Dexter McCauley
Chesapeake Bay, Now
The harbor area of Annapolis had grown over the years to accommodate an ever-increasing number of pleasure boaters, struggling to retain its centuries-old charm. As Dex entered the narrow cobblestoned streets leading to the wharfs, he could smell the water in the air, and he felt at home. Funny how the sea became such a part of you.
As he parked at the dock he recognized some of the other guys’ vehicles already. Nobody wanted to be late for this one. The Sea Dog, with its long aft deck, bobbed and nudged at its moorings, waiting for its call to duty. When he climbed on board, he found Kevin Cheever and Doc Schissel giving their gear a once-over. They both waved when they saw him.
“Hey, Boss,” said Kevin with his characteristic big smile.
“Where’s Don?”
“Below,” said Doc. “He said he wanted to take a look at the engines before we headed out.”
Dex nodded, moved to his own locker and started his own equipment-check. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, he was feeling very anxious about going back down to the wreck. Although he’d conducted more than a hundred dives to sunken vessels over the years, intuitive forces tugged at him like the unseen gravities of worlds, whispering a message of urgency, and perhaps danger.
And that was a strange thing—part of him wanted this dive to be just like all the others (which meant routine and ultimately unremarkable), and another wanted it to be the one that would be a milestone, the signal event in his life that would make the difference, would make Dexter McCauley know it had all been worth it.
That all the crap he’d endured actually meant something.
He smiled as he thought about that. No way he’d ever want any of these guys to know such notions of fame and posterity ever crossed the brow of good, old, pragmatic Dex…
He spread out his pale green dry suit, and began checking his array of electronic gadgets. He liked the modern stuff, but he never forgot the most important fact about them: they might make diving easier, but not safer. There was no gear that could make you cautious.
Sensing movement in the periphery, Dex turned to see Don Jordan’s watchcap-clad head appear above the stairs to the main deck. His big Irish face was flush and grinning.
“Hey, Dex! .Ready for a big day?”
“We’ll see. Everything look good down there?”
Don rubbed his two-day stubble with the back of his hand. “Oh yeah. Those engines’ll still be running a hundred years from now. I’m going up to the bridge and warm up the radio gear.”
“Weather going to hold?”
“If you wanna believe the Weather Channel.” Don smiled, then headed up to the bridge.
Dex checked his watch. Almost seven. Where were the other guys?
His cell chirped as if in answer, and he fished it from his outer vest pocket.
“Dex here,” he said.
“It’s Mike. Just checking in. I’ll be there in about five minutes.”
“No problem. We’re still waiting on Tommy and Andy too. Relax.”
“I’ll try to do that. See-ya.”
As he flipped the little phone shut, he spotted Andy’s dark green Cherokee pulling into the parking area. And as Andy was opening his door, Tommy’s Mustang almost clipped him as it swung into the slot next to him.
Andy just stood there, hands on his hips, glaring at Tommy, who climbed out of the car with a big smile on his face.
Dex shook his head. He’d been trying to figure out how he’d set up the teams this morning, and his choices just got narrower. Even though Andy’s temper was by nature as brief as it was volatile, Dex would not be pairing him up with Tommy Chipiarelli. The smartest move would be to keep Tommy on a short leash, and that meant buddying up with him all day. One thing for sure—he knew he wouldn’t be hearing any complaints from any of the other guys.
True to his word, Mike Bielski showed up five minutes later. Watching him walk from his car and down the dock, Dex caught a weird feeling. The guy was walking so slow it was a little scary. Like he was headed to his own gallows.
When he came aboard, everybody greeted him with the usual round of chatter, and Dex’s odd feeling passed. He didn’t believe in premonitions or any of that kind of stuff. Nobody noticed his silence as they tugged into their suits and gear, trading bullshit chatter. Maybe he was just being his usual overly cautious self, but he was aware of a couple things: everyone had become partially infected with the gold bug, and Tommy had pissed everybody off yesterday. If he acted as impulsively today, there could be worse trouble. But at least with Tommy, Dex and the other guys knew what they were dealing with.
As he undressed in the cool morning air, layering into his dry suit, Tommy was already in high motor.
“And I gotta tell ya,” he said. “This chick had legs up to her ass.”
Andy Mellow rolled his eyes. “How many times I have to tell you, you dumb fuck? Everybody has legs up to their ass! That’s where they connect, you dope!”
The other guys laughed, and so did Tommy. “Oh yeah, that’s right. I meant her shoulders. Yeah, she had legs up to her shoulders!”
