Poor kid. Not even twenty-three yet and look at him…hands shaking, stress lines around his eyes and mouth. And his eyes. When he put them on you, they looked like they belonged to a sixty-year old man that had lived too hard and seen too much. Like the eyes of kids in Vietnam. Nineteen going on fifty. Like Orr himself, Anderson was pretty much getting by on caffeine and adrenaline. Not much else. He rarely slept and what sleep he did get was haunted by nightmares that he woke sweating and screaming from. This whole goddamn project, this lake, that city, all of it…it was like some gigantic dry cell battery charged with negative energy and badness. You could only handle so much of it before it burned you from the inside out.

“How you doing, son?” Orr said to the kid.

Anderson offered him a jittery smile. “I’m…I’m okay.”

“Sure. Sure, you are. I’m okay, too. And the sooner we get the hell out of here the more okay we’re going to be.”

“Yeah…yes, sir.”

“Suppose when you were going to DeVry, or wherever the hell a guy like you does his training, I don’t suppose you ever imagined you’d be sitting in a buoy on a lake beneath a fucking glacier.”

Anderson forced a laugh. “No, sir. The ONR never mentioned this kind of thing when they hired me.”

“Just hang tight, kid. It’s almost done with now.”

Orr listened to Bell and Murphy talking over the wire. They weren’t as chatty as before. No joking. No jibes. And definitely no humorous sexual banter between Javonivic and Murphy.

They were all stretched pretty tight by that point and there wasn’t a drop of good humor or optimism left in them. Orr had seen that little girl same as Javonivic had. But what the hell was he supposed to say? Yup, looks like a fucking ghost all right. If I were you, I’d haul ass out of there. No, he couldn’t say that. All he could do was urge them forward to get the job done. NSF, ONI, all the backroom power brokers, no…they wouldn’t understand if Orr scrubbed the mission now. They would make an example out of him. And he wasn’t even worrying much about them yanking his pension, but he didn’t want to lose face.

With his divers.

And particularly with himself.