100 Fathoms Below

CHAPTER THIRTY

Tim ran through the dark, following Jerry down the corridor, away from the control room and through Fire Control, toward the main ladder. Jerry stopped at the ladder and waited there for him to catch up, then ushered him onto the rungs.

“Go, go, move!” Jerry whispered.

“But the weapons locker,” Tim said.

“No time!”

Tim grabbed the side rails, took two rungs, and dropped the rest of the way. He landed on the middle level and spun to look down the corridor. Shapes seethed toward him in the darkness, groping, hissing like animals, their eyes glowing with an unnatural light. Jerry dropped down the ladder and landed beside him. He grabbed Tim’s sleeve and pulled him away from the shadowy figures, but there was nowhere to run. Their backs were to the bulkhead. Tim saw the hatch to the reactor room at the top of a short flight of steps. He ran to it. The silhouettes in the darkness swarmed closer—so close that the hair on Tim’s neck stood up. He didn’t have to look back to know they were reaching for him. He bounded up the stairs to the hatch, spun the handle, and yanked it open. A sliver of light spilled out into the corridor, like a beacon promising safety. The light struck one of the shapes in the dark—it was Matson. The hospital corpsman hissed angrily, showing long, sharp teeth, and ducked quickly out of the light. The other shapes fell back.

“Come on!” Tim shouted as Jerry pounded up the steps.

Together they barreled through the hatch, and Jerry slammed it behind them.

After the darkness that had filled the rest of the submarine, coming into the brightly lit space was like staring into the sun. Tim blinked, taking a moment to let his eyes adjust, then looked around him. The reactor room. He had been here only a handful of times, during emergency drills. Other than that, there was no good reason for a sonar tech to go into the boat’s reactor room, although being chased through the submarine by a horde of vampires probably qualified.

The reactor room was enormous compared to the other rooms on the boat—spacious enough to give the engineers room to maneuver without stepping on each other’s toes. The reactor was a hulking cylinder of metal that spanned two of the sub’s levels. Crowned with a field of activators and control rods like antennae and winged by two massive pipes, one that brought in the coolant—usually seawater—and another that expelled the superheated water into the steam generator, it looked like something out of a science-fiction movie.

They weren’t alone. Six sailors—human sailors—stepped out from where they had been hiding on the other side of the reactor. Five of them brandished thick steel crowbars. The sixth held a two-foot spud wrench that must weigh twenty pounds. They lowered their weapons when they recognized Tim and Jerry.

“Where the hell did you come from?” the sailor with the wrench asked.

“The control room,” Jerry said. “They’re all dead up there.”

“We know,” he replied. “They’ve got control of the boat.”

“Have you seen Farrington?” another sailor asked.

Tim shook his head. “The COB is dead. Matson killed him down in the torpedo room.”

“Wait, Matson’s one of them?” the wrench man asked.

“He is now,” Jerry said.

The phonetalker mounted on the reactor room bulkhead rang, startling Tim. He looked at it, then back at the sailors. None of them made a move to answer it. He started toward it himself, but the man with the spud wrench put a hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t,” he said.

“Why?” Tim asked. “What’s going on?”

The phonetalker continued to ring for a few seconds, then stopped.

“That could have been the captain,” Tim said.

“It wasn’t,” the wrench man said. “They’ve been calling every few minutes for an hour now. They don’t say anything.”

“They’re just making sure we’re here,” another sailor said.

“So they know you’re here, but they haven’t tried to get in?” Jerry asked.

“Not yet, they haven’t.”

“That won’t last,” Jerry said. “Sooner or later, they’re going to get in, and when they do, you’re going to need more than crowbars and wrenches.” He pulled the key out of his pocket. “This opens the weapons locker.”

The man with the wrench looked like a hungry dog staring at a raw steak. “If we can get to those weapons, we can take back the boat. Where’d you get it?”

“Off the WEPS,” Jerry said.

“Lieutenant French? He’s all right?”

“We got it off his body,” Tim clarified. “He’s in a body bag down in the torpedo room.”

“LeMon Guidry’s body bag,” Jerry said.

“So Guidry’s in on it too?” someone asked.

The question came from the far end of the room, from the same spot behind the reactor where the six sailors had emerged. Tim recognized the voice even before he saw Captain Weber step out. The captain’s gaze met Tim’s, and a flicker of a smile crossed his lips.

“Spicer, I’d almost given up on you,” he said.

“Still kicking, sir,” Tim replied. “Thanks to PO2 White, sir. He saw what was happening before I did.”

The captain turned to Jerry. “Well done, White. I’m happy to see I made the right choice in accepting your transfer to Roanoke.”

Jerry looked genuinely gratified to receive a compliment from the captain. “Thank you, sir.”

“No doubt both of you are already aware of the grave danger we’re facing,” Captain Weber said.

“Yes, sir, I think so, hard as it is to believe,” Tim said.

The captain sighed. “It is hard to believe, Mr. Spicer. I always thought of myself as a good commanding officer, fair and understanding and not too much of a hard-ass unless I needed to be. I never thought I’d see a violent mutiny on my own boat.”

“Mutiny, sir?” Tim asked.

“Mutiny, Spicer, and the way I reckon, it’s been planned from the start. Now that I have confirmation that Senior Chief Matson is involved, I can see how they managed to keep it under wraps until it was time to make their move. Once he set up the quarantine in the torpedo room, they had a place they could meet and plot their takeover of the ship without interference. I’m starting to wonder if there was ever really a fever going around the boat, or if it was all a cover.”

“Sir, with all due respect, I saw how sick Steve Bodine and LeMon Guidry were,” Jerry said. “They couldn’t have been faking it, sir.”