“We get the picture,” said Doc.
“Actually I got some great pictures with my phone,” said Tommy.
“God bless Apple,” said Kevin Cheever and smiled. “Just her, right?”
Suddenly the entire hull shuddered as Don kicked in the big 872 diesels. Their power surged through the deck steel and you could feel the boat just itching to yank them out of the harbor.
“Okay, ya swabs!” yelled Don, grinning. “Let’s break us loose!”
Doc and Tommy jumped up and ran fore and aft to unslip the lines holding them to the dock. Mike Bielski barely looked up from the fiddling he was doing with the adjustments to his Divelink, and Andy was testing his respirator.
Dex felt the comforting rock of the deck as the Sea Dog eased out into the channel and headed for the open Bay.
“I’ll go check on the GPS,” said Kevin. “Make sure we’re headed back to the same spot.”
Nodding, Dex snugged up his suit. If it hadn’t been for Kevin’s surplus gear from NavTronics, they would’ve never found that sub. He wondered how much easier all this new gear would’ve made some of the crazy operations his Navy unit had attempted during his long hitch.
Checking his watch, Dex figured they’d be over the target in about a half hour.
And they were.
He’d divided them up into three teams—Tommy and him, Kevin and Andy, and Doc and Mike. And they would dive in that order with each team overlapping the one in front by ten minutes. That way, there would always be a window of at least four divers on the wreck at any one time—in case there was trouble. Upon hearing his plans, none of them had complained about not going down with Tommy. No kidding…
Looking off the starboard side, Dex watched the marker buoy with Kevin’s radio beacon bobbing in the light chop. The sky was high and clear which made the Chesapeake look more blue than a muddy green. In the distance, made clear by the lack of haze, the double-spanned Bay Bridge ribboned toward Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and a flotilla of sailboats speckled the seascape with brushstrokes of color.
“We’re just about on top of her,” said Don. “First team ready, Dex?”
“Just give us the word.”
Leaning over the rail outside the entrance to the bridge, Don looked down and gave a thumbs up. “Get your headgear on and we’ll go on link.”
Tommy was already twisting his mask and mic into the most comfortable position as Dex tugged his own into place.
“Mic check—one two three,” he said.
“Copy, Dex.” Don’s unmistakable drawl filled his earpiece. “Ready anytime you are.”
With a nod of his head, Tommy acknowledged he could hear everything, then both of them flipper-waddled to the aft end of the crewboat’s long flat rear deck. When they reached the gunwale, they leg-slung themselves over the side and down to the custom-built grated platform that was almost at sea level. Dex grabbed a mesh samples collection bag off the rack, and nodded to Tommy. From there, they tilted back and entered another world.
Dex watched Tommy’s red suit come clear of the impact bubbles as he drifted beyond the black hull of the Sea Dog toward the safeline. Shoulder to shoulder, Dex moved with him and grabbed the thick nylon cord—one end attached to the buoy, the other running down past the wreck’s conning tower.
“Let’s go, boss,” said Tommy.
Without a word, Dex angled down, pointing his head toward the bottom. Despite the water warming up from a high, clear sun, the Bay appeared to be almost totally algae-free. He couldn’t remember ever seeing the usually brackish water so clear, but that wasn’t saying visibility was actually good—just better than usual.
“Okay,” said Dex. “Twenty feet…”
“Pretty clean down here,” said Tommy. “You can really see today.”
“Good copy,” said Don. “Sea Dog standing by…”
Descending the rest of the safeline’s length, they reached the topmost masts of the sub within several minutes. Dex was feeling good about the increased water-clarity—that meant higher margins of safety. You were always better off when you could see more of what was going on around you.
“Clearing the con,” he said into his Divelink. “We’re ready to move clear of the safeline and check out the aft hatch.”
Dex had decided against bringing the videocam down on the first dive. When you didn’t have the diving environment down cold, it was a bad idea to be distracted with the bullshit of running a camera. The light, the focus, worrying about the width or the tightness of the shot…all the little things that can keep your attention from the primary one of staying alive.
No way.
After he and Tommy had the next phase of their exploration checked out, then he’d start recording things. Maybe Kevin and Andy could bring the cam down on their dive, but Dex would just have to see how things were going. He floated slightly ahead of Tommy who was, at least till this point, playing by the rules.
