"Yeah. Okay. Sure." The grip tightened, then let go. "On three, sir. Follow my feet."
They went down together on three. Carter would remember the count, Mike's voice saying it, steady as a metronome, one, two, and the deep breath, and three. Down through the black, along the plating, hand over hand. Mike's boots ahead of him, kicking, and Carter's fingers brushing them, losing them, finding them again. His lungs began to burn. The steel under his hands was rough and then suddenly jagged, peeled back like the lid of a can, and he felt the water change, felt a current pulling, cold, outside water, the open sea.
Mike was in the breach. Carter could feel him there, could feel his body wedged in the jagged opening, struggling. Something had him. His vest, his kit, a strap, a buckle, Carter would never know what. He got his hands on Mike's shoulders and pulled, and pulled again, and felt Mike shake his head, felt it through his hands, a short hard no. He pulled a third time. His chest was on fire. Little stars had begun to burst behind his eyes.
And Mike Chardi reached back through the jagged steel and put his hand flat on Carter's chest and pushed. Not pulling for help. Pushing him away. Out, past him, around him, through the gap beside his own trapped body where there was just enough room for one man. Carter felt the steel tear across his back. He felt his vest catch and tear free. And then he was through, outside the ship, in open water, and he turned and reached back, and found Mike's hand, and Mike squeezed his fingers once, hard.
Then let go.
The Anahita went down. Carter felt her go, felt the great sucking pull of four thousand tons of steel sliding under, dragging the sea down after her, dragging him, and he kicked against it with everything he had left and everything he didn't, and he did not let himself think about the hand, and he did not let himself think about anything, and then there was nothing to think about, because his head broke the surface into the warm black air of the Arabian Sea and there were stars over him, a whole sky of them, and he was alone.
* * *
The Kessler searched for him for four days.
He knew that because he read it, afterward, in the reports they let him see.
Four days. Two helicopters and the destroyer and later a Pakistani frigate that had come to help. They found Bost on the second day. They found pieces of the Anahita's lifeboats and a great iridescent slick of fuel oil, and a single boot, and they found nothing else.
By then the current had carried Carter more than forty miles to the southwest.
He had found a hatch cover broken free of the ship and pulled himself onto it before dawn and watched the sun come up red out of the sea. His back was opened from shoulder to hip where the steel had caught him. Sometime that first morning he heard a helicopter, very far away, and tried to wave, and could not lift his arm high enough for anyone to see.