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Book One: Underway

Ensign Brendan Duggan stood at the opening to the massive diesel fuel oil tank, located near the center of the big submarine. The tank was empty, for the moment, except for a lone, unseen enlisted man whose rhythmic banging with a rubber mallet sounded like a mournful gong. When the petty officer was done, Duggan would climb in. It was his second day on the boat.

He had been invited to enter the empty tank by Lieutenant Danny Jabo, who stood there waiting with him, casually fingering one of the twelve large bolts that had been removed to give them access through a twenty-two inch hole. There was a folder of miscellaneous paperwork on the deck: the certification that the tank’s air was safe to breathe, a form for Jabo to sign upon completion of their inspection, and a copy of the danger tags that would (theoretically) keep shut all the valves that, if opened, would flood the tank with either seawater or diesel fuel. While they waited, Duggan read through it all earnestly, more eager to make a good impression on the lieutenant than he was to actually study the information.

In the strictest legal sense, Jabo barely outranked Duggan. They were both junior officers on their first sea tour: Jabo near the end of his, Duggan at the very beginning. While Duggan still held the rank of Ensign, the rank given to him along with his diploma at the Academy, Jabo had been promoted twice, first to lieutenant j.g. (junior grade), and then to full lieutenant. So Jabo had been in the Navy just a few years longer than Duggan, but those years were, importantly, sea time: five long patrols on a nuclear submarine. Duggan had exactly zero days underway. But the most important difference between them was something unquantifiable, something not easily reduced to pay grade or days at sea. Jabo was hot shit. He was the Junior Officer all the enlisted men wanted to work for, the one the department heads wanted to mentor, the one the other JOs wanted to emulate.

“You ready?” said Jabo with his mild Tennessee twang.

“I think so,” he said, trying to sound somewhere between too nervous and too confident.

“You know the only requirement is that an officer close it out — you don’t need your dolphins. So you can go in alone if you want.”

Duggan hesitated for a minute, saw that Jabo was joking, and exhaled nervously.

“You’re lucky we’re doing this,” said Jabo. “This is a tough evolution to see. Impossible to get underway.”

“Yes,” said Duggan, squelching the urge to say, “Yes sir.” Even though Jabo did outrank him slightly, junior officers didn’t talk to each other that way. But Jabo had that kind of aura. It made Duggan mildly jealous, as the new guy, months away from having anybody respect him for anything. He also fought down the impulse to resent the fact that an ROTC guy like Jabo could rise to the top — he felt like four years of celibacy and eating shit at Annapolis should entitle an Academy guy to hold that role. That had been the promise, that the ROTC guys were barely competent part-timers, while their years of toil at Annapolis would make them military superstars. But despite getting his degree at a school with frat parties and pompon girls, Jabo was clearly an outstanding officer. And Duggan had seen Jabo’s wife, Angi, at the farewell party the night before, a redheaded, athletic knockout, the kind of girl he imagined would turn heads even at a school full of southern beauties. Another reason to resent his monastic life at the academy, another reason to be jealous. But, in spite of all that…Jabo was just impossible to dislike.

“He’s comin’,” said Jabo. Duggan heard it too. The gonging had stopped, replaced by footsteps on the iron rungs of the ladder that were bolted to the inside of the tank. Light from a flashlight grew in intensity as the petty officer neared, until his head popped out of the manway.

There was no graceful way to exit the tank. The petty officer handed Jabo his flashlight and rubber mallet, which Jabo placed on the deck before grabbing his outstretched arms and pulling him through. He got to his feet, took a deep breath, put his hands on his hips, and looked Duggan up and down.

“You the new guy? Sir?”

“That’s me,” said Duggan, trying again to strike a balance between confidence and modesty. He got the distinct impression that the enlisted man…Renfro, that was his name…was waiting for him to say or do something stupid that he could report back to an amused crew. Renfro had a pencil thin mustache and that muscular, small build that seemed characteristic of so many submariners, standard issue along with the hard, challenging stare. All three of them were wearing identical, insignia-free green coveralls for the occasion, not even a nametag among them. But no one observing the scene would have had any trouble picking out who among them was the respected lieutenant, who was the experienced petty officer, and who was the boot ensign.

“You an Academy guy?”

“That’s right.”

“Hmm,” said Renfro, nodding his head with disapproval. Renfro was “qualified,” a wearer (when in a normal uniform) of the coveted silver dolphins. This meant that despite the difference in their nominative ranks, Renfro outranked Duggan in an unofficial, but very important way. It would be months of non-stop work, study, and endless on-the-job training before the captain pinned dolphins on Duggan’s chest. (Closing out a tank was one of about two hundred “practical factors” he had to complete along the way.) Furthermore, Renfro was an “A Ganger,” a member of Auxiliary Division, the men in charge of the dirtiest, most important equipment on the boat: the diesel engine, the oxygen generators, all the ship’s damage control equipment. They made the claim, with much justification, that they were the Navy’s truest submariners.

“You ready?” said Jabo.

“Yes,” said Duggan. The dark tank didn’t seem all that inviting, but he suddenly wanted to get out from under Renfro’s hard gaze.

Jabo went in first, somehow effortlessly squeezing his considerable frame through the manway. Duggan followed him, while Renfro stood watch at the entrance.

“Don’t worry sir,” said Renfro as they descended. “I won’t let them start filling it up ‘til you’re half way up the ladder.”

“We appreciate it,” said Jabo.

Duggan climbed down the iron rungs, which were welded directly to the side of the tank. The side of the tank was also the concave side of the ship, making it tricky to reach the next slippery step as they curved outward, away in the darkness, most of his weight hanging from his hands rather than supported by his feet, until he was halfway down and the hull curved back.

The darkness of the tank and the geometry of the ladder made it impossible to see how far he had to go; it was deeper than he imagined. He felt himself growing tense as he went further, thought about the single valve handle and the listless watchstanders that were the only things standing between him and thousands of gallons of diesel fuel. As he got deeper, the air in the tank grew thicker, harder to breathe, the smell a combination of diesel fuel and the sea, a more concentrated version of what permeated the entire ship. He kept his eyes on the manway above him, his only escape. It got smaller as he descended, like a full moon in a black sky.

Jabo had navigated the steps deftly and waited at the bottom, swinging the flashlight on its lanyard, making the shiny walls of the tank seem to sway.

“Okay, you know why we’re here?” said Jabo. His voice echoed metallically. Duggan realized that he still clung on to the bottom rung, afraid to lose contact with it in case Jabo dropped his light, or the batteries died. He forced himself to let go.

“Duggan? Why are we here?”

“To close out the tank.”

“You know what that means?”

“Make sure there’s nothing left down here?”

“Like tools and stuff? Sure. Good answer. And?” He held up the mallet.

“Sound shorts?”

“Sound shorts, anything loose. We’ll bang on everything, make sure it’s all squared away. Because if there’s something rattlin’ around down here, it will be impossible to fix at sea. And remember, we’re a submarine…we don’t like making noise. Any time we empty a tank like this and do work, before we’re done, a qualified enlisted man closes it out, then an officer verifies. Do you know why this tank is empty?”

“We did some maintenance, right?”

Jabo nodded, and pointed his flashlight to a corner of the tank, where a pipe rose like a stalagmite, extending the full height of the space. The walls of the tank gleamed like glass in the beam, the steel preserved pristinely by the blanket of fuel that normally covered it. “We had to fix that: the level detector. You know how that works?”

Duggan nodded. “No…sorry.”

“That’s okay…hell, you just got here. The tank is always full. As we burn diesel fuel, we let in water. The fuel, being about fifteen percent less dense, floats atop the water. The sensor floats atop the water-fuel interface. So as the tank empties of fuel oil, the sensor actually rises. Keeps the tank full of something all the time, which helps shield the people tank from the reactor.” He knocked his flashlight against the aft wall of the tank.

“Cool,” said Duggan.

“Yeah, those fuckers think of everything. One more question: how much fuel does this tank hold?”

“Thirty-five thousand gallons,” said Duggan, proud of himself for knowing the answer. Right before coming down, he’d seen the tanker truck on the pier, the hoses already extended, ready to send the cargo gushing into the tank where he stood.

“Good job. You have any idea why we carry that much diesel fuel?”

The question surprised Duggan. He hadn’t thought it was based on anything…it was just how much the tank held. He was struck by how many things there were to know inside an empty tank…and they weren’t trivial, either, they were actually important, capacities and specs developed by some of the finest engineers in the world. He contemplated how many hours he would have to spend at sea before he knew everything he was supposed to know about this giant boat.

“I’ll give you a hint,” said Jabo. “It’s based on a theoretical casualty in which we lose all power except the diesel engine, and this much fuel would allow us to steam for a certain number of hours at a certain number of knots, enough hours to get us out of harm’s way. The theory goes.”

“I’ll look it up.”

“Then get back with me and I’ll sign your book. Will that be your first signature?”

Duggan nodded.

“Holy shit! What an honor. You owe me a beer when we get back.”