Checking his Ikelite, Dex watched the depth numbers click past sixty-six feet, and was once again reminded of how fate had a way of making things as tricky as possible. Sixty-six feet was one of those magic numbers for divers. Under water, for every thirty-three you descend, the pressure on your body increases by one atmosphere. Which meant once you passed the sixty-six foot threshold, you were subjecting yourself to three atmospheres. And that’s when things got very interesting for all those nitrogen molecules in your bloodstream, which dissolved under the pressure and worked their way into every little space in your brain, muscle, organs, joints, and everywhere you never thought of.
Two things can happen after that. One is all that nitrogen makes divers get a little less cautious or observant. If you go to four or five atmospheres pressure, divers can get absolutely loopy and start hallucinating. Second thing is you can’t head to the surface too fast, before all that nitrogen can be passed out of the system in the form of microscopic bubbles. To make this happen, divers have to pause in their ascents, and give the process time to occur naturally.
At the depths where they found the sub, nitrogen narcosis, or “the bends” remained an issue of concern, but it was not as life-threatening as deeper dives could be.
At seventy feet, Dex felt almost totally weightless and the smallest kick or arm pull changed his position in the water. He’d spent so much time under the sea, he didn’t need to consciously be aware of the endless adjustment a diver made to maintain a depth, angle, attitude. There was a serenity, a sense of powerful isolation, that made him feel so…so complete, so in control of everything necessary to stay alive. If for no other reason, Dex loved diving for that sense of being so sharply attuned to your thoughts and the sealed-off hull that defines you as an individual, a singularity in the universe.
A universe largely out to get you.
They hovered over the conning tower and the small observation bridge in front of the superstructure. “Hold on,” said Dex, as he probed the deck of the bridge with his torch beam. The hatch leading below appeared to be breached, which made sense if the boat had been sent to bottom in a controlled scuttle.
He would have liked to have tried to inspect the sub at midship, but he knew—even though nobody was saying—they all wanted to find out what Tommy thought he saw through the rear hatch.
Motioning with his torch, Dex led his dive-mate toward the aft section. “Hey,” said Tommy. “Somebody left the door open…”
His partner’s attempt to be clever pulled Dex from his concentration, and he looked ahead of them to see the aft hatch peeled back like the lid of a garbage pail. They cleared the swollen hump of the boat’s rear deck and homed in on the opening to the hull.
“Okay,” said Dex. “Let’s take a look down there. Get out your torch.”
He and Tommy unhitched their watertight flashlights from their utility belts, and switched them on. Despite their compact size, the devices put out a tight, sharp beam. Dex hovered over the dark circle of the open lower hatch, then pierced it with a burst of light, revealing a ladder leading down to a grated deck.
“Tommy, listen up. I’ll go in first. You stay topside till I see what kind of room we have down there.”
“Gotcha.”
“Donnie, you copy that? We’re going in.”
“Gotcha,” said Don, his voice modulated by the little earpiece headphone. “Standing by…”
Following the path cut by his torch beam, Dex angled head first into the hatch. Experience from previous dives into openings of similar dimensions alerted him to how much clearance his tanks allowed him. He had to move with deliberate caution in case there was something sticking out that might foul his hoses or snag his suit.
Dex tilted over, headfirst, and slid through the hatch, keeping his chest close enough to the ladder to clear his double tank. Halfway down, he craned his neck around to see what might present possible problems. The passageway directly beneath him appeared to be clear of obstacles or debris.
As he righted himself, his torch played across the grated deck, touching steel and brass fittings, and Dex had a brief moment in which he felt like an intruder to a place better left untouched. Like a grave robber or a cat burglar. To the left, in the direction of the aft torpedo room, he saw what looked like a single brick laying up close to the bulkhead.
Tommy’s “gold bullion,” no doubt.
“See anything?” said Tommy. “I’m ready to follow you in.”
“Come on. Just take it slow.” Dex drifted over to the brick-like object. As he drew closer, he could see it wasn’t the treasure Tommy had imagined. There was no gold sheen about it. He reached out, picked it up and was surprised to feel how heavy it was—some kind of really dense material. Rubbing it, he was surprised to see no thin rime of algae sticking to its surface. The color looked like a dark pewter.
Whatever it was, the Nazis probably had some use for it. Lying nearby were the rotted remains of what might have been a canvas rucksack. No way to tell if there’d even been any more bricks here or if this was the only one. Dex opened the throat of his collection bag, slipped the heavy object into it. As he was doing this, Tommy floated over to him. “Hey, so was I right?”
