-framed glasses. Fat face. Fat frames. Zhou was smaller, features tight.
Del Grazo’s movements growing more agitated.
Zhou — looking down, listening, then shaking his head.
Del Grazo took two quick steps toward the hatch and the guns came up. And now he was shouting in pantomime, waving his arms, body bent into his screaming as the hazmat guys disappeared into the sub, with the ziplock, then all the Chinese soldiers but one filing down into that hole, to safety, then there were only four figures out there. Zhou and his translator up high. Del Grazo and a single soldier below.
Eddie gasped. “They’re going to leave him.”
I shook my head. “No. If they leave him, we pick him up. They won’t leave him.”
“Then what are—”
Del Grazo must have panicked. He lunged forward. Later I’d try to figure out what had happened. All the pressure he’d been under — the spy normally assigned low-key missions, a computer hacker, not a saboteur. A sneak, not a warrior, suddenly pressured to do more as the stakes shot up.
We saw the gunfire before we heard it, blossoms of light in the dark before the snapping sound, a faint pressure on the eardrums over the humming idling of the icebreaker.
He crumbled. He was on hands and knees. I felt sorry for him for a moment. He crawled a few feet toward the edge of the deck, and then he toppled, disappeared, dropping into the sea.
Back to Zhou now, through glass. Zhou, on the bridge, riveted, eyeing the spot where Del Grazo had disappeared. Zhou, motionless for what seemed a long time. Then Zhou’s right hand came up, and he saluted the spot where Del Grazo had been last with that stiff, palm-up motion favored in the People’s Republic.
Eddie said, “One, you want to tell me what the hell just happened over there?”
“He’s honoring him,” I said.
“Oh, honoring. Some honor. Shoot a guy and salute him.”
I turned to Eddie, who, close up, was as green as the Hulk. “Zhou had the same choice we did. Zhou decided — or was ordered to — keep the potentially infected guy off. He knows what happened in the Montana. He got the samples for analysis. They’ve probably got that bag in a locked freezer that no one will go into until Zhou gets home.”
“Honoring,” said Eddie.
“I think so. Yes.”
“Yeah, so how will they honor us? A torpedo?”
Zhou turned to us, as if he felt our eyes on him, and knew we tried to figure out what he was doing. I felt him staring back. Maybe he even had a photo of me.
But oddly, probably because we were both motionless, it was not a tense moment. I had no sensation of antagonism across the black water. Just a sort of connection through the green world of night vision, as if we both understood that we’d faced the same choices, that the consequences of missteps in the microbial world we’d been thrust into had spiraled far from human control.
It was, I knew, just a feeling. And feelings can be dangerous. That feelings in a confrontation can — if you deceive yourself, if you fall victim to wishful thinking, if you get tired, as I was, and were scared, as I was, and confused, as I knew myself to be — lead to disaster.
And yet the moment lengthened, and I could not help but believe that a fellow consciousness linked our two vessels.
He would protect his crew better than I did mine, I couldn’t help thinking. He would take the samples and disappear below and turn west, staying in international waters, heading toward the U.S.-Russian border, then veering south into the narrow Bering Strait, and the northern Pacific, the main sea lanes, and ultimately to whatever secure lab awaited that ziplock and its contents somewhere in the People’s Republic of China.