Far above them, Renfro stuck his head through the hatch and yelled down. “Hey, topside wants to know what’s taking so long. Are you guys blowing each other?”

“Yeah,” said Jabo. “But we’re almost done.”

He handed Duggan the mallet. “Here, start banging on shit.”

The navigator sat huddled over a chart in a darkened corner of the submarine’s control room, frantically making revisions during the last few hours of the USS Alabama’s refit. He was a small man burdened with many secrets.

For example: he knew the combination of the inner SAS safe, the safe-within-a-safe that held the sealed authentication codes that would allow the launch of a nuclear missile. That series of four double-digit numbers was so secret that he was not allowed to write it down, and he had nightmares about being summoned to radio at the start of World War III and being unable to remember it, his faulty memory removing Alabama from strategic service as surely as an enemy torpedo. And, as navigator, he knew the exact locations of their patrol areas, the vast swaths of ocean where Ohio-class submarines maintained their vigils, within missile range of their targets in China and eastern Russia. That kind of targeting information was so secret, classified beyond Top Secret, that even the name of the classification was unutterable to the vast majority of the ship’s 154 man crew.

He knew the ship’s top speed: not as fast as many novelists speculated, slower than a good speed boat, but impressive enough to those who understood how quietly their 18,000 ton warship could move beneath the ocean at that speed. And he knew the ship’s test depth, the deepest at which they ever operated, the depth at which their systems were tested against the maximum sea pressure they should ever face. More secret still, he knew the ship’s collapse depth, the depth at which engineers estimated that the hull would finally succumb to the pressure of the millions of tons of sweater that surrounded them. It was striking what sea pressure could do to the works of man at those depths, the way water could turn into a force as solid and destructive as any weapon. Their XO had a standard lecture he liked to give about the nature of submarining, how seawater was their only real enemy. Torpedoes and depth charges just allowed the enemy inside.

Unlike the ship’s relatively unimpressive top speed, its maximum depth would be striking to anyone knowledgeable about diving and submersibles, a very large number that was a monument to the engineering marvel that was a Trident Submarine. But, as the navigator knew and was reminded of every time he so much as glanced at the small, italic numbers that dotted every one of his charts: even that large number was very much smaller than the depth of the ocean almost everywhere that they operated. Another favorite monologue of the XO’s: he would hold his hand out at waist-height, the distance to the deck representing the depth of the Pacific. Test depth is here, he would say, pointing to a spot about four inches below his palm. The submarine could travel deep, but the Pacific was very much deeper, a kind of biblical abyss that was difficult for the mind to grasp, even the minds of men who’d spent their whole lives at sea.

But the navigator had another, even darker secret, one more frightening than a forgotten safe combination or the depth at which a submarine becomes destroyed by a heartless ocean, a secret that tortured him as he tried to stay focused on the charts: he knew the ship’s mission. Along with the captain and the XO, he’d seen the new orders that he feared would doom them. Doom humanity. As navigator he not only knew about it: he had to help plan it, and plot their course right into the belly of the beast. He envied the rest of the crew in their ignorance, their hectic, boisterous preparations for patrol.

“Nav, are you alright?”

The navigator looked up, startled. The Duty Officer, Lieutenant Maple, was staring at him from the conn. He’d stopped signing the thick stack of red DANGER tags in front of him and stared with concern.

“Yes. I’m fine.”

“You’re bleeding.”

The navigator looked where Maple was pointing. He’d been jamming the point of his dividers into his knee. He’d stabbed right through the fabric of his khakis, into his flesh. Blood ran down his leg into a dark red puddle on the deck.

The next morning, Jabo waited outside the Captain’s stateroom with his single-page letter of resignation in hand. He hadn’t wanted it to be this way, wanted a few more days to warm up to the task, but as with so many of his plans over the last nine years, this had been preempted by the needs of the navy. They’d been ordered to sea early for reasons that had not yet been revealed, and he had to get this letter in the captain’s hands before the final mail call, if he actually expected to get out of the Navy at the earliest opportunity: five years to the day after he received his commission from the ROTC unit at Vanderbilt. The ship was still on the surface and rolled gently in the five foot swell that was following them out to deep water. After three years at sea, Jabo knew intuitively that if the rolling was bad inside the protected waters of the sound, they were in for a rough transit to Point Juliet, the earliest they could submerge. The XO walked out of the Captain’s stateroom, a wry smile on his face, paused at the sight of him. Like Jabo, he had a letter in his hand, but his was printed on fine official stationary.

“Danny have you heard anything about this girl baby shit?” he asked, waving the letter. The XO was short. But he was solid and spry, with a boxer’s build and attitude. His shaved, gleaming head enhanced his tough guy look. There were legends in the submarine fleet about his physical strength, tales of bar fights he’d broken up in Subic Bay and boxing matches he’d won at the Academy. He was a submarine officer of the oldest school, fluent in profanity, torpedo targeting, and dismissive of protocol. Jabo agreed with the consensus that they were lucky to have him.

Jabo was startled by the question. “Sir?”

“The rumor-of-the-month: that radiation on a nuclear submarine means you’ll only have girl babies. Have you ever heard this?”

Jabo nodded. “Actually I have, sir. Last patrol in maneuvering they were talking about it, after Chief Palko had his third kid.”

The XO furrowed his brow. “Yeah, that dickhead does have three girls, doesn’t he? I’ll have to get on his ass about that…it’s starting to be a problem. Somebody just wrote their congressman asking off the boat because of this bullshit.”

“Palko’s not the only one,” said Jabo. “I remember them going through the numbers…something like eight out of the last nine babies born to crew members have been girls.”

The XO grinned and stepped in closer. “So you believe this shit too Jabo? Think neutrons are doing something to kill off all your boy sperm?”

“I’m just saying…”

“You know Jabo, one of the things we ask of our junior officers is to not be stupid. So if you hear anybody contributing to this bullshit…help me put a stop to it.”

“Aye, aye sir.”

“What the fuck is that?” he said, suddenly turning his attention to the letter in Jabo’s hand.

“Sir, if you don’t mind, I’d like to show it to the captain first.”

“Just what I was afraid of: a resignation letter. Another JO heading for the fuckin’ beach. I take it Microsoft was impressed with your resume?” He nodded his head toward the Captain’s stateroom. “Go on in, Jabo.” He stomped down the passageway, whistling loudly and cheerfully.

Jabo knocked on the open door. “Captain?”

“Come in Danny.” A captain could call a junior officer by his first name, but the reverse was never true. The fatherly Captain Shields was calming contrast to the XO, the two complementing each other as they led Alabama to its place at the top of all the squadron’s rankings. He had salt and pepper hair and a perpetual twinkle in his eye. Unlike the XO, he’d acquired no legends about his physical strength, although he had been an All-America swimmer at the Academy. But he had built a rock-solid career, culminating with his command of Alabama, on steady leadership and his almost freakishly comprehensive knowledge of submarine nuclear power. While sailors told stories about a push up contest the XO had won against a Marine Corps General, the captain was of a different caste. He looked like a man who not only could solve quadratic equations in his head; he looked like he was doing it all the time, effortlessly.

Jabo shuffled in and sat on the only other chair in the stateroom. “Captain, I’ve decided to resign my commission.”

The captain nodded thoughtfully, waited a beat, and then took the letter from his hands. He took his time reading it, and then handed it back. “I refuse to accept this.”

Danny waited, not knowing what to do, hoping the captain was joking.

“Sir?”

“I don’t understand Danny — you’ve always seemed like you enjoy your job to me.”

“I do like my job. And I love this ship.”

“So why get out? You can keep the fun going for twenty years or more, just like me.”

“I’m not sure it’s as much fun if I stay in. I like standing watch and driving the boat. Not writing training plans and filling in spreadsheets.”

“You think that’s what I do all day, Danny?”

“Not you, sir — but the department heads, frankly, yes. And that’s what I’d be doing next if I stayed in.”

“Believe it or not, Danny, being a department head can be fun too.”

“Like the navigator?”

The captain grimaced. “Come on, Danny. The nav isn’t a particularly good example. He’s at the end of a very demanding tour, five patrols as a navigator is a very long time.”

“It’s just…”

“So you’re afraid you won’t have as much fun as a department head? That’s the reason?”

“Captain, if you’ll read my letter, you’ll see that it’s not. I also wonder sometimes what we’re doing out here.”

“You don’t think what we do is important?”

“That’s right, captain.” Jabo felt ashamed to say it, but it was true. “We’re still running a platform that was originally designed to lob missiles at a nation that no longer exists. I feel like we’re just shadow boxing out here.”

“Listen carefully, Danny. Driving this boat and keeping it safe is important — maybe the most important thing you’ll ever do, certainly more important than chasing the next bonus at Microsoft.” The boat had lost their last two junior officers to Microsoft and it clearly irked the command. “And, if you don’t like our mission, get on an attack boat for your next tour — they’re in the fight.”