“You mean is it gold?”
“Yeah…”
“I don’t know what this thing is, but it’s not gold.”
“Hey, guys,” said Don’s voice through his earpiece. “You wouldn’t want to clue us in up here, would you?”
“Sure,” said Dex. “We’re not rich, okay?”
He briefly summarized their findings, then listened to Don bemoan their bad luck. The water in the flooded chamber was clear enough to see the closed hatch in front of them—leading toward the center of the boat. Other than their breathing, amplified through their hoses and communications gear, the normal silence of being under the sea morphed into something more eerie, more oppressive in the sub’s cloudy interior.
“We’re going to work our way aft towards the conning tower now,” said Dex. How’s Team Two? They ready?”
“Been ready,” said Don.
“You can get them in the water on schedule,” said Dex. “Everything looks okay so far.”
“Any sign of damage?” said Don.
“Not yet. Looks like the Jerries scuttled this thing but they didn’t use charges.”
“Jerries?” said Tommy. “Why they called that?”
“No idea… I’ve always wanted to say the word, that’s all.”
Moving to the hatch, Dex checked the wheel-lock. It was frozen, as often happened to moving parts in seawater, but in the open position. He put his shoulder against it, and it swung inward, away from him easily. Beyond this bulkhead, they entered a surprisingly open section of the boat, which housed two long, lean diesels. The salt water had failed to eat much of the formidable engines, and in tribute to the German engineering that created them, they still looked clean and powerful enough to be refurbed and push this boat along at a good clip. Flanking the diesels on the outer walls of the hull were banks of batteries to power the electric motors. To them the sea had been less kind, reducing them to crusted piles of corrosion.
“Pretty big rig,” said Tommy.
“This was a big boat.” Dex paused to study the path ahead, making sure there were no obstacles that might be a problem.
Between the two engines, a ladder headed up to a wider than usual hatch, which appeared to be locked down. Dex played his torch beam over it. “That’s probably the access to the second level.”
“We goin’ up?” said Tommy.
“Not yet. I want to see what the control deck looks like. Plenty of time to check that out later.”
“You’re the boss,” said Tommy.
“Hey, Dex…” Don’s voice in his earpiece. “Andy and Kevin are ready to go.”
“Check. They need to bring the camera.”
“They got it.”
“Good.” Dex paused for a second. “Kevin? Andy? You guys copy that?”
“Just hit the water,” said Kevin Cheever. “What’s up, Boss?”
“We’re about midway down the aft section. When we get there, we’ll see if we can get the hatch on the bridge open. That leads down to the control deck, which is where we’re headed. We can meet you there.”
“Sounds like you worked this out pretty good,” said Andy. “We’ll be there.”
Dex checked his chrono—they were making pretty good progress. He’d have a little time to poke around in the captain’s area before having to head up. And he felt good about having the second team nearby when he did it. He was starting to feel confident, and even a little comfortable as they moved along, and he had to remind himself he was floating through the center of a rusting hulk at the bottom of the bay. A dark, congested coffin that hadn’t yet given up all its secrets.
In other words: still watch your ass.
Next came a section of the hull filled with bunks so neatly and closely stacked, he could almost see them still occupied by fresh-faced German sailors. What had happened to them? If any were by the oddest chance still alive, they would be stooped and shrunken old men. From the looks of the number of racks, the sub had supported a larger crew than the Type VII boats.
“Just cleared the crew quarters,” Dex reported to Don. “Nothing unusual.”
He was looking for anything that might help explain the boat’s size and oddly shaped hull, but so far Dex hadn’t noticed a damn thing.
“Hey, Dex,” said Tommy. “I’ve been meaning to ask you…”
“Yeah?” he said as they floated past the bunks, heading ever closer to the center of the boat.
“You think everybody got out of this thing? I mean, what if we find…you know…some bodies?”
“Like I said, my first impression is they scuttled her, which means everybody jumped ship way before she ended up down here.” He paused as they approached the next bulkhead door, slowing their motion to see if there were any potential problems. But nothing revealed itself in the beam of their torches and he tried to relax.
“Sounds like a ‘but’ coming…” said Tommy.
“Kind of. Any bodies exposed to seawater this long would be pretty much just gone. But if we did find some poor bastard holed up somewhere—protected somewhat—well, we’d have to give him a proper burial.”
“Gives me the creeps,” said Tommy.
“Yeah, I hear you.”
