100 Fathoms Below

CHAPTER TWENTY

After Lieutenant Junior Grade Charles Duncan’s watch section was finished and he’d had something to eat in the wardroom, he got to thinking about Jerry White, Frank Leonard, and fate.

He had known Lieutenant Commander Leonard—or, he supposed, just Frank, now that the man’s navy career was over—for four years, having served under him on the USS Batfish, a Sturgeon-class sub out of Charleston. This was after Operation Evening Star made Batfish a navy legend in 1978, when she detected a Soviet Yankee-class ballistic missile submarine in the Norwegian Sea, a couple hundred nautical miles above the Arctic Circle. Batfish had trailed the sub for 50 days without ever being detected, all the while gathering valuable intelligence on how Soviet subs operated. Although Duncan and Leonard hadn’t been part of that op, when they were assigned to Batfish they found a sense of camaraderie among the crew that stemmed from the sub’s impressive legacy. Everyone on Batfish knew it was a special boat, and as a result the crew was tighter than any other he had known.

He and Leonard remained friendly even after they were transferred to new submarines, calling each other regularly when they weren’t underway. Duncan had felt terrible when he heard Leonard had been passed over for promotion a third time, thereby ending his career with the navy. But his sympathy had turned to anger when he learned why Leonard had been passed up. An official complaint by some pissant PO2 named Jerry White.

Did Frank Leonard have problems? Of course he did. Everyone had problems. Was it true Leonard had a weakness for nose candy and pills? Sure, but it sounded a lot worse than it was. He did it only when he was off duty and off base. And besides, he assured Duncan—one of the few people who knew about his habit—that he had cut way down and was in the process of stopping altogether. He promised he had it under control. Then Jerry White went and screwed everything up with that damn complaint. And the kicker? It hadn’t even been about the drugs. It had been about the way Leonard treated some PO who shouldn’t have been allowed in the navy in the first place—a faggot who’d lied about being a faggot so he could join the submarine service. Frank Leonard had been a good, loyal navy man, and the fact that he’d lost his career over the way he treated a goddamn homo had made Duncan furious.

The day he saw Jerry White’s name added to the crew roster for Roanoke, it was as if fate had played a hand. He called Leonard from Pearl to tell him the news, and Leonard had made him promise to make White’s life on the submarine a living hell. He didn’t need to twist Duncan’s arm. If fate was giving him a chance to avenge his friend and fellow member of the esteemed Batfish crew, who was he to say no? White had destroyed an executive officer’s career, and yet White’s rank was intact, his record unsullied. It was an injustice so outrageous, Duncan felt justified—no, duty-bound—to make White wish they had thrown him out on his ass. If the navy had been too much of an institutional pussy to teach him the lesson he needed, Duncan was happy to pick up the slack.

But there was only so much Duncan could do to him, especially knowing White’s affinity for filing complaints about officers. If he harassed White too brazenly, Duncan would get gigged, and that demerit would stay on his record permanently. If he got violent with him, he would get thrown out of the navy faster than if he’d been caught diddling some boy during a stopover in Bangkok—and with just as much dishonor. He had to walk a fine line, which left him with only one option: dressing White down at every opportunity, preferably in front of as many other crewmen as possible. He had almost slipped up in the control room a couple of watches back, when they shook the Victor off their tail. In his jubilation, he had very nearly high-fived White along with the other men. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. Before this underway was through, he intended to make White feel about as lucky to have transferred to Roanoke as a black cat breaking a mirror on Friday the 13th—make him think about putting in for another transfer the second his feet were back on dry land. It would be a petty victory, smaller in scale than that shit-heel White deserved, but the thought of it still felt pretty damn good.

He made his way to the officers’ staterooms at the forward end of the middle-level corridor. He had some downtime ahead of him and wanted to catch up on his reading. He opened the door to his stateroom, slipped inside, and closed it behind him. A triple-decker bunk sat behind a curtain on one side of the stateroom. The other walls were taken up by a couple of dressers, a standing wardrobe, and a few built-in cubbies with pull-down doors. Remembering that he’d left his book in his rack, Duncan crossed the thin grass-green carpet to the curtain. He pulled it aside, and there on the middle rack, his rack, lay Ensign Penwarden, eyes closed, body curled into a fetal ball.

It took a moment for the astonished Duncan to find his voice.

“Ensign Penwarden,” he said loudly. When the man didn’t stir, he shook his shoulder roughly. “Penwarden.”

The ensign roused himself as if from a deep sleep. He blinked up at Duncan. “Lieutenant, sir?”

“Ensign Penwarden,” Duncan said, “would you mind telling me what the hell you’re doing in my rack, in a stateroom that doesn’t belong to you?”

“What, sir?” Penwarden looked around himself, confused. “Sir, how did I get here?”

“You don’t know?”

Penwarden put up an arm to shield his eyes from the overhead lights. He sucked in a breath and grimaced in pain.

Duncan nearly gasped in shock. “Ensign, what—what’s wrong with your teeth?”

Without warning, Ensign Penwarden grabbed Duncan by the collar and leaped out of the rack. Duncan fell onto his back. Penwarden straddled him, pinning him down. Duncan tried to throw him off but couldn’t. Penwarden was unbelievably strong.

“Ensign, what—”

That was all Duncan had a chance to say before he got another look at Penwarden’s teeth, up close.