“Not really. I mean, I know they may get to go more places than us, support battle groups and ops like that, but it’s no different. Our enemies use box cutters now — you can’t really fight them with a nuclear submarine.”

Shields sat back in his chair and looked Jabo over. He was smiling. “Are you sure there’s nothing else going on here?”

The junior officer and his Captain looked at each other for a minute. Unlike the navigator, Jabo often felt like he had no secrets — it was something about the tight-knit community of shipboard life that he had never quite gotten used to. And, for the past six weeks, he’d had a big secret: his wife, Angi, was pregnant. If the captain had somehow intuited that pregnancy, than perhaps he had also intuited Jabo’s strong desire to not have a Navy family, to have his child be a Navy brat. He’d seen far too many screwed up families in the Navy, and no matter what he said in his letter of resignation, that was one of the best reasons he could think of for getting out. His wife was just starting to show the pregnancy on her slender frame, and she’d already entered the Byzantine world of military medicine, Champus, Tri-Care, and the navy hospital. Jabo wondered, as he looked at the Captain, if the secret was out.

“Captain, I’ve explained myself as best I can in my letter.”

“Okay. But I wasn’t kidding. I’m not going to accept your letter.”

“But—”

“I know, you’re worried about missing your twelve-month window. You won’t. I can’t tell you all the details right now, but we’re going to pull into port in a couple of weeks. If you still want to get out, I’ll endorse your letter then. But I think in the meantime you may see that it’s still possible to do some vitally important missions on a nuclear submarine. If I’m wrong, then I’ll endorse your letter and this will be your last patrol. Okay?”

Jabo nodded. He actually felt a sense of relief about not yet having his letter in, as well as a sense of excitement about learning whatever awaited them in their patrol orders. There’d been rumors, of course, especially with the sudden departure. “Okay, Captain. Thank you.”

“Thank you Danny — thanks for giving the Navy another two weeks.”

They looked at each other for another moment, Jabo waiting to be dismissed.

“You know, Danny, it is possible to raise a good family, to be a good family man,

and be in the Navy.”

Jabo nodded without saying anything. It was a discussion he didn’t want to have. The captain had a wife, and two daughters, and Danny couldn’t tell him that he thought they all suffered because of the captain’s chosen career. But moreover: he couldn’t do it. I can’t spend another sea tour away from Angi, he thought, another year where I see her more in my dreams than in real life. And if the captain asked him in response, don’t you think I love my wife? Jabo would have had to answer: I must love my wife more. It was the one vanity he allowed himself.

There was a firm rap on the door and the XO let himself in. He was agitated, and not in the bemused way he had reacted to the rumor about girl babies. Jabo wondered briefly if his resignation had bothered him that much. He dismissed that idea as the XO stepped back out and waved impatiently at Jabo to exit.

As they traded places in the captain’s stateroom, the XO said something about the Nav. He shut the stateroom door behind him.

Jabo walked to his stateroom, grateful for several things. He was grateful that his beautiful wife was pregnant with their child. He was grateful that, as hard as it was, he’d told Captain Shields of his plans to leave the Navy. And, as he walked up the ladder to the control room to take the watch, he was grateful that he’d been able to have that talk with the understanding Captain Shields, and not his predecessor, Captain Mario Soldato. That guy was an asshole.

“What’s up?” said the captain.

The XO remained standing, running his hand across his smooth bald scalp. “It’s the navigator. He’s gone and done something weird.”

Captain Shields leaned back and laced his fingers across his stomach, his face grim, awaiting details.

“Lieutenant Maple said that yesterday in control he stabbed himself in his leg with his dividers. Repeatedly. Got blood everywhere. Apparently Maple took a day to think this over before telling me.”

The Captain raised an eyebrow. “What did you say?”

“I told him to shut the fuck up about it.”

“Have you talked to the nav?”

“No sir, not yet. I wanted to talk to you first, because I know we don’t have much time.”

The captain paused. “Time for what?”

“To get him off the boat! Let’s get him off with the fucking mail.”

The captain waited before responding. He knew the XO had never liked the navigator. In fact, the navigator was a tough man to like. But part of it was that each man was, in his way, a perfect representation of the two different tribes of submarine officers. One was a torpedo-hurling warrior who trusted his instincts. The other, a highly-schooled, bookish, technical expert. The tension between them was as old as the Nautilus, the Navy’s first nuclear submarine, and the captain realized that he was probably closer to the nav’s end of the spectrum than the XO’s. “Mike, do you think they have a spare navigator waiting for us on that tug?”

“Fuck sir, I don’t know. I’ll do it, I’ll be the goddamn navigator. Or let’s give Jabo a battlefield promotion. I trust him more than I trust that crazy fucking Mark Taylor.”

“That’s enough,” said the captain sternly.

“Yes sir.”

They both paused long enough to let some of the pressure out of the room.

“You really think it’s that bad?” said the captain. “Bad enough to kick the guy off the boat? Scuttle his career?”

“I really don’t know, captain. Maybe this whole thing just confirms a feeling I’ve always had about the Nav — I don’t know.”

“I think if you’ll really ask yourself — this isn’t the craziest thing either one of us has ever seen a man do at sea. Not even close.”

“Very true, Captain. But this is our navigator. And with so much at stake this patrol…”

“Exactly. And it’s already too late for us to turn around, to ask for a new navigator. He’s done a stellar job for five previous patrols, and I’m confident he will this time too, before he goes on a well-earned shore tour.”

The XO sensed that the decision had been made. “Aye, aye, captain.” He turned to leave.

“XO?”

“Yes sir?”

“Pay a visit to Maple. Tell him there’s no point in spreading this around. We don’t need stories like this getting around with the crew, undermining their confidence in their leadership.”

“Aye, aye sir,” said the XO. But he knew the story had probably already circled the boat twice. They both knew.

Seaman Hallorann was nineteen years old, just two weeks out of boot camp. He learned quickly that his most urgent priority onboard Alabama was to “qualify,” to complete all the requirements of a yellow booklet that took him through every compartment of the ship, after which he would receive the coveted silver dolphins to wear upon his uniform. With that goal in mind, as the ship pitched and rolled its way to sea, he found his way to Maneuvering, a tiny box of a room in the upper level of the engineroom. A line in his yellow book read: identify and observe Maneuvering watchstanders. Sounded easy enough.

“Request permission to enter?” he asked, mimicking a chief he’d observed entering and leaving maneuvering before him.

An officer looked up at him from a thick black book, slightly surprised, slightly amused. His name tag said Hein. Hallorann knew he was the Engineering Officer of the Watch, or EOOW, pronounced to rhyme like the sound that a cat makes. He sat behind a small raised desk, looking at the backs of three enlisted watchstanders.

“Reason?”

Hallorann held up his yellow book. “Qualifications, sir?”

“Name?”

“Seaman Hallorann, sir.”

Hein turned to his watch team. “Should we let him in?”

“Sure,” said the one closest to him, without turning around. “This watch is in danger of becoming boring.”

“Enter maneuvering, Hallorann.”

It was a perfect cube of a room covered on all sides by lights and dials. Beneath the small desk of the EOOW were two rows of thick, black books like the one the lieutenant was reading. Hallorann considered himself a smart guy, had been told that by others: it was one of the reasons the Navy wanted him on a submarine. But he wondered how anyone could ever master all the information available in that small room.

“So, Hallorann, what are we doing out here?”

Hallorann knew he was being fucked with — and that being fucked with would be one of his primary duties until he pinned on his dolphins. Still, he preferred to give an answer that didn’t make him sound like a complete shit head. “Strategic deterrence?” he said.

A couple of the watchstanders actually glanced away from their panels at that, impressed.

“Wow, pretty good,” said the one on the right, who looked to be running the ships electrical system, a control panel that contained dials marked in units familiar to Hallorann: volts, amps, and kilowatts. “Officer material.”

“That is good,” said Lieutenant Hein. “And that would normally be correct. But that doesn’t seem to be the answer this patrol. Any idea what we’re doing here this patrol?”

“It’s a trick question,” said the one of the left, the steel wheel of the throttles in his hand. He seemed to be concentrating harder than the rest, and Hallorann got the feeling that the ship’s rolling motion was making his job harder, as he constantly adjusted the position of the wheel in his hands with each pitch and roll. The movement seemed to be intensifying. “No one knows what the fuck we’re doing out here on this patrol.”

“We’re going somewhere, that’s all I care about,” said the watchstander in the middle.

“You’re a lucky fuck, Hallorann,” said the electrical operator. “I made four patrols before I went anywhere. And that was just Pearl. God only knows where we’re gonna end up on this run.”

“I’ll bet the lieutenant knows,” said the thottleman.

“You bet wrong,” said Hein. “I’m a mushroom too right now.”

“You know why we’re mushrooms?” asked the Electrical Operator.

Hallorann nodded.

“Because they keep us in the dark and feed us shit.”

“It’s something different this patrol, that’s for sure,” said Hein. “Maybe we’ll end up with some kind of unit citation.”