“Couldn’t they?” the captain asked. “Only Senior Chief Matson had the medical expertise to judge whether they were sick, and you said yourself he’s one of them.”

Tim frowned. He had seen Matson toss Farrington like a beanbag across the torpedo room. He had seen blood, bite marks on the victims’ necks, glowing eyes in the darkness. This was no ordinary mutiny. Surely he and Jerry couldn’t be the only ones who saw that?

“Let me see that key to the weapons locker, White,” the captain said. Jerry handed it to him. “Gentlemen, come with me.”

Tim and Jerry followed him to the back of the reactor room, where several more men had congregated. Tim’s quick head count came to 28, including himself and Jerry. Was this all that remained of 140 men? The men in the reactor room, combined with the dead full crew in the control room, came to only 50—a little over a third of the crew. It didn’t seem possible that Matson could have flushed the rest out through the torpedo tubes, not this quickly. Were other pockets of survivors still out there? He supposed it was possible—he hoped it was possible—but he couldn’t imagine where else on the boat they could be safe.

Captain Weber continued through a doorway into the small maneuvering room behind the reactor room. Nicknamed “the box,” its walls were lined with banks of bulky gray equipment and covered in countless levers, switches, and dials, making the narrow space feel even more cramped. The captain leaned against one of the machines. When he spoke, Tim had to lean in to hear him. With the turbine generator going and the propeller shaft spinning, the aft end of the Roanoke was a surprisingly noisy place.

“Tell me what happened to Senior Chief Farrington,” Captain Weber said.

Tim told him the story, with Jerry adding details he missed. When they got to the part about the torpedo tubes, the captain kept his expression calm and composed, but Tim could see the fury in his eyes. Drowning those men like that was callous. Soulless.

Of course it was soulless, Tim’s inner voice reminded him—Matson wasn’t human anymore! He pushed the thought away. If he let the idea of his crewmates turning into bloodthirsty supernatural creatures linger too long, he would lose his mind.

“Currently, Roanoke is running on autopilot,” Captain Weber told them. “I heard you mention you were up in the control room. You saw that slaughterhouse. The mutineers came up in a swarm. They smashed every light they could find, just as they did all over the rest of the boat, to keep the crew disoriented and unable to see them. It gave them the advantage. They attacked without warning or mercy. I got lucky. I managed to get away, but I wouldn’t have made it two feet if PO Antopol hadn’t gotten between me and the mutineers. He gave his life so I could escape.”

Ah, damn. Tim hung his head. He knew Antopol. He was a great guy and an even better poker player. Tim couldn’t count how many hands of seven-card draw he had lost to his fellow sonar tech.

“These men found me and brought me to the reactor room,” the captain said. “We’ve been safe here so far, but we can’t stay. We have to take back control of Roanoke immediately. The only problem is, we can’t go back up to the control room until we know it’s safe. We can control our speed from here in the maneuvering room, but not our bearing. We’ll just continue sailing in a straight line until we’ve got hands on the helm again, but that is unacceptable. These waters are much too dangerous to be sailing blind.”

“Because we’re so close to Soviet territory, sir?” Jerry asked.

“No, White, because we are in Soviet territory. I’ve already informed the other men out there, and Spicer is aware, so I suppose it’s time to tell you as well. This is no run-of-the-mill reconnaissance op. Our orders have taken us directly and covertly into Soviet territory.”

“Sir, you’re saying we’re in Soviet waters with no control of Roanoke?” Jerry asked. “We’re sitting ducks, Captain.”

“Precisely why we can’t let them find us,” the captain said. “And that means taking back control of the boat ASAP. The mutineers were smart; they sabotaged the radio before they made their move. We’re cut off with no help on the way.”

“Sir, are you sure we’re safe back here?” Tim asked.

“We have been so far. But I imagine it’s only a matter of time before they launch an assault.”

“But, sir, don’t you find it strange they haven’t yet?” Jerry asked. “If they killed everyone in the control room that quickly and easily, they’re not going to be afraid of a few sailors swinging crowbars.”

“I’m not one for looking a gift horse in the mouth, White,” the captain said.

“I understand, sir, but something doesn’t feel right,” Jerry said. “What if this is exactly where they want us? We’re stuck in the aft compartment with only one exit, and with who knows how many of them right outside the hatch. And then there are the phone calls, sir, like they’re checking to make sure we’re still here.”

“You think it’s a trap?” the captain asked.

Jerry shrugged. “I don’t know, sir, but it can’t be a coincidence they’re not even trying to come in. For all we know, they broke a seal on the reactor and are flooding the whole compartment with radiation. Then they wouldn’t need to come after us. The radiation would kill us for them.”

Captain Weber tapped a small gray plastic box clipped to his pocket. “I had the same thought, White, and took precautions. I’m wearing a Geiger, and the level is normal. Besides, half the men down here are engineers. If there were a radiation leak, they’d know about it. These guys check the equipment five times an hour.”

Jerry frowned. “There must be some other reason they haven’t come in here. Maybe the lights?”

“There’s one reason I can think of,” the captain said. “The mutineers have promised to hand me over to the Soviets, along with Roanoke. They want me alive. It’s hard to get any sensitive information out of a dead captain.”

The captain was right about one thing, Tim realized. Their enemies had used the isolation of the torpedo room to gather and plan their attack on Roanoke. It was where Bodine had hidden when the crew was looking for him, and probably where the other crewmen turned vampires had hidden when they went missing too. But the captain was wrong about this being anything as mundane as a mutiny. He had to get Weber to listen, to believe, or things would only get worse.

But the captain wasn’t interested in further conversation. He held up the key to the weapons locker.

“If we’re going to take back control of Roanoke, gentlemen,” he said, “this key just tipped the scales in our favor.”