"Sir —"
"Get them topside, that's an order, I'll get the lieutenant. Go."
He went into the water.
It was warm. That surprised him. Warm as a bath and thick with fuel, and he went along the inside of the hold half swimming and half climbing from tractor to tractor in the dark, calling, and his flashlight beam swung and swung over nothing, over black water and rusted steel and floating oilcloth, until finally it caught a face.
Reyes was pinned against the forward bulkhead of the hold beneath the edge of a steel hatch cover that had come down partway in the blast, and he was holding a sailor's head above the water with both hands. The sailor's eyes were open. Carter knew before he got there, from the way the head lolled, that Gunner's Mate Second Class Tyler Bost was already dead, and that Lieutenant Tom Reyes knew it too, and that it didn't matter, that he was going to hold that boy's face out of the water until the sea took them both.
"Tommy. Tommy, let him go."
"I can't — sir, I can't get him free, his leg's —"
"He's gone, son. Let him go. Look at me. Look at me."
Reyes looked at him. There was blood running out of his hairline into his left eye. His helmet was gone.
The water had risen. There was a scuttle in the bulkhead above them, a small square escape hatch that led up into a cable trunk and from there, if the drawings Carter had studied for three days were right, into the forward passageway and to the main deck. It was perhaps four feet above the water now and the water was coming up fast. Carter got a hand on the dogs and wrenched them open one by one and shoved the hatch up and back and felt air come down out of the dark, real air, cool and moving.
"Up. Up, Tommy, now."
"Bost —"