“I’ll just be happy if I just get one day in a liberty port,” said the electrical operator. “Not all that concerned about the implications for my career.”

They plunged dramatically. Hallorann barely stopped himself from falling into the back of the electrical operator. An alarm sounded on the far left panel. “Watch it!” said Lieutenant Hein, and the throttleman spun the throttles to the right as all the others made adjustments.

“Screw came out of the water,” said the throttleman, as things settled back down.

“Steam flow hit 80 percent,” said the middle watchstander. “It was WAY out of the water.” Outside maneuvering, something crashed loudly to the deck.

Hein looked a little flustered. He spoke into the microphone on his desk, the words echoing outside maneuvering. “Engineering Watch Supervisor, verify stow for sea.” A few seconds later, the chief acknowledged the order into a mike.

“Shit falling all over the place out there,” said the electrical operator.

“Fuck, I can’t wait till we submerge,” said Hein.

It went silent for a minute as things got back to normal. Hallorann felt Hein looking past him, a little blankly. He wondered of he had been in there long enough to get the signature in his yellow book; he felt the need to speak.

“It’s pretty rough, isn’t it?”

All three enlisted watchstanders turned with raised eyebrows, and Hein grinned.

“This your first time at sea?” asked the throttleman.

“Yeah — how about you?”

The throttleman, without turning, pulled a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket. “Hey, shit stain, see this pen? It has more sea time than you do.”

The reactor operator, in the center, chimed in. “I’ve got more time eating ice cream at test depth than you’ve got underway, nub.”

Hallorann laughed at that.

“Is the motion getting to you, Hallorann?” Lieutenant Hein asked, still grinning. “All this rocking and rolling?”

Hallorann nodded. “Not really.”

“It’s okay….everybody feels seasick once in a while.”

“Yeah,” said the electrical operator. “There was like three inches of puke in the aft head this morning. Mostly looked like scrambled eggs, but I saw some McDonald’s fries floating around in there, too, that one last meal on the beach.”

The reactor operator spoke up. “There was a line down there at both heads this morning, so Leer had to puke in his hat. It’s the only one he’s got so he was washing it out in the sink so he could keep wearing it.”

“Is that the same hat he shit in?” asked Hein. He turned to Hallorann. “He kept his hat tucked into his back pocket, and once last patrol he sat down to take a shit and the hat fell in the commode without him realizing it, and he took a big dump in it. Couldn’t flush it like that, had to pull it out, dump the shit in the bowl, and carry on.”

Hein waited for him to react. Hallorann suddenly realized what was happening. They were trying to make him sick…it was a game to play with the new guy. But he still wasn’t feeling seasick in the least, he appeared to be one of those guys immune to the ailment, despite a life spent landlocked. And if they thought they could make him sick merely by telling gross stories…Hallorann had spent every summer of high school working at a chicken slaughterhouse outside of Fort Dodge, Iowa. He had a pretty high tolerance.

The throttleman remained focused on his panel, but he seemed like he’d been saving something. “What’s your name again, nub?”

“Hallorann.”

“Hallorann. Right. Don’t listen to these guys, honestly. But if you ever start to feel a little queasy, I know a cure.”

Hallorann didn’t say anything. The motion of the ship had changed, from kind of a violent pitching up and down, to a roll that seemed to move them in every direction, like a rock tumbling in space.

“OK, take it easy. Mind your panels,” said Hein. He was again staring past Hallorann, tiny beads of sweat forming on his upper lip.

“One second, sir, I just want to help the new guy out with my seasickness cure. Wanna hear it Hallorann?”

“Sure.”

“Just go to the mess decks, okay, and get one of those ice cream bowls.”

“Okay.”

“Fill it all the way to the top with mayonnaise…”

“Okay.”

“And then microwave it until the mayo is just steaming hot. Then eat the whole thing, every spoonful.”

Suddenly Lieutenant Hein pushed Hallorann away from his desk. He stuck his head down into a tiny trashcan that was lashed to the side of it, and began puking dramatically. The three enlisted watchstanders in maneuvering cheered like it was New Year’s Day.

Hallorann excused himself from maneuvering, thinking it wasn’t a good idea to participate in the mocking of the young officer. He considered going back forward, but he found himself interested in the engine room, and wanted to explore it further. He’d overheard another enlisted man say that you could actually see the main shaft where it penetrated the hull, and watch it turn, the very thing that propelled them through the water. That was intriguing enough to seek out. It had to be aft, the most aft thing on the boat, he assumed, and he resolved to walk that direction until he found the shaft or until someone told him to leave. He retrieved some foam earplugs from his pocket and shoved them back into his ears.

He passed maneuvering into a space that opened up, a place of large machines and bright fluorescent light. A mechanic was on watch, taking a reading and recording it on a clipboard. His sleeves were rolled up, revealing large, ornate tattoos with Japanese characters adorning images of dragons. He looked up from his clipboard and nodded with a smile. Hallorann began to walk toward him, to ensure his presence there was okay, and to accept help if it was offered.

Two steps later, however, Hallorann was almost leveled by a noise so loud that it had a physical force; he could feel it impacting and deforming his ear drums right through the foam plugs. The noise was so loud that it was meaningless to try to determine what direction it came from, it was everywhere, filling the space, pressurizing it. He fought the strong urge to run in fear. He watched the reaction of the watchstander with the clipboard, to see if what he was hearing was normal. He could see in the startled expression that it was not. The watchstander seemed almost as confused as Hallorann. An announcement came through the speakers, but was unintelligible over the roar. For a moment, it seemed like the sound would consume them all as they stood there, paralyzed by its force.

Then through the tunnel marched an officer Hallorann had not seen before. He was putting on heavy-duty ear protection as he strode aft, and actually had a smile on his face. He brushed by Hallorann without a glance, walking directly toward the roar, which seemed to Hallorann to be one of the braver things he’d ever witnessed. He glanced at the gold dolphins and his nametag as he passed: Jabo.

And even though he was walking toward the noise, Hallorann decided that Jabo was the kind of person he wanted to be next to in a crisis. He followed him.

He walked down a short ladder into the middle level of the engine room. Hallorann had to stop finally, even with the foam earplugs and his hands pushed firmly over his ears, he literally couldn’t take another step toward the noise, it felt as though it would split his skull in half. Jabo kept walking, armed with both superior ear protection and a supreme sense of confidence. At the front of the space Jabo arrived at a row of three identical machines. He walked right up the center one, assessed it briefly, and then threw over the handle of a valve at the top of it. Instantly the roar stopped.

Hallorann felt himself breathe, and reluctantly pulled his hands from his ears just as an announcement came from maneuvering, Hein’s voice: “Number three high pressure air bank is isolated! Engineering Watch Supervisor investigate!” Hallorann could hear in Hein’s voice that he didn’t understand, even as Hallorann understood, that with Jabo’s action the noise and the crisis were over. A chief brushed by Hallorann, the same chief who’d preceded him in maneuvering, walking briskly toward Jabo with a book open. Jabo smiled at him and pointed toward the valve that he’d just shut.

The chief handed Jabo the book and began banging on an adjacent valve, first with his fist, and then with a rubber mallet that another watchstander had appeared with in hand. There were several watchstanders who’d gathered around now, all of whom had been invisible when Jabo first approached the roaring machine. The chief seemed to hear something, stopped banging, and then gestured toward Jabo. The lieutenant slowly opened the valve that he’d shut, braced, Hallorann could tell, to shut it if the roar to began again. When it didn’t, he removed his ear protection and put them down around his neck.

“Number three high pressure air bank is restored,” came another announcement. Hallorann made his way toward the cluster of men near the machinery. A few cast disapproving glances at him, but Jabo smiled. “Hey, a nub!” he said. “Here to learn something?”

“Yes, sir.”

“These are High Pressure Air Compressors,” said the lieutenant. “Or ‘hipacs.’ They compress air into our air banks at three thousand PSI. That sound you heard,” he said, pointing to the top of the middle compressor, “was this relief valve lifting. And it wouldn’t re-seat. Pretty loud, wasn’t it?”

“Yes sir,” said Hallorann, moving closer. “It was just air?” That seemed incredible to him.

Jabo nodded. “Yes, but anything at that kind of pressure has to be treated with respect.” Hallorann noticed for the first time that the piping immediately around the relief valve was caked in a thick, knobby, coating of white ice. Jabo touched it. “Besides being loud, a stream of fluid at that pressure could put a hole right through you. Or cut your arm clean off. Like a scalpel.”

“Really?”

“I’m not shittin’ you,” said Jabo.

“So what did you do, sir?” said Hallorann.

“I isolated the relief by closing this valve,” said Jabo. “That’s why you heard that announcement…because that’s not a normal configuration, obviously, the hipac isolated from its relief. Then the chief here came down and fixed our sticky relief valve according to the casualty procedure.”

“It’s called ‘mechanical agitation,’” said the chief, tapping the mallet to the palm of his hand.

“That caused the valve to re-seat, so we were able to un-isolate the air bank and get on with our day.”

