That night Finn sat out on the portside Gatling gun catwalk, watching the ocean, sketching in the faint illumination of a waning crescent moon as jets blasted off the flight deck above. Incredible, that no one had spotted him out here and dragged his ass inside.
Incredible, that they were leaving the Gulf without completing their search.
This ship was a mess, all right. But not his mess. How had he put it to Schofield, that first night? Just a passenger.
Besides, he had his own concerns to worry about.
He took out his ring knife and sharpened the charcoal pencil to a fresh point.
The sea looked like hammered silver tonight, the moon’s arc fracturing into a million slivers of glass on its surface. Finn knew exactly what that looked like gazing up from underneath, dozens of meters down, diving under the hulls of great ships like this.
As part of their SEAL workup, Finn and Boyd had gone through a dive exercise, planting explosives on the hull of a destroyer in the San Diego Harbor. Visibility was close to nil and because their Dräger rebreathers emitted no bubbles, they couldn’t orient themselves by the usual upward bubble trail from their exhale. The boom of the ship’s generators was incredibly loud, and sound didn’t work in water the way it did in the air—it pinged and echoed so that it seemed as if sounds were coming at them from every direction at once.
“It’s easy to lose all spatial orientation,” he’d explained when he told Carol about what happened. “The way to beat the panic is to find the seam of the weld on the ship’s hull and follow it with your fingers. You have to ignore everything else, because the moment you go chasing after up and down you lose connection with the seam of the weld.”
“And that was Boyd’s mistake,” said Carol.
And that was Boyd’s mistake. When he lost orientation he fought to get it back. He let go of the seam, unclipped his buddy line, and went chasing after up and down. The more it eluded him the more frantic he got.
Finn couldn’t reach him in time.
Those ballast pumps sucked in seawater with tremendous force. The ship was supposed to have shut down their pumps for the exercise, but some dipshit in admin forgot to pass along an order to someone else. Boyd got sucked into the ballast tank.
The next moment Finn’s sniper partner was nothing but a cloud of red mist.
It was ruled an accident, of course. A tragic training mishap. No one was charged. The circle-jerk of military politics.
A few weeks later Finn was at the funeral, seated next to Boyd’s stone-faced sister. Halfway through the service she leaned sideways toward him and whispered, “You’re Finn?”
Finn nodded, smelling the coffee and stale funeral-home cookies on her breath.
“He told me, if it hadn’t been for you, he’d never have got through that sniper course. That he would’ve washed out and gone home.”
Finn said nothing. It was true. Boyd was a phenomenal shot, but couldn’t stalk worth shit. Finn had practically carried him through the course.
After a long pause the sister leaned closer, her hand on his arm now, and whispered directly in his ear.
“I hope you burn in hell.”
Finn didn’t blame her. Boyd shouldn’t have died.
“Know what I think?” Carol had said after hearing the story. “In a court of law they’d probably find you insane.”
Because?
“Because the courts define insanity as not knowing the difference between right and wrong—and as far as you’re concerned that definition completely misses the point of reality.”
How so?
“Right and wrong? Might as well chase after up and down. And in the dark there is no up and down. There’s only the seam of the weld.”
Finn had no response to that.
“So here’s my question,” she said. “For you, what is the seam of the weld?”
Finn didn’t have an answer.
After a minute Carol said, “Know what I think?” She leaned over and whispered in his ear.
“I think it’s loyalty.”
Finn watched the coast of Iran recede, its oil derricks lighting the sky.
Was that true? Was that what kept him connected to Carol? To Kennedy?
Loyalty?
He didn’t know. All he knew was, he was sitting here saying goodbye to a man he hardly knew.
They were leaving Schofield behind.
Finn had never been big on the leave-no-man-behind ethic, noble as it was. He didn’t disagree with the sentiment; it was a good code and he’d fought for it himself, more than once. But he didn’t believe in it. Some men got left behind. That was just how it was. It wasn’t karma, it wasn’t fate. They didn’t deserve it or not deserve it. There was no reason for it.
No up, no down.
But Schofield should not have died.
He turned to a fresh page and went on sketching the glassy slivers of moon.
He thought again of Schofield the night before, striding purposefully past in the direction of the fantail. The hot prickling up the back of his neck.
The next moment, he’d been sitting out on the CIWS mount astride the great Gatling gun at dawn, hearing Captain Tom’s voice in his head.
Two scenes, side by side in his mind, seamless, like a smash cut in a horror flick or a skip in an old vinyl LP.
And of the sequence of steps between those two moments? He had no memory.
No memory at all.