In his frustration he smacked at the door with his hand, though that was worse than useless, since in the thick water he couldn’t get much leverage, and—
“Huh,” he said to himself.
He slapped the hatch again, and this time he listened to the sound it made.
Again. Yes, definitely. It didn’t make the clanging sound he would have expected. It sounded more like he was striking a drum.
It seemed impossible, but it had to be right. The door wasn’t jammed or locked. It was being held shut by the pressure of the water on top of it, because the cabin beyond was still full of air. This one hatch must have remained sealed when the sub went down, unlike all the others. Even after twenty years it hadn’t been breached.
Chapel knew there was no way he would ever get the hatch open by main strength. He would have had to fight the entire ocean to do it. Luckily he’d come prepared. In a pouch at his belt he had a small lump of plastic explosive and an electronic detonator. He worked the plastique carefully, rolling it into a thick rope, then pressed it into place along the hatch seals. Then he swam away from the door, moving into the tiny wardroom. It had a folding door that he shut behind him. He put one arm over his mask and hit the detonator.
The explosion made a lot of noise and a huge shock wave that buffeted Chapel even through the wardroom door. He hated to think what would happen to any nearby fish. When it had passed, he shoved open the wardroom door and swam back out.
The crew deck was full of bubbles and disturbed sediment that made his lights nearly useless. A thick torrent of silver bubbles rushed up out of the place where the cabin hatch had been, the trapped air of twenty years screaming out and upward. Chapel fought through the curtain of roiling air and heard it hiss against his suit, felt it push back against him as it tried desperately to escape. He reached for the wheel to open the hatch — the pressures would equalize soon, and it would open easily once—
Then a grinning skull came flying at him and smacked him right in his mask.
Chapel sucked in a deep breath and shoved himself backward, out of the storm of bubbles, but the skull kept after him, bouncing against his face again and again. He collided painfully with something behind him and one of his flippers broke loose, and for a second he could only spin around, desperately grabbing for it as the disturbed muck of the submarine rose up around him, filling up the cone of his lights, making him half blind — and still the skull kept bobbing after him, bumping against the ceiling, its teeth lunging right for his mask.
It took all his self-control to stop thrashing and try to calm down.
It wasn’t some long dead sailor’s ghost that was after him. Just the remains of a man who had sealed himself in his cabin when the submarine went down. Chapel forced himself to reach out and take hold of it, one thumb in an eye socket. The skull wanted to float out of his hand — there must still be a bubble of air inside it, a bubble that had lifted it out of the ruptured hatch. When he had shot backward, away from the cabin hatch, he had created an eddy in the water that had sucked the skull after him. That was all.
The skull looked a lot less imposing when it wasn’t attacking him. It was just a normal human skull, fleshless and yellow. It was missing its lower jaw. There was a big ragged hole in the back of it that looked like the exit wound of a gunshot.
He got his flipper back on. The muck had started to settle again, and he could see a little better. The bubbles had all but stopped streaming from the breached door. Still holding the skull, he used the fingers of his free hand to lift the cabin door, releasing a last trapped pocket of air.
Around him the hissing roar of the escaping air slowly subsided, and once again he could hear the long, drawn-out death knell of the submarine. He ignored the noise and slipped inside the captain’s cabin.
This room hadn’t changed at all in twenty years. It had been sealed shut and full of air, not seawater, until Chapel came along. The tan paint on the walls was intact, and the captain’s meager furnishings were still in good shape — hardwood gleamed where it had been polished, brass shone in Chapel’s lights. It was a ridiculous mess now, though. Chapel had done far more to disturb the cabin than the ocean could. Letting in the seawater had sent papers floating like two-dimensional fish that swirled around him. The blankets on the single narrow bunk fluttered and frayed as he watched, stirred up by the water that had rushed inside.
Curled up in one corner of the floor — what had been the portside wall of the cabin — was most of the captain’s body minus the skull. The body was still dressed in a Soviet naval uniform. Clutched in one skeletal hand was a pistol that must have fired the fatal shot, the one that left the exit wound Chapel had found in the skull.
He could guess what had happened. His briefing hadn’t mentioned what became of the Kurchatov’s captain. At the time Chapel assumed he had just gone ashore with the rest of his crew and his passengers. Apparently not. Instead the man had elected to go down with his ship.
He must have sealed himself in his cabin and waited for the end as the submarine sank to the bottom. He must have listened to that horrible groaning, just as Chapel was now. How long had he waited until he took his own life? Had he used up all the oxygen in the room and chosen not to let himself asphyxiate? Or had it happened long before then, when he realized that his beloved nation was no more? Maybe—
Maybe, Chapel thought, he should stop trying to imagine the captain’s last moments and focus on the mission at hand.
He realized he was still holding the skull. He turned it upside down to let a last wavering silver bubble of air out of its cavity, then gently put it down with the rest of the skeleton. Then he turned and looked for the captain’s desk. It was a tiny ledge that folded up into the cabin’s wall. He pulled it down on its hinges and some of its contents drifted out — more papers, a pair of brass calipers that settled quickly to the floor. It had a compartment that could be locked but hadn’t been. He opened the compartment and found a couple of neatly folded charts inside and an envelope that probably held the captain’s orders for what to do when the coup failed.
Not what he was looking for.
Chapel turned around and found the captain’s personal locker under the bunk. He pulled open its door and reached inside to search the contents.
He drew out the contents of the locker. A spare uniform. A wooden box containing a couple of Soviet medals. A box of ammunition for the captain’s pistol. Some old photographs.
None of that was helpful to him. But he was out of places to look. The cabin was tiny, with very little in the way of storage space — the desk and the locker were pretty much it. He supposed that what he was looking for could be hidden somewhere, underneath the thin carpeting that lined the floor, maybe, or in a secret compartment built into the walls, but—
Think, Chapel, he told himself. What he was looking for wouldn’t be hidden in a secret compartment that was difficult to access. The captain would have needed it every time he used the sub’s radio. It had to be close by, and easy to get to, but secure…
Chapel spun around and looked at the skeleton. At the uniform jacket it wore. He kicked over and looked down at the skull, saying a silent apology. Then he pulled at the jacket until its buttons came loose. The rib cage underneath collapsed under his hands as he rummaged in the captain’s pockets.
There! A little book with a black leatherette cover, just as it had been described to him. It looked like an address book, but when Chapel opened it to a random page, he saw columns of numbers and Cyrillic characters in a grid. The pages had all been laminated to protect them from the water. This was what he needed.