The fourth, Gunner's Mate Second Class Tyler Bost, the sailor from the destroyer, had his own plaque on a different wall in Norfolk. Lucas had looked that up, too.
There'd been a small laminated card tucked behind a bouquet of dried flowers at the base of the wall that day, faded from the weather, and Lucas had crouched down to read it. In neat block capitals, it said: SIR, YOU WENT BACK FOR ME. I HAVE NEVER STOPPED GOING BACK FOR YOU. — T.R.
He had not known who T.R. was. He'd taken a picture of the card with his phone and looked at it sometimes, late at night, without knowing why.
A voice called out across the lawn, sharp and carrying, and the whole formation came to attention as one, and Lucas came with it, heels together, chin up, eyes front. The band struck up. Somewhere ahead of them the color guard had begun to move.
He let himself look one more time, just with his eyes, toward the front row.
His father was looking at the stage. Not at the formation, not at the colors, not at Lucas. At the stage, where a line of officers in dress whites was filing up the steps to take their seats behind the lectern, and at the last of them, the tallest, a lean dark-haired man with the broad gold stripe and star of a rear admiral on his shoulder boards and a chest full of ribbons that caught the sun.
And his father's face, from a hundred feet away, had gone the color of the white folding chairs.
* * *
The hand on his ankle pulled, and he went with it, because there was nothing else to do, kicking blindly upward, or what he hoped was upward, through water as black as the inside of a closed fist. Then his head broke into air.
Not open air. A pocket. He knew it by the sound: the way his own coughing slammed back at him from close steel on every side, the hollow, ringing, tomb-like slosh of water in an enclosed space. The hold had rolled almost completely over, and somewhere up in what had been its floor and was now its ceiling, a few cubic yards of air had been trapped against the plating. He reached up and touched steel eighteen inches above his face. It was warm and it was vibrating.
"Sir." Mike's voice, right beside him in the dark, hoarse with fuel. "Sir, you with me?"
"I told you to get topside."