The two missing crewmen. Carter understood it all at once, the way you understand things in those moments, complete and cold. They hadn't been hiding. They'd been setting the charges, and then they'd gone over the side in the dark on the far side of the ship while everybody was watching the bridge, and now they were somewhere out there on the black water in a life ring or a skiff, and the Anahita was going to the bottom with whatever was in her holds, and so was everybody in them.
"All stations, all stations," he said, and his own voice sounded strange to him, very slow, very clear. "Abandon ship. Get topside now. Kessler, Anahita, we have flooding, we are abandoning, get the boats alongside the starboard quarter. Reyes, acknowledge. Reyes, get your people out of those holds, acknowledge."
Static. Then a voice, not Reyes, one of his sailors, high and fast: "Sir, the ladder in three's gone, the ladder's gone, the lieutenant's down there, we can't —"
The deck tilted. The master's papers slid off the chart table and scattered across the floor.
Carter was already moving.
He would not remember, afterward, the run down through the ship. Only pieces. A companionway gone suddenly steep. A steel door that had swung half shut with the list and that he had to put his shoulder against. Mike Chardi appearing beside him out of the dark, from nowhere, the way Mike always appeared where he was needed, saying, "Hold three, sir? I'm with you," and the two of them going down together, down and down into the groaning, tilting belly of the Anahita, while above them the ship's lights flickered and died and the only light left was the one on the ends of their rifles.
The hold was flooding from below. They came out onto a catwalk that ran along its upper edge and looked down into a pit of moving water, black and oily and climbing, with the shapes of tractors breaking its surface like the backs of animals. Somewhere down there, flashlights. Three of them, then four, wavering, and men's voices, shouting. The ladder that should have run from the catwalk to the floor of the hold had torn loose from its upper mounts in the explosion and fallen into the water. Two of Reyes's sailors were clinging to the side of a tractor cab, chest-deep. Another was trying to climb the slick inner wall of the hold with his bare hands.
"Line," Carter said, and Mike already had it, a coil of nylon off his kit, and was tying it to the catwalk railing with the quick, sure, ugly knots of a man who had tied a thousand of them in the dark.
They got the first three out that way. Carter on the catwalk hauling, Mike down on the line in the water, pushing, shoving, shouting, hauling men up by their gear and their collars and once by the hair. One of the sailors had a broken arm and screamed the whole way up. Carter didn't remember his name. He would read it later in a newspaper, in a story about the four men who'd been lost and the twelve who'd been saved, and he would sit with that newspaper in a room in Germany and not be able to put a face to it, and that would bother him more than almost anything else.
"Reyes!" he shouted down into the hold. "Where's your lieutenant?"
"Forward, sir!" The boy with the broken arm, on the catwalk now, pointing with his good hand. "He went forward to get Bost, Bost was by the tractors, the lieutenant went back for him —"
The water was a foot from the catwalk. The list was worse. Carter could feel the ship going, could feel the change in her, the way she had stopped fighting and begun simply to fill.
"Mike, get these men topside."