Hallorann nodded. He was so impressed he didn’t know what to say.

“Is there anything in your little yellow book about relief valves?” said Jabo.

Hallorann hesitated. “I’m not really sure, sir.”

“Well, take a look,” said Jabo. “And come get me to sign it if there is.” He slapped the chief on his back, and then departed the engine room while they all watched.

Angi Jabo waited only a moment outside Captain Soldato’s office before she was called in. Soldato looked slightly lost behind the enormous wooden desk that befitted his status as the new Commodore of Submarine Squadron 17. A television behind him showed CNN with the sound down; Angi knew it was a story about the latest breakdown in negotiations between the US and China, some scrap about a Taiwanese merchant ship. When the story broke, Danny pointed out how many American wars had begun with an attack on a ship: the Maine, the Arizona, the Gulf of Tonkin. It was something Danny clearly took pride in. It made her feel a little nauseous; she’d been avoiding the news ever since. Captain Soldato shut off the TV, stepped quickly around his desk, and hugged her tightly.

“Angi! Congratulations. Congratulations to you both!”

He stepped back, and Angi found herself surprisingly touched. So far, other than Danny, who’d been a nervous witness to the pregnancy test, she’d told only two people, both of them on the phone: her mother, back in Tennessee, the moment she knew for sure. And Cindy Soldato, the captain’s wife. Mario was the first person other than Danny to congratulate her in person, and his enthusiasm for her pregnancy felt downright great.

“Thanks, Mario.”

“How do you feel?” he said, a huge grin still plastered across his face.

She shrugged. “Better, now. I was pretty sick for a couple of weeks. How about you? How do you like being Commodore?”

He offered her a chair and sat down on another one, beside her, not behind his desk. “It’s depressing as hell. I’ve been on seven submarines, Angi, punched a lot of holes in the ocean. Now I’m ‘one of them,’ just another air breather who they’ll scrub the decks for once a month when I show up at the end of a patrol.”

“I’m sure it’s not that bad,” she said, laughing at his theatrical self-pity. “Can’t you boss them all around now?”

“When you’re an officer in the navy, your entire career, you strive to be the commanding officer of a warship. There’s no higher calling. Everything after that, no matter what rank they give you, is just bullshit. Excuse my language.”

“Well, at least you’ve got this beautiful office,” she said. She could tell he hadn’t completely unpacked, but he did have the plaques from seven submarines in a line on the wall behind his desk: Sunfish, Skipjack, Baton Rouge, Jacksonville, Archerfish, Omaha, and the last one from SSBN731, USS Alabama.

“I’d rather be driving ships and leading men,” he said. “You’ll see what I mean someday, when Danny takes command of a boat.”

She froze her smile at that, and looked down at the polished surface of his desk.

“Isn’t that the plan?” he said.

She cleared her throat. “It seems I can’t keep any secrets from you, Mario.”

He patted her hand. “Has he turned his letter in yet?”

“I think so — needs to do it soon, before he hits the four-year point.”

“Are you doing it because of the baby?”

“No! I mean — I hope not. Lots of reasons. Danny just wants to do something different.”

The captain looked genuinely stricken, and Angi noted again the difference between how Captain Soldato seemed to feel about Danny in her presence, and how her husband perceived it. Danny would come home and relay the tirades he’d endured from Soldato, sometimes alone and sometimes as part of a group. On Mario’s last patrol, during a botched firing of an exercise torpedo, he’d said, “Jabo, how do you keep the ants off your candy ass?”

But whenever Mario mentioned Danny in front of her, he was like this: pure paternal concern and professional admiration. She thought it a shame that the captain could never show this side of himself to Danny, but after three patrols together, she’d assumed it was impossible, because of some combination of nautical tradition and masculine inhibition.

“Well, Angi, take comfort in this: whatever Danny decides to do, you’re going to have this child in a Navy hospital. And Cindy and I are here to help in every way possible. Now that they’ve taken me away from the boat, I’ve got plenty of time on my hands.”

“Thanks Mario, I really do appreciate it. I do feel sometimes like I need someone to help guide me through the insurance process…”

He waved his hand. “Consider it done. I know all the people at Group Nine who manage this stuff, and I went to the Academy with the CO of the hospital in Bremerton. Everything will be fine.”

“I know it will, but thanks for the offer. There’s a chance, depending on how long this patrol is, that Danny may be home before my due date…” The Captain immediately shook his head, and she knew with sudden certainty that he would not.

“We’re going to take care of you Angi,” he said. “You and your baby.”

To Angi’s complete and utter surprise, she began to cry.

At home that night, Angi got on their computer and studied Taiwan and China. She had been avoiding the news up to that point, afraid to learn what was going on, but she suddenly wanted to know as much as she could, no matter how unsettling. It had seemed odd to her all along that the tensions between these two distant countries would so urgently involve the United States. And it seemed downright bizarre that it might affect her, and her nascent family. Now she wanted to know why.

She had to scan several historical overviews before she found one that seemed relatively untainted by politics. She learned that that China had been fighting for the island of Taiwan for five centuries, and that this tortured history was impossible to separate from the current crisis.

In 1662, the Chinese went to Taiwan and expelled the Dutch, its first European colonial masters. The Dutch treasured the island they named Formosa, for its rice, its large native deer population, but mostly for its commanding position on the Asian sea lanes it contested with Spain and Portugal. Not only Europeans coveted Taiwan, however, and in 1895 the Japanese defeated the Great Qin in the first Sino-Japanese war, leading to a long Japanese occupation. Japanese rule of the island lasted until their 1945 defeat in World War II, when the victorious allies deeded the island back to the Chinese.

Clarity was avoided, however, by the Chinese Civil War. That conflict pitted the Communist Peoples Republic of China, led by Mao Zedong, against the Republic of China, led by Chiang Kai-Shek. The war had raged since 1927, stalling briefly during World War II. As soon as World War II ended the Civil War resumed, until the 1949 defeat of Chiang Kai-Shek. With about two million of his supporters, he retreated to Taiwan, where the ROC declared itself to be the sole, legitimate government of China.

This declaration put the United States in an awkward position. For one thing, it was so obviously untrue. And no one really believed that the ROC, with its corrupt leaders and inept military, would ever pose a legitimate threat to the ruthlessly effective communists of Mao and the PRC. On the other hand, the ROC were fierce-anticommunists, and some of the US’s only allies in Asia at a time when the US badly needed allies in that part of the world. So the US began a long, awkward advocacy of the status quo. The unstable arrangement resulted in periodic, predictable crises, many of which metastasized into military action, sometimes on a massive scale. In 1958, China fired so much artillery at the ROC controlled island of Quemoy that the high-quality steel shells became an un-natural resource for more than a generation of island blacksmiths, who became renowned for the meat cleavers they could fashion from the shells that had been intended to kill them. A skillful blacksmith could to this day, Angi learned, make sixty cleavers from a single shell.

After spending an hour on Taiwan’s history, Angi began to get into Taiwan’s recent past and its unique relationship to the US…from Wikipedia she linked to the Taiwan section of globalsecurity.org. She learned that the US policy had evolved into this: if the Republic of China was not actually China, neither was it a “rebel province” as declared by the real Chinese government, one that could be crushed by a PRC police action. The US, under Richard Nixon, finally acknowledged the obvious when it recognized the PRC as the legitimate government of China in 1979. The US embassy in Taipei, Taiwan was closed, renamed the American Institute in Taiwan. (The Taiwanese equivalent in Washington is the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office.) The US, through a series of presidents, maintained the deliberately ambiguous “One China” policy, without ever specifying what that one China consisted of, or who was in charge of it. The US tacitly agreed to never hint that Taiwan was entitled to the independence that it actually had — by 1990 it was a thriving, prosperous democracy. In return, China tacitly agreed not to invade Taiwan and enforce the sovereignty that it insisted it had over the island.

The current crisis began less than six months before, when Qian Chen, the President of Taiwan, was granted a visa to speak at the University of Notre Dame, his alma mater. This visa represented a reversal of US policy, which had for forty years not allowed top Taiwanese officials to visit the United States — in 1994, Lee Teng-Hui, then president of Taiwan, was not even allowed off his plane in Hawaii while it refueled, lest his presence on American soil antagonize the Chinese. At Notre Dame, President Chen barely deviated from the carefully evolved phrases that characterized Taiwan’s odd status, but his mere presence there was enough to aggravate Beijing. In response, they immediately announced a series of surface-to-surface missile tests in waters less than twenty miles from Taiwan’s northern port city of Keelung — a distance that an M-9 Dongfeng missile travels in 9.5 seconds. Commercial air traffic was diverted and the Taiwanese stock market crashed as the latest crisis unfolded.

Angi learned what happened next on sinodefence.org, a British website operated by volunteers that called itself, “the most comprehensive and trusted online source of information on the Chinese military.” On a beautiful Fall morning, a specially trained brigade of the Peoples Liberation Army drove an 8 x 8 launching vehicle from the province of Jiangxi to a position about sixty miles away in the Fujian Province. Two missiles were fired and landed in the ocean, a vivid but harmless assertion of China’s anger and their national sovereignty.

