Was Coffman deformed? Hawkins wondered, but then discounted it. He doubted a man with a deformed arm would have seen active duty outside of an office setting or hospital. It might not have been much of a handicap, but in a war setting, a weaker arm would definitely be a liability. Then what? Malnutrition? That didn’t make sense, either. It wouldn’t affect a single arm.
Hawkins leaned in close. The left arm almost looked dainty. Feminine. His head snapped to the left, where the woman they’d first discovered lay, three bodies over. The woman’s right arm lay to her side. The left arm was missing.
He faintly heard Bray asking him what he was doing, but ignored the man. He could barely hear him over the rushing of his own blood. He measured out the left arm again. Doing his best to keep his arms in place, he stood and walked to the skeleton missing an arm. He placed his hands over the right arm.
They matched.
He leaned up, eyes wide, but not seeing. “Fuck.”
Hawkins snapped out of his daze. Joliet had muttered the same curse, at the same moment he had.
“What is it with you two?” Bray asked as he stomped toward them. “What are you doing?”
“Coffman’s left arm,” Hawkins said. “It’s not his.” He looked down at the woman missing a limb. He pointed to the empty shoulder joint. “It’s hers.”
Bray stumbled back a few steps. “What?” His eyes darted back and forth between Coffman’s body and the woman’s. “That can’t be right.”
“It’s right,” Joliet said and then pointed to the body she’d been inspecting. “You thought there was another row of bodies beneath these because of the extra limbs.” She looked up at Bray. “There is no second row. The third arm—” Her eyes moved to Hawkins. “It’s been surgically attached.”
Hawkins and Bray both leaned over the woman. Joliet had cleared the sand away from the arm, revealing a shoulder ball joint with a pin in it. The pin ran straight through the bone where it attached to the sixth rib. It wasn’t hard to picture this person in life, in agony, with a limp arm hanging from the ribs.
“These people weren’t tortured,” he said. “They were experimented on.”
A deep roar filled the lagoon valley. All three of them jumped back, spinning around in search of the sound’s source. Hawkins found it in a cloud of gray smoke issuing from the Magellan’s exhaust.
The engines were running.
“How you like that?” Drake said over the radio, sounding pleased. “It’s about as piss-poor a rig as I’ve ever seen. We’ll have to two-way radio every course change to the engine room so they can manually adjust the ship, but we’ll be mobile.”
Hawkins stood and looked down at the three-armed body. “You have no idea how happy I am to hear that, sir.”
He knew they couldn’t leave without discovering Kam’s fate, but it was nice to know they could, if they had to. He didn’t think getting through the sharply bending channel that led into the lagoon would be easy, but if they moved slowly enough, they could do it. They could escape the island graveyard.
“Let’s get back to the Magellan,” Hawkins said. “Figure out what to do next.”
Neither Bray nor Joliet disagreed. They quickly and quietly made for the Zodiac. Hawkins took one last look at the jungle and the bodies and hoped that if Kam were in the hands of the people who had committed these crimes, or their descendants, that he was being treated well, or already dead. The alternative was unthinkable.
15.
The lavish spread on the mess hall’s long dinner table felt inappropriate, given the fact that two men were dead, another missing, and they’d just uncovered the bodies of fifteen mutilated war crime victims, at least three of which were United States Navy. But it seemed surviving the storm and getting the engines back up was cause for celebration. At least it was to the Tweedle brothers.
In attendance were Captain Drake, Blok, Bray, Joliet, and Hawkins. Ray and Jim Clifton remained in the kitchen preparing meals for Jones and Bennett, who’d kept working in engineering, Sanchez, in case he woke up, and DeWinter, who manned the bridge. The crew normally ate in shifts, and the captain almost always ate alone, but this was as much a group debriefing as it was a meal.
The table held an assortment of foods. Grilled steaks sat in front of everyone except for Blok, a vegetarian who got pasta instead. Sides included mashed potatoes, green beans, and salads with dried cranberry, sugar-coated almonds, and avocado, served in frozen bowls. Not exactly high on the fancy scale, but filling, comforting, and served with red wine that helped ease Hawkins’s tension.