Terminal Run

He knew he should consign himself to sleep, but he was too afraid. He knew that once he shut his eyes, that would be the end. There would be no waking up from this nap. It would be better, he knew, to get through the last horrible hours in slumber than to experience them awake. He didn’t want to be awake when the already dim lights flickered out. He felt his eyes fill with moisture and he finally was able to shut them, telling himself to slow his breathing and sleep. Every time he did, he felt his heart pound in his chest as the fear rose into his throat. There was one thing that seemed to calm him down, and it was thinking about Nicole, his young daughter, wondering what she was doing right then. He hoped she was not watching a news report and crying over him. He had thought they would keep the lid of classification on this sinking, and only tell the world when it was all over. He mourned the loss of her photograph, the one that had been bolted to his stateroom bulkhead. The one that had probably been blown to cinders in the first internal torpedo explosion.

Catardi let his thoughts wander, imagining his self flying out of this cold dark steel coffin and rising out of the sea and ascending in the air over the Atlantic Ocean, soaring higher over the earth until he returned to the house he and Sharon had shared with Nicole in a time far in the past, and he came up to the door during the summer and Nicole came out and hugged him and squealed Daddy Daddy Daddy and he lifted her into the air and said her name and they chased each other in the yard and played hide-and-seek and piggyback and all the other games she adored. And when dusk came he carried her into the house and read all her favorite stories to her, seeing every page, making every funny voice she liked, singing the funny songs he’d invented for her and listening to her giggle, and then kissed her forehead and told her to sleep. He felt her arms go around him one last time, and he stood back and watched her fall asleep until her breathing was slow and steady, and he turned out her light and stood there in the dark by her side, making sure no monsters were there to get her, and when Catardi himself fell asleep, there were tracks of tears leaving his eyes and streaking down his temples into his tangled gray streaked hair.

Outside the intact hull of the Piranha’s DSV the mangled hull of the ship lay buried in the sediment of the bottom, with just a few places where the muck had been wiped off for the hydrophones. The hydrophone cable and the locator buoy cable rose away from the dark wreck on the bottom and made their way to the surface, where night had fallen. There were no stars because of the dark clouds, and the seas rose as the wind began to howl, making the cables vibrate and sing as they came over the fantail of the salvage ship Emerald and continued into her equipment bay. At the temporary consoles set up in the crew’s mess room Lieutenant Evan Thompson sat at a console and monitored the noises coming from the interior of the DSV. It had been quiet for some time, only muffled footprints falling on the deckplates, then a muted sobbing, and then nothing. They were either sleeping or unconscious, Thompson thought. He pulled off his earphones and sighed, draping his palm over his eyes and accepting the coffee brought by the mess captain.

The British were making better time than expected, and were due by dawn, but there was nothing they would be able to do. The storm was getting worse. The captain of the Emerald had made plans to disconnect the hydrophone cables and get back to port, or if it got as bad as the reports said, make his way north to get out of the storm path. Thompson hoped they stayed long enough to turn over the operation to the Brits, but the crew of the Emerald was responsible for ship safety. It was their call. Thompson put the headphones back on and put his head on the horizontal table of the hydrophone console and shut his eyes, deciding he would sleep like that in case they called for him.

The night passed as the Emerald rocked in the waves, but there was not a sound from inside the wreckage of the USS Piranha.