A third missile was launched twenty-two minutes later from the same vehicle: China had announced this in advance, as a demonstration of their rapid reloading capability. This missile followed the same course as the first two initially, and then veered north approximately eight degrees. The missile traveled 576 nautical miles, close to its maximum range, and then slammed into a 170,000 ton cargo ship, the Ever Able. The ship was flagged in Panama, but owned by a Taiwanese company, and was bound for Shanghai. The reasons for the missile strike were immediately and hotly debated, the conversation inevitably colored by the politics of the speaker. China claimed the Ever Able had sailed into the publicized target area, and, in any case, the Dongfeng missile was not a heat-seeking anti-ship missile: it was a ballistic missile fired to a specific geographic coordinate, one that would be almost impossible to use deliberately against a moving vessel. China’s opponents in Taiwan and the United States argued that it was naked act of aggression, and that the time had come at last to defend America’s democratic ally against the Godless Communists of the PRC. The president of the United States, a liberal recently elected, was under enormous pressure to act, having just been seen as weak while negotiating trade regulations with China, who made thinly veiled threats about what havoc they could wreak on the US economy should they decide to divest themselves of their vast holdings of US government debt.

While the world nervously waited to see what the long-term consequences would be, there was no doubt about the immediate effects of that errant missile. While it carried no warhead, the sheer weight and kinetic energy of a 13,000 pound object flying at ten times the speed of sound broke Ever Able in half. It sunk almost instantly, along with its crew of twenty-two men.

It was almost one o’clock in the morning when Angi stared at the image on her computer screen, remnants of the Ever Able’s cargo floating on a calm sea. The bow of a rescue ship jutted into the bottom of the frame, but there was no one to save.

The first days at sea were always hectic, exhausting, but there was something of a relief to it as well: both the ship and the crew were meant to be underway. Alabama’s numerous and complicated systems were designed to operate ideally while in motion, relying on seawater to cool the steam flowing through condensers, shield radiation, and to insulate them from the world of commodores and admirals. The crew was also designed to operate optimally inside a ship at motion, with each division manned to operate a three-section watchbill of six hours on watch, twelve hours off, with plenty of maintenance and training for all hands to do in those off hours, into which also had to be squeezed showering, shitting, shaving, eating, and occasionally sleeping. So while bitching about sea time was an ancient and valued tradition of any maritime force, there was something pleasing about throwing off all lines and getting underway. For almost thirty six-hours, the ship steamed on the surface, each hour rougher then the last, until the ship had finally reached Point Juliet, marking water deep for them to submerge.

Lieutenant Hein, like many men, had rebounded from his seasickness after the initial episode of vomiting. He was standing watch in the control room as the officer of the deck, and he carefully verified their position on a familiar chart of Puget Sound. He then verified that the ship was rigged for dive, and looked to the captain who was standing at his side on the conn. He awaited his order.

Captain Shields nodded his head. “Submerge the ship.”

“Submerge the ship, aye sir. Chief of the watch — submerge the ship.”

The chief of the watch picked up the 1MC microphone and announced to the crew: “Dive! Dive!” He sounded the klaxon alarm, Ahh-OOO-Gah, twice. Modern submarines had, tragically, replaced the traditional klaxon alarm with a poor electronic facsimile, but Alabama, like many boats, had taken an old iron klaxon from a decommissioned boat in the shipyard. The large, gray cast iron alarm was bolted to the deck at the chief of the watch’s feet in a completely unauthorized modification to the ship’s plans.

After sounding the klaxon again, the chief of the watch threw the switches that opened the vents to the six main ballast tanks, the giant tanks of air at each end of the submarine that kept her afloat. Salty spray shot fifty feet into the air through the open vents, as seawater flooded into the tanks through grates in the bottom. Lieutenant Hein watched the controlled sinking of the ship through the periscope and gave a running update to the men in control.

“Forward tanks venting…” He turned the periscope one hundred and eighty degrees. “Aft tanks venting….decks awash…” It was always a strange sight to see the dry deck become covered in swirling green water, where just minutes before crewmen had scurried to make the ship ready for sea. Then the scope was at sea level, water splashing over the optics, then it was under. “Scope is submerged. Lowering number two scope.” He backed away from the scope and turned the orange ring that brought the scope down. Every part of the ship was under water. Their patrol as a submarine had begun.

The navigator excused himself from the control room without a word, and quickly locked himself into the watchstander’s head at the bottom of the control room ladder. He grabbed each side of the small steel sink, and looked straight down at the drain to avoid looking at himself in the mirror. He throat constricted as he thought of the sea surrounding them, just inches away on the other side of the bulkhead, endless, dark, and merciless.

In his stateroom, Jabo felt the rolls ease, without completely stopping, as the ship paused at an intermediate depth to get its initial 1/3 trim. The chief of the watch and the dive were working together, moving water from tank to tank, making fine adjustments, until the ship was at a perfect, level angle, and a slow speed, with all the control surfaces at a zero angle. It took time and skill to get it exactly right. Then the ship increased speed, which he could not feel. But it went deeper, which made the rolls completely melt away, and Jabo almost sighed at the sheer pleasure of the moment. Jabo didn’t quite feel any kind of supernatural, physical connection to his ship. Maybe that came after a lifetime of sea tours, maybe the XO and captain felt that way. But Jabo was profoundly in tune with the machinery that surrounded him, and it was a special kind of relief he felt as the ship went deep. It was like driving a truck on rutted dirt roads for two days, then finally pulling onto the smooth asphalt of a new highway.

“So you turned in your letter?” asked Hayes Kincaid, his roommate in Stateroom 3. Their third roommate, Hein, was on the conn. At the moment the diving alarm sounded, the earliest moment allowed, they both changed from their khaki uniforms into their blue coveralls, or “poopie suits,” and tennis shoes. The poopie suit was one of the great perks of submarine life, and Jabo had trouble imagining how his comrades-in-arms in the surface navy managed to strap themselves into khakis, blues, and shined leather shoes every day.

Kincaid was not only his roommate, he was his best friend on the boat. He was the only black officer onboard, and the only one who’d been enlisted prior to receiving his commission. Kincaid had done a full sea-tour on a submarine as a nuclear electronics technician before being awarded an ROTC scholarship and attending Hampton College in Virginia, where he got a mechanical engineering degree and an Ensign’s shoulder boards. Then he went right back to nuclear power school, then right back to sea.

“Well sort of. Not really. The captain refused to accept it.”

Kincaid laughed loudly. “Can he do that? Didn’t you need to get that in this last mail call?”

Jabo shrugged. “He was a little mysterious about it. Said we’d have another mail call in a couple of weeks, and that the reason we were having the mail call would convince me I want to stay in the navy.”

Kincaid laughed again. “Fuck…that. You want to come back to one of these? Be a department head?”

“That’s what I said — I mentioned the navigator — said he doesn’t look like he enjoys life all that much.”

“What did the captain say to that?”

“Said the nav was a bad example.”

“Fuck that! He’s a perfect example. That department head tour is when they get you. JO tours, XO tours, what are they, three years? Because JOs, like you, they’re trying to trick you into staying in. And XOs, they only need one per boat. And the CO tour is down to what, eighteen months? But the departments heads, the Navy knows they’ve got those guys, they’ve already decided to stay in — so they keep them out here like five years, wring every last drop of sweat out of them. And then what do they do? Promote half of them to XO and tell the rest to fuck off. No pension, no nothing to show for their trouble.”

“What the fuck, Hayes, aren’t you a lifer?”

“I’ve got twelve years in, my friend, ‘cause of my enlisted time, and all my time in college counted too. I’ll do my shore tour after this, then my department head tour, and then I’ll have my twenty. The Navy can do whatever it wants to me after that. I don’t give a shit if I don’t screen for XO.” But Jabo knew Kincaid would — he was an outstanding officer and, despite everything he ever said aloud: he loved the navy.

The rough voice of their Executive Officer on the 1MC: All officers report to the wardroom.

“Are we finally going to find out what the hell is going on this patrol?”

Kincaid shrugged. “I already told you the plan. We’re going to go to sea, we’re going to screw around for three, four, five or six months, and then were going to come back. In a year, we’ll do it again.”

Jabo laughed. “Maybe you’re right.” Kincaid worked hard to always be the least impressed person about any event of shipboard life, whether it was a fire in the engine room or the new ice cream maker in the Crew’s Mess.

“Let me ask you something, Hayes. Was life on submarines really that much more exciting twelve years ago? Is it that much more boring now?”

“Let me tell you a secret,” he said leaning in and whispering. “Life on submarines has always been boring.”

“Fuck you, I don’t believe it,” said Jabo, laughing. “I’ve heard the stories. Plus, why would you stay in all this time?”

“I like the food.”

They stepped out of their stateroom and walked down the short ladder that took them to the wardroom.

