100 Fathoms Below

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Lieutenant Commander Jefferson sat down for dinner at the wardroom table with Captain Weber and seven other Roanoke officers—a touch of normality at the end of a day that had been anything but normal.

The stewards entered with platters of food fresh from the galley, but he found himself preoccupied, his mind spinning in different directions. He couldn’t get the sight of Steve Bodine’s dead body out of his head—or the bloody cuts on his hands. It made him think of the broken lights all over the boat. It was as if the submarine were being purposely thrown into darkness. But why? Bodine had said the lights were hurting his eyes, and Jefferson would wager that Stubic had the same complaint. It had to be a side effect of the fever—but it couldn’t be just that. He would have bought it as an explanation if only the lights in the head had been smashed, but the mirrors had been broken too. Mirrors didn’t give off light. At best, they reflected it, but why attack a reflection when you could just as easily destroy the light’s true source? There was something more going on; he was sure of it. Some piece of the puzzle that he was missing.

He was distracted enough by his thoughts that he only barely registered the absence of Lieutenant Junior Grade Duncan, who normally ate with them. Maybe he was needed in the control room. No one had informed Jefferson, but he let it slide. He had enough on his mind.

The stewards served them steak, grilled to perfection by Gordon’s galley staff. Jefferson cut into his and watched the juices flow from the lightly pink interior. Under normal circumstances, his mouth would have watered and his stomach would have grumbled in eager anticipation, but the mirrors kept returning to his thoughts. There was something eerie about shattering a mirror. Symbolically, it was like shattering yourself, wasn’t it? All a mirror could do was show you your reflection, and to break it…

To break it meant you didn’t like what you saw.

As he ate his steak, he looked across the table at Captain Weber, who was engaged in small talk with the other officers about sports, their families, their children—anything but the op itself or the strange and tragic events that had taken place. Such things were routinely avoided at dinners like this. The captain thought that a good meal and a chance for easy conversation was the best way to relieve stress among the officers, but it all felt forced. Two crewmen were dead, the hospital corpsman was sick, Roanoke was being further vandalized by the day, the radio wasn’t working, and they were sailing deep into Soviet territory. No amount of steak dinner and chitchat would change any of that.

Earlier, he had informed Captain Weber about the fresh cuts he’d seen on Bodine’s hands, and the possibility that their timeline of events was off, that the helmsman might have died after vandalizing the head, not before as they had thought. But the captain wanted facts, not conjecture, and had ordered Jefferson to continue his investigation until he had concrete answers. To do that, Jefferson needed confirmation of Bodine’s time of death from Matson, but that was where he kept hitting a brick wall. Thanks to the fever, Matson’s memory—indeed, his whole state of mind—could no longer be trusted. Hell, maybe, in his delirium, Matson had smashed up the head himself, then gone back to quarantine with a shard of glass and used it to mutilate Bodine’s hands. No, that was too far-fetched. If Matson were that out of his mind with the fever, he wouldn’t bother framing a dead man. And besides, though Matson had clearly been sick, he hadn’t been that far gone when Jefferson saw him in the torpedo room.

Which meant that either Matson had prematurely hallucinated Bodine’s death when he called Jefferson on the circuit to report it, as he suspected, or…

Or what? Steve Bodine had risen out of his body bag like Christ on Easter to go smash some lights and mirrors, then run like hell without being seen before anyone could investigate what all the noise was?

It didn’t add up. Once again, Jefferson felt as though he was missing some important bit of information that would make it all make sense.

When the meal was over, Captain Weber dismissed everyone but asked Jefferson to stay behind for a moment. Both of them remained seated at the table.

“It’s been a rough op so far, hasn’t it, Jefferson?” the captain asked.

“Aye, sir,” he replied. “This isn’t like any underway I’ve ever been on.”

“I take it you’ve never lost a man on your boat before?”

“No, sir. Have you, sir?”

Captain Weber shook his head. “Not until now. I’ve been in the submarine service long enough to see past crewmen die from cancer, heart attacks, car accidents, but never on the boat, never during an op. I’ve been lucky that way, I suppose. Did I ever tell you my father served in Korea?”

“No, sir.”

“He was a navy man too. A love of the ocean runs in my family. We used to say we had salt water for blood. He was stationed on an aircraft carrier in the Sea of Japan, not far from Gangneung. He saw a lot of airmen fly off the ship and never come back. These were swaggering, cocksure pilots, the kind who thought they could never die. You know what he said about that? He said everyone is lucky—you, me, everyone—but only until the day they’re not. There’s no such thing as a charmed life, he said, but there’s no such thing as a life wasted, either. Hold on a moment, Jefferson. I’ve got something for us. Get the door, would you?”

Jefferson got up and closed the wardroom door while Captain Weber went to one of the built-in cubbies in the wall. This one had a lock on it, but he took a key out of his pocket and opened it. He pulled out a bottle of Macallan twelve-year-old single-malt Scotch and two glasses, and set them on the table.

“Sir?” Jefferson asked, raising an eyebrow as he returned to his seat. He knew perfectly well that General Order 99, which had been in place for nearly 70 years, forbade liquor on naval vessels while at sea.

Captain Weber sat and uncorked the bottle. “Don’t worry. A small amount of alcohol is permitted on submarines for medicinal purposes. According to regulations, it can be issued only on the authority of two men. The first is the hospital corpsman. The second, of course, is the captain.”

He poured out two glasses and passed one to Jefferson, who accepted it in stunned silence.

“You lost someone important to you, Jefferson,” Captain Weber said. “I would be a piss-poor captain if I didn’t know what was going on with my own crew. I know you took Bodine under your wing, and I know you had high hopes for him.” He raised his glass. “To Steve Bodine. Long may he sail.”

