"Engine room's clear, sir," came back Chief Ray Dunleavy's voice, flat and calm. "Nobody down here. Engines secured."
"Keep looking."
He brought Reyes's team aboard. He remembered the young lieutenant coming over the rail first, as he should, helmet a little too big for him, a slight man with a Texas accent who had asked good questions at the planning brief without trying to impress anybody.
"Holds two and three, Lieutenant," Carter said. "The tractors are in three, if the report's right. Take your people, take your pictures, don't touch anything that has wires coming out of it."
"Aye, sir."
"Tommy."
"Sir?"
"Two of the crew are unaccounted for. Keep your head on a swivel."
"Aye aye, sir." And then, after a beat, the hint of a smile visible under the edge of his night-vision mount: "Nobody calls me Tommy but my mother, sir."
"Then I'm in good company."
It was eleven minutes later, while Carter was on the bridge going through the master's papers with a red-lensed flashlight, that the first charge went off.
It was not a large explosion. That was the thing he would come back to, again and again, over the years, lying awake in the house in Maine with the sea breathing against the rocks below the window. It was not large. It was a flat, dull thump felt more than heard, coming up through the soles of his boots, and for one long second nothing happened at all. Then the second charge went, and the third, deep in the ship, down by the keel, and the Anahita gave a great shuddering groan like a living thing and began, very slowly, to list to port.
"Scuttling charges," Dunleavy said over the radio, and for the first and only time in eleven years Carter heard something in the chief's voice that was not calm. "They've scuttled her, sir. She's taking water in the engine room, fast. I can hear it coming in."