The Captain was at his traditional spot, at the head of the table, while the XO sat literally at his right hand. The navigator, small and exhausted looking as always, was standing up in front with a tripod that held a chart, a chart hidden by a standard issue navy bed sheet. That was unusual — everyone in the wardroom had at least a top secret clearance, and Jabo felt again that maybe Kincaid was wrong about their patrol being boring. Jabo also sensed some tension in the silent room.

They were all three in their khakis, and Jabo felt a little underdressed in his poopie. Soon the other junior officers in poopie suits piled in, though, all of them just as eager as he had been to get comfortable. The noise level rose. They waited for Hein to arrive, who was being relieved on the conn by the engineer himself, at the XO’s insistence…whatever was going on they wanted Hein to hear firsthand. Hein finally arrived, looking slightly befuddled, and sat next to Jabo without saying a word.

The XO convened the meeting. “Everybody shut the fuck up.” They all quickly complied. The XO’s muscular arms bulged inside his khaki sleeves, and his bald head gleamed in the fluorescent lights. MS1 Straub, the head cook, stuck his head in from the galley door, doing his job and seeing if anything was needed. The XO nodded at him, and he got the message, retreating. The XO locked the door behind him when it shut — another unusual precaution.

“Before we get started,” said the Captain. “I’m tempted to ask what the craziest rumor each of you has heard. About our patrol orders, not about girl babies.” There was nervous laughter around the table. “Whatever you’ve heard,” said the captain, “I can assure you it’s complete bullshit. The XO and I were briefed the morning of our departure by the Admiral, and the navigator found out shortly after.” Jabo looked at the nav, whose face was impassive, haunted, exhausted.

“So here’s what we’re really going to do,” said the captain. “We’re taking this ship to Taiwan.”

There was some muttering around the table, and Jabo watched for just a moment as even Kincaid was unable to hide his surprise, before he slipped back into his mask of practiced nonchalance. But it was truly remarkable news. Because of the nature of their normal mission, they almost never went anywhere exciting. Unlike their brothers on attack submarines who deployed all over the globe with battle groups, Trident Submarines generally followed a fairly predictable schedule of leaving Bangor, Washington, going to sea for a few hundred days, and returning. If they were lucky, every other patrol or so, they might pull into Pearl Harbor. Once, on Jabo’s first patrol, they had to surface off of Kodiak Island, Alaska, to medevac a shipmate who’d suffered a heart attack. But foreign ports were just never part of the deal — their deployment schedule didn’t allow for it and most foreign nations were hesitant to allow twenty-four nuclear missiles into one of their harbors, with all the protests and controversy it would inevitably cause.

“The United States has a fundamental commitment to the nation of Taiwan,” said the Captain. “The nature of which, frankly, is too complicated to explain here. But, in short, we will surface two weeks from now one hundred nautical miles east of the island, we will pull into the Taiwanese navy base at Suao, and then we are going to remove sixteen warheads from one of our missiles, and give the government of Taiwan temporary custody of them. It’s all top secret, beyond top secret, until we pull into the harbor, and then the news media of the world will be invited to take pictures. You’ll probably all end up on the Nightly News.”

“Isn’t that a violation of the non-proliferation treaty?” said Hein. Hein had gone to MIT and was one of the smartest guys that Jabo had ever met. It didn’t surprise him that he would throw out a question like that.

“That’s a good question Jay. I asked the same thing of the admiral. The official line is that we’re not proliferating because we’re not giving them the warheads — we’re allowing them to store them on our behalf. Or something like that. But your intuition is sound — I have no doubt that this will stir up a shitload of controversy, at home and abroad, and will antagonize the Chinese beyond belief. But I believe, as everyone at this table should, that our national leadership has thought this through completely and that they’ve decided the benefits are worth the risks.”

“What do we tell the crew?” asked Kincaid.

“Nothing,” snapped the XO. “No one knows where we are going or why. We’ll tell them the day before we pull in that we are going to Taiwan, but not why. This is all ‘need to know,’ and you guys need to know, since you’re going to be looking at the chart every night and making sure we’re headed in the right direction. You, you, and you,” he said, pointing in turn at Kincaid, Jabo, and Jay Hein, “will be straight up three-section OOD starting with the next hour. Get to know and love those charts. Outside this room, only quartermasters and a handful of Nav ETs will know. And I guess we’ll have to tell the engineer sooner or later.” Everyone chuckled.

“You, you, and you,” said the XO, pointing to Morgan, Morrissey, and Retzner, “are our three-section EOOWs.” They all happened to be sitting next to each other on one side of the table, all friends and roommates on their second patrol. They nodded in unison. “And you,” he said, pointing to Duggan, “Your job is to qualify EOOW, get on the watchbill, and make life a little easier for your six shipmates here.”

“Aye, aye sir,” said Duggan. Jabo heard the urgent sincerity in his voice. It was a shitty feeling to be the only one in the room without a real role to play.

The XO continued. “All of you can regard any information about our mission just like targeting information— no one else needs to know.”

“The rumor mill is already running like crazy…” said Hein.

“Then let it run. I frankly don’t give a shit,” said the XO. “This is a vitally important, vitally secret mission, one that will have historic consequences. I am honored that they’ve chosen us to carry this out, and woe to the sailor or officer who fucks it up. Understood?”

Everyone nodded. The XO had made it clear that the question and answer period was over.

“Ok,” he said, waving a hand toward the nav. “Let’s get on with it. The navigator, as we mentioned, just found all this out. After spending the better part of the last week getting our charts in order for a patrol of the northern pacific, he’s got to revise everything. But show them what you’ve got.”

The Navigator pulled down the sheet to reveal a small-scale chart of the entire Pacific Ocean. On it, he’d penciled in a great-circle route all the way to Taiwan. While it looked curved on the flat chart, the course was actually a straight-line across the curved surface of the earth. A large red dot, on the far right hand side of the chart was labeled PA: Papa Alpha. The track connected it to a point on the other side of the Pacific: PZ, Papa Zulu. Point A to Point Z. “This is all I’ve got so far,” he said meekly.

Jabo noticed for the first time behind the nav a small pyramid of tightly rolled up charts that looked freshly-delivered from Group Nine. They must have come over in the last mail bag off the tug. Every one would need to be reviewed by the nav, updated, and approved. And every chart he’d already done this for in their normal patrol areas, working day and night for weeks, was now useless. The captain had delivered on his promise in one way, Jabo thought, in revealing to him orders that were spectacularly different from anything they’d done before, an exciting unforeseen mission for them and their boat. But he’d also confirmed that the navigator’s life was pretty fucking miserable.

“We’re going to have to really burn it up,” said the Navigator. “To make it there in time, across the operating areas they’ve given us, we’re going to have to have a speed of advance of twenty knots the entire time, day and night.”

“This is going to preclude a lot,” said the XO. “Our sonar will be degraded, we’ll be limited in the drills we can run. And we’re going to have to keep our heads up. That means you, OODs. You’re going to be covering a lot more ground each watch than you’re used to — keep an eye on the chart, on the fathometer, all that good shit. Make sure we are where we are supposed to be. You hear me?”

“Yes sir,” they all said in unison.

“What’s after Taiwan, sir?” asked Jabo.

The XO looked at the captain, who nodded. “After we complete this mission, we’ll make another two-week transit, assume a target package, and begin a normal strategic deterrence patrol.”

No one said what everybody was thinking: they were going to be at sea for a very, very long time.

“Ok, everybody get the fuck out of here and get some rest,” said the XO. “You’re going to need it.”

The three roommates crowded into the stateroom: Kincaid, Jabo, and Hein. Hein was dogging it a bit, giving the engineer a few minutes more on the conn. They all wanted to talk it over.

“Ever been to Taiwan?” Jabo asked Kincaid.

“Never. Never heard of a boat that has.”

“Of course not,” said Hein. “It is going to cause a complete shit storm. This is huge!”

Jabo nodded grimly.

“What, aren’t you pumped about this? God knows what kind of attention we’re going to get…this could be great for our careers.”

Kincaid laughed. “You’re the only one here all that worried about that, my friend.” He nodded at Jabo.

It took Hein a second to process. “Really? You turned your letter in?”

“Not exactly,” said Jabo. “Captain’s going to endorse it when we get to Taiwan.”

“If we make it!” said Hein, grinning. “We’ll have to evade the entire Chinese Navy.”

Jabo nodded, lost in thought. He was excited, like Hein, like the captain had promised. They were doing something extraordinary. But he was also going to be at sea months longer than he’d expected. With the changes to their orders, he’d originally thought that an early departure might mean an early return; in time for his child’s birth.

But the opposite was true. They were going to be at sea longer than normal, and he would almost certainly miss everything. He wondered when and how Angi would learn the news.