Dex motioned him to move closer as they were within reach of the next bulkhead. The hatch here was also unlatched, but this one swung in toward them, to reveal a collection of tables and benches, which defined the crew’s mess and the galley beyond it. This deep into the boat, the metal surfaces looked cleaner than Dex would have expected. The incursion of endless variations of sea life was everywhere, of course, but not with the ravenous reclamation he’d seen in other wrecks.
“Everything looks so small,” said Tommy. “How many guys get to scarf in here at a time?”
“Fifteen. Twenty, maybe.”
“I don’t know if I could’ve stood this shit.”
“Lot of guys can’t,” said Dex.
They drifted over the tables and benches, past the entrance to the compact, efficiently designed little galley.
“You ever sail in a sub?”
“Not as duty,” said Dex. “Had to be inside on a couple of rescue ops. Before they’d refined the DSRVs.”
“The whats?”
“Deep Submersible Rescue Vehicles.”
“Oh yeah…”
“I’m sure the latest ones are kind of half-assed classified.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet…”
Playing the beam of his torch on the next door, Dex could see it was sealed, and he hoped it would open as easily as the others. Despite its larger size, this U-boat had been laid out in similar fashion to its smaller, older siblings, and Dex figured the control deck would be the next chamber.
“Hey, guys,” said the familiar voice of Kevin Cheever. “We’re about halfway down the safeline. Sounds like you haven’t made the conning tower yet.”
“Just about there,” said Dex. “Be careful when you enter the bridge—watch out for the antenna and the snort, okay?”
“Got it covered,” said Andy.
The bulkhead door loomed in front of them. Its steel facade, encrusted in a thin layer of sea scum, seemed to absorb their torchlight. Dex gestured to Tommy to grab the wheel-lock on the door and give it a good, hard turn. But it was already in open position, the door ajar.
Now they were entering the heart and mind of the boat. Dex knew if there were any secrets to be found, they would probably be found here. He announced their entry on the Divelink’s open channel.
“We’re right above you,” said Kevin. “Looks like we have a clear path to the bridge.”
“You still with us, Donnie?” Dex said.
“I’m hanging in there,” said Don through the base unit. “Be careful, guys.”
The bulkhead door to the control deck swung inward, and Dex had the sensation of a curtain being pulled back as the beams of their torches passed the threshold ahead of them.
“You first,” said Tommy.
Dex nodded, leaned forward and lightly flippered through the opening. Above him the hull thumped and echoed the arrival of Kevin and Andy on the bridge.
“Okay, we’re in…” he said.
The control deck was wider and longer than any vintage sub he’d ever seen. The only thing similar was the low ceiling, crammed with piping, cables, and wires. The periscope array hung from the center of the chamber, but there was ample room all around it for a chart table, an instrument pedestal, and communication bay. The aft end comprised the helm and fire-control panels; the prow of the conning tower was dominated by a striking innovation—a viewing port.
“Look at that,” said Tommy as he played his light over the thick glass of the port. It was a horizontal slash in the conning tower, like the gun-port in a pillbox. The German engineers had obviously solved the problems of pressure and maintaining an efficient seal. Impressive.
“Dex…?”
“Yeah, Andy?”
“We’re right above the deck hatch. It’s locked down tighter than a crab’s ass.”
“We’ll give it a go in here.”
Motioning to Tommy, Dex directed him to the ladder leading to the bridge above their heads. He watched his partner’s red suit glow briefly as he passed through his torch beam. Floating up to the wheel-lock, Tommy muscled it open with little effort. As the lid peeled back, Dex saw Andy Mellow’s faceplate framed in the circular aperture.
“Trick or treat,” he said as he drifted back, positioning the videocam in the opening. “I’m gonna get a shot of us coming through.”
Dex and Tommy backed away, giving Andy room to maneuver his wide-shouldered torso through the hatch. He was followed by Kevin Cheever. They wore orange and lime green suits respectively, which flashed colorfully in the torchlight, and now with four outfitted divers in the chamber, the space did not feel in any way near as capacious or comfortable. As Andy slowly panned around the interior of the conning tower, Dex found himself imagining what it must have looked like with a crewman at every station.
“We have about twelve minutes,” said Dex. “Tommy and I are going to look for the captain’s cabin. You guys can see if they left anything in here that might tell us something.”
“Got it,” said Kevin.
“After that, it’ll probably be a good idea to get some video of the aft sections—engine room, crew quarters, and then if you have time, head on back to the rear torpedo room. If they scuttled this tub, they would have opened all the tubes to get it done.”