With everything else that was going on, Jefferson hadn’t really had time to let it sink in that Bodine was dead. Or maybe he just hadn’t let it sink in. He had felt it for a moment down in the torpedo room, looking at his friend in a body bag, but now, with the captain toasting Bodine’s memory, he felt himself choking up. He steeled himself against the rising tide of grief and raised his glass to the captain’s.

“To Steve Bodine,” he said. “I was going to encourage him to apply to Officer Candidate School, sir. I think he would have gone far in the navy.”

“I don’t doubt it,” the captain said, “especially with a mentor like you.”

They sipped their Scotch in silence for a while. It had been a long time since Jefferson had had a drink. It was smooth, tasting of wood and peat and honey. It went down warm and pleasant.

“Lieutenant Commander, I don’t think I’ve ever told you this before, but you are, hands down, the best executive officer I have ever served with,” Captain Weber said. “Everything you’ve had to deal with on this underway would have broken a lesser man. When we get back to Pearl Harbor, I’m going to recommend you for your own command. I know some of the higher-ups have already been thinking about it, but a recommendation from me will help kick the wheels into motion. You’ve earned it, Lee. You deserve it.” He poured them both another glass. “However, should you tell anyone else on Roanoke about my secret stash of Macallan, not only will I withhold that recommendation, I’ll put you in an inflatable and launch you out of a torpedo tube myself.”

Jefferson laughed and lifted his glass. “You’ve got yourself a deal, sir.”

As XO, Jefferson had his own stateroom in Officer Country, which also happened to be the forwardmost room on Roanoke. Beyond it was only the fore ladder, which led up to the captain’s egress, and the bulkhead that separated the forward compartment from the submarine’s water-filled nose cone, where the sonar sphere was housed.

By the time he returned to his stateroom, he was feeling happily warm from the Scotch. He took down the folding bed from the bulkhead, sat on it, and began unlacing his boots.

Damn, he was going to miss Bodine. He had the nagging sense again that he had ridden the young man too hard, been too stern with him in his effort to make him the best sailor he could be. But it had been born of good intentions, and that had to mean something, didn’t it? Sometimes, it seemed as though white sailors in the US Navy were given as many second chances as they needed, but a black sailor had to mess up but once before others started talking in hushed tones about whether “his kind” belonged in the navy at all. And that was why he had been so tough on Bodine. Surely Bodine had known that and hadn’t blamed him. Right?

He thought it was his own drunken imagination when he heard Bodine’s voice just then, softly calling him.

“Lieutenant Commander…”

Jefferson shivered and pulled off his boots. It was just his imagination running away with him. Bodine was on his mind, after all. He was exhausted from a long day, and his mind was drifting pleasantly from the Scotch. Was it any wonder he was hearing things?

“Lieutenant Commander,” came the voice again.

This time, Jefferson sat up bolt upright. That wasn’t his imagination. He really had heard something, but he couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Close enough to be heard clearly. Was someone hiding in his stateroom with him? But where? There was no place to hide.

“You should hear what they call you behind your back, Lieutenant Commander,” Bodine’s voice continued.

Jefferson stood up. “Who’s there?”

“The captain, the other sailors—you should hear the names they have for you when you’re not around. Jig. Sambo. Spade. Shine.”

Jefferson turned in a circle, looking into the corners of the stateroom, but no one was there. He was alone.

“They can’t stand you. They can’t wait until this underway is over, so they can get away from your uppity black ass. It’s all they talk about when you’re not there.”

“You’re wrong,” Jefferson said loudly. Was he going crazy? First, he was hearing voices, and now he was talking back to them? But Scotch had a way of replacing one’s common sense with fearlessness. “I just spoke with the captain. He’s not like that.”

“They’re all like that.”

Jefferson put his hands over his ears and shook his head. He had to be losing his mind. Or maybe this was a delusion brought on by the fever that was going around. Damn it, had he been infected when he went down to the torpedo room earlier? Matson had warned him it could happen…

The sound of breaking glass outside his stateroom startled him out of his thoughts. One of the light fixtures outside? He turned toward the door.

“Do you know what the best thing about being on a submarine is, Lieutenant Commander?” Bodine’s voice asked. “There’s no sun. Down here, it’s always night.”

Another crash, closer now, followed by the tinkle of glass shards falling to the deck.

“Who are you?” Jefferson shouted.

“Don’t you know your old friend Steve Bodine?”

No, it was impossible. He was dead. And yet, that voice…

Fuck this. Someone was playing a nasty prank on him, and he was going to have the son of a bitch’s hide for it. He walked to the door and reached for the handle.

Another crash came from outside, making him pause. More glass fell tinkling to the deck. Christ, the three light fixtures in the Officer Country corridor.

“I’m just outside your door, Lieutenant Commander.”

Jefferson stared at the handle.

“Why don’t you come out and say hello?”

To hell with this sick bastard, whoever he was. Come out and say hello? That was exactly what Jefferson was going to do. And when he caught the son of a bitch, he would give him an ass-kicking to remember. He gripped the knob, turned it, and yanked the stateroom door open.

The corridor outside was dark. He was right: all three light fixtures had been smashed. The light from his stateroom bled out into the shadows before him, falling across bits of shattered glass on the deck. Beyond where the light reached, he saw a shape in the darkness—the silhouette of a man. It had Bodine’s posture and stood at Bodine’s height, but it couldn’t be Bodine.

The silhouette’s eyes glowed brightly out of the darkness as if they were reflecting the light, like a cat’s.

In a harsh, inhuman whisper, Steve Bodine said, “Hello, brother.”