The Navigator sat alone in the Officer’s Study at 2:00 am, a huge, unblemished chart of the Pacific Ocean in front of him. There was a repeater in the study and the navigator registered subconsciously that they were on course and on track, 280, twenty-two knots, 650 feet. At that depth, they were well-insulated from the upheaval on the ocean surface. They were so seemingly motionless that the five sharpened pencils he had laying on the table only moved when he picked them up. He liked being busy. It seemed to quiet the nervous buzz in his head. If he focused intensely and worked himself into exhaustion, he hoped, he could stop thinking about all the things that worried him.

Counting his years at the Naval Academy, Mark Taylor had been in the Navy thirteen years. For that entire time, he’d been nervous, fearful that he would somehow fuck things up. At times his anxiety was nearly debilitating. During his Plebe year at the Academy, he once dreamed that he was being strangled, and awoke swinging his arms, fending off his attacker. But Plebe Year was designed to drive people crazy, as the upperclassmen, with their ritualized hazing, attempted to ferret out any weakness among the newest members of the Battalion. While Mark worried about his sanity, he took comfort in the fact that he seemed to be holding up better than many of his classmates. During Hell Week, another fourth class Mid from his company stood on his desk in his second floor room in Bancroft Hall and jumped, intentionally landing on his knees, shattering them, sending himself away from Annapolis with a debilitating injury. He recuperated for a month and then enrolled at Ohio State University on crutches. It was a measure of how miserable Plebe year was that most of the other mids spoke of his experience with envy. Mark worked hard to cope, and hoped that after his Plebe Year things would get better.

And…they did. For a while. He realized that frenzied hard work seemed to keep his bad thoughts at bay, so he pushed himself ruthlessly in the library and classroom, and chose to study electrical engineering, by consensus the hardest degree at the Academy. His stellar grades soon attracted the interest of the nuclear power program’s recruiters who were always looking for motivated young engineers with a high tolerance for abuse. His senior year, he sat for interviews with a couple of psychologists who screened all candidates for the nuclear submarine program. One shrink handed him a piece of paper and a pencil and asked him to draw a picture of himself. Mark drew a stick figure that he hoped looked normal and happy, then worried that the smile looked maniacally toothy and large.

The second psychologist presented him with two columns of activities; in each case he was supposed to circle the one activity of the pair he would rather do. One instance asked if he would rather “peel potatoes,” or “kill people.” Although his final years at the Academy had been relatively happy, he approached the tests with the attitude that he did have something to hide, and to him, the tests seemed superficial and easy to fool. Some aspiring nukes got called back for a third psychological interview, but Mark didn’t even have to do that: the shrinks gave him a clean bill of health, which Mark, with his great faith in the Navy’s institutional wisdom, took as vindication. When he left Annapolis with an Ensign’s stripes and orders for nuclear power school, Mark began to feel confident that his fears and insecurities had been outgrown, part of the residue of Plebe Year that he’d left behind on the banks of the Severn.

Nuclear Power School and prototype training brought with them a new kind of pressure, and with it, a few worrisome episodes. Once, while at nuclear power school in Orlando, he’d slept an entire weekend. Went to bed on Friday night, and didn’t wake up until Sunday afternoon. He awoke to a bed that he’d soaked through with urine. He had to drag his mattress and sheets to the apartment complex’s dumpster without his roommate seeing, and slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of his room for the rest of the term.

The second episode was worse. It happened at the S1-C prototype in Connecticut, an operating nuclear reactor that was the capstone of their engineering training. The plant was built to operate exactly like a submarine plant, and even turned a shaft. Since there was no ocean, however, to absorb the energy, the screw turned a generator which dissipated the plant’s energy into electrical resistors, which turned it into heat, which dissipated over the Connecticut countryside. When the plant was running, the resistors were hot — it was their job to be hot. They were surrounded by a high fence designed mainly to keep out the raccoons who were attracted to the warmth, but who would sometimes get trapped between resistors and cook, making a god awful mess.

One frigid February night, Mark wandered outside the plant trying to clear his head after a marathon studying session. The next morning he was to be observed as Engineering Officer of the Watch conducting casualty drills. If he performed well, his nuclear power training would be successfully completed. If he failed, his nuclear aspirations would be ended. He hadn’t left the site in twenty-four hours, and planned on studying through the night, right up until the moment he took the watch in maneuvering. He was stressed, exhausted, and fairly certain that some of the mumbling he heard inside the large, common study area was audible only to him.

He paused at the high fence that surrounded the resistor bank. He could see where the insulated cables came out of the fake hull, channeling electricity into the resistors. I=V/R, Ohm’s Law, flashed into his head, the cornerstone of electrical theory. Like all the other ensigns at the site, he could rapidly and accurately calculate in his head what current would flow through the resistors at a given power level, how many shaft horsepower that translated to, and how much heat would be generated by the resistors as it absorbed that power. Because it was so cold, he could actually feel the heat coming off of the resistors; it felt good on his face as his back turned cold in the chilly night; it even smelled pleasantly warm, like a campfire, something Mark had never noticed before during midnight walks around the installation.

That’s when Mark noticed that a long, thin oak branch had fallen from the surrounding trees and landed atop the resistors; what he smelled was the unmistakable aroma of wood being heated to its burning point. There were no trees directly over the resistor bank, but the branch was covered in dried, curly leaves. It must have snapped off in the cold and glided over from the surrounding woods like a paper airplane, landing exactly where it would do the most harm. Mark couldn’t do anything himself because of the fence; the branch was unreachable. He immediately turned, intending to run to the nearest phone and alert the Engineering Officer of the Watch.

But…he stopped.

He watched the branch in a kind of trance, thinking that it was not unlike an experiment Naval Reactors might conjure up, to see what the consequences of a branch falling on the resistor bank might be. He pictured a chart in a Reactor Plant Manual charting the temperature of a wooden branch versus time on a logarithmic graph, a bold horizontal line indicating the auto-ignition temperature of dried leaves. For a few minutes, he thought maybe nothing would happen. But then white smoke began to curl away from some of the leaves, and he smiled as the nostalgic, pungent aroma wafted over him. Then a few of them burst into flame, then, almost simultaneously, all of them were on fire.

The branch burned quickly, and settled into the resistor bank as it fell apart and turned to ash; the crevices between resistors and wires showed vividly in the orange flames. Soon Mark began to smell the sour, acrid smell of an electrical fire, and a few pops came from the resistors as wiring melted and shorted out. Resin inside the resistors melted and dribbled down the side, like gore from a wounded animal. A minute more, and he heard the KA CHUNK of large circuit breakers tripping, one right by his feet, that made him jump, and one just inside the hull. A bleating alarm sounded inside the hull, and he heard a muted, concerned announcement of the casualty from inside. He wandered away from the resistor bank, and took the long way back to the classroom where he’d been studying.

The next morning, crews were cutting down every tree within five feet of the outer fence line, and the plant was shut down while they all had training on the incident, and discussed the seriousness of what had happened: a reactor that is creating energy and then suddenly has no place for that energy to go. It could lead, they all reviewed, to soaring temperatures, protective actions, damaged fuel. They all worked through equations to calculate the rate and the extent of the potential damage.

Mark had to wait two days for repairs to the resistor bank to have his observed watch; he combated simulated flooding and recovered from an actual scram. He passed with solid marks. He didn’t let the branch incident bother him for more than a few days. After all, it wasn’t like he’d thrown the branch onto the resistors, there would have been a fire even if he’d never gotten near it: his presence there was a coincidence. And all the reactor’s protective mechanisms had worked properly, protecting it from any damage. He graduated third in his class and received orders to the USS City of Corpus Christi. On his way to the west coast, he stopped in his hometown of Lansing, Michigan to marry Muriel, his high school sweetheart.

Mark loved Muriel, but he told her nothing about the fears he had for his own sanity. It was easy to keep from her at first. When they’d dated in high school and during trips home from the Academy, he’d been fine. Muriel was a tough woman, a realist, and Mark knew if he told her, she would immediately seek help, help that would result inevitably in the end of his career. And, in a way, keeping Muriel in the dark made him feel better, just as fooling the Navy shrinks had. Muriel was smart, and perceptive. If she couldn’t tell that Mark was crazy…well then, he must not be that crazy. Of course, when she finally realized everything, he had to leave her. A wife telling the Navy that her husband was crazy was one thing. But a spurned wife telling the Navy that her ex-husband was a nut…the Navy would have to shut down if it listened to every allegation hurled by an ex-wife.

Everyone told junior officers that as demanding as the nuclear power training was, going to sea was harder. When he arrived on his first boat, the USS City of Corpus Christi, it had just begun a refueling overhaul in the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. For his entire tour, the boat never left drydock; he had to be loaned out to other ships around Puget Sound to complete his at-sea qualifications.

He completed them with aplomb, pinned on his gold dolphins, received top marks on his fitness reports, and screened for department head with flying colors. The overhaul was demanding and stressful, but Mark got through the entire tour without an episode. He began to think again that he had healed. He did a leisurely shore tour at the ROTC unit at Creighton, then was ordered to report to the USS Alabama, where his optimism disappeared on the first day of his first patrol.

It was after the two-day transit to Point Juliet, two days in which he’d spