The first thing they snagged were the lights. First there was the disorienting pull from being dragged by vaccum inside the hull. The narrow torpedo shoot had enveloped and drawn in Tom and then Paul, their ears crashing with radio screams from Perry being jettisoned to the surface, Wells calling out for help, Tom swearing like he’d just stepped on every Lego brick ever made and Paul calling out for his brother, Tom.
As they spilled into the flooding room, their limbs and gear bounced and tumbled over each other, the lights flailing and making bizarre vignettes of hundreds of interwoven pipes and tubes and gauges, then heavy gloved hands snagging and pulling at them. The light was extinguished, the radio cord was severed, Pauls arms were held by tight grips that felt like steel.
It was the radio silence that scared Paul the most. The entire situation was horrible, he knew that, but it was that sudden and familiar isolation that divers felt when they had to communicate through visual cues and hand signals; and his hands were being bound behind him. It was as he struggled against the weight of the hands that he noticed what had changed, the water was draining out of the chamber.
Soon he could hear his brother, furious and almost roaring. The man was nearly seventy and he still bellowed like a thirty year old sergeant, bitter about being good at being in the bush, being in the bush. The yells were almost feral, wild and tribal, his brother was yelling in a mix of Quebec-French and Maine English. He was making the timberland pioneers sound like children giddy to say their first curse word. If Paul hadn’t been so scared to piss himself he probably would have marveled at it. Then the lights turned on. It was searing how bright the bare lightbulb made the room. A fluorescent, pig curl, modern, light bulb. Tom was dead silent, the brothers had stopped struggling.
Wells had been trained alongside the Recon Marines for Underwater Combat School. It was hand to hand training on how to fight in any subsurface circumstance, and it was brutal. In the gigantic pool room where dozens of diver candidates bobbed like so many terrified recruits, the walls had one simple phrase painted and recolored yearly with dedicated pride, “If you’re still concious, you’re not trying hard enough.”
Wells had tried the hardest of all of his peers. He had been dragged the surface, half drowned, half a dozen times. It was specifically during unarmed survival combatives that he tried so hard he ended up spending a night in the hospital, coughing and sputtering chlorine water until dawn.
It didn’t matter at all.
The figures descended on him like ghouls to fresh flesh, his knife lashed out and his target shifted effortlessly back, snagging his hand with a grip that felt like a steel trap. A moment later his tanks were compromised and he was sent spiraling out of control upward, his ears still ringing with Perry and Akin flooding his thoughts in a flurry of sound.
As the water splashed away from Wells’ face mask he spun around to see where Perry had ended. Wells was a proud sailor from the Navy, he would never admit how overjoyed he was to see the orange stripe of the Coast Guard vessel and her crew hauling Perry aboard. His reality slowly fuzzed back into focus and he could hear Akin’s furious tone on the radio, repeating.
“Lieutenant, what the hell is going on down there?”
Perry, already stumbling to stand on the deck, turned to help hoist his comrade up, their grasp locked at the forarm. Wells’ survival knife was still dangling from the paracord on his vest, the silvery shine reflecting light in the dim light on board. Perry helped twist and free his friends’ head from the mixed air helmet. Wells leaned back at once and looked around at the other Coast Guard crew who had scrambled to help the divers. His expression must have made sense to Ke, she rested a hand on his broad shoulder and said clearly, “We will get the other two back.”