“Got it.”
“Let’s see…what else? Okay, then Tommy and I will exit from the control deck hatch to save time.”
“Okay, Chief,” said Kevin.
“Anything else?” said Andy.
“If you have time, see if you can get a look inside the hump-back.” That was the term Andy had come up with to describe the additional chamber on the U-boat, which ran the entire length of the hull’s aft section.
“Yeah, right.”
“We saw a hatch in the engine room leading up that way,” said Dex. “But don’t try anything risky. Don’t go up there if your air is low.”
“We won’t,” said Kevin.
And Dex knew he wasn’t bullshitting him. Kevin Cheever was one of those by-the-book kind of guys. He was polite and thoughtful and you just knew he was a highly moral person. He also knew the value of following procedure.
“Okay, Tommy, let’s see what we can find up this way.”
Dex drifted toward the bulkhead door leading to the bow, and was a little surprised to see it ajar. Pausing, he looked for signs of damage, but there was nothing apparent. The corridor beyond this door seemed more narrow than the others. Two doors flanked the passageway, the one to the right was a second room with stainless steel tables and benches—the officer’s mess. The one on the left was closed, but it swung inward as Tommy leaned into it. By submarine standards, the room beyond it was like a first class stateroom. A trundle bed, a wardrobe locker, private bathroom, and an expansive desk with a chair that, despite the corrosion and the rotted fragments of leather, looked somehow imposing.
“Captain’s quarters,” said Dex. “You copy that, Don?”
“Yeah, Chief. Sounds exciting,” said Don through the headset. “Glad I’m not there…”
“Hey, we might find somethin’ here,” said Tommy. “You want me to start diggin’ around?”
Dex checked his watch. They were running short on time and air. “Yeah, let’s just be careful. Stuff’s going to be real fragile after all this time.”
“Gotcha,” said Tommy as he drifted closer to the wardrobe and storage drawers built into the hull.
As Tommy eased open each door and drawer, trying not to disturb their contents, Dex fixed his attention on the Captain’s desk. There was a center drawer, which contained nothing but decayed and corroded stationery items, but there was file drawer that formed the right side of the foot well, which looked promising. It was locked, but Dex used a compact, flattened pry-bar from his tool bag to spring it open. Sixty-plus years underwater had defeated even Germany’s precise manufacturing specs, and the file drawer slid open to reveal a section of decayed files and a small, steel oblong box with a four digit combination lock.
Dex picked it up, immediately feeling its mass. The box, perhaps ten inches long and half as deep, was well-machined…and heavy, and quite possibly air and water-tight. Carefully, he slipped it into his sample bag. Then, scouring the inner walls of the file drawer with his torch beam, he saw nothing else of interest.
“Hey, this might be something…” said Tommy.
He was still scanning the storage area where the Captain’s clothing had been kept.
“What’d you find?”
“I dunno, looks like some clips and some medals.” He held them out in his hand, pinned them there with his Ikelite.
“Yeah, grab any of that kind of stuff you find. It’s all that’s left from the clothes, but it might tell us something.”
“Okay,” said Tommy.
“This place looks pretty empty,” said Dex. “But the seawater could’ve eaten everything. No way to tell.”
“Piece of his shoes,” said Tommy. “There were little scraps and pieces in the locker. That was all that was left of this guy’s shoes.”
“I remember reading somewhere that the German sailors used to put their names in their shoes—that it was a good way to ID a ship by checking the guy’s name on naval registries.”
“Not this time,” said Tommy.
A soft beeper sounded, synched up with the LED on Dex’s Princeton Tec. The device was telling him it was just about time to go.
“Hey, you about ready?” he said to Tommy as he gestured toward the ceiling.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Kevin, Andy…? How’s it going in there?”
“Not much around. This place looks like they picked it clean.” said Andy. “We’re heading towards the aft torpedo room.”
“Be careful. Get samples of anything that looks interesting,” said Dex. “Tommy and I are heading up. You copy that Don?”
“I hear you.”
“What about Doc and Mike?”
“Ready to hit the water,” said Doc. “On your mark, Boss.”
“Any time you’re ready,” said Dex. “We’ll see you on the safeline. On our way up.”
Nodding to Tommy, Dex gestured to his dive-mate to get moving.
He felt a pulse of excitement jump through him as he anticipated going through the stuff they’d just found. Good chance they’d ID the sub for sure now, and that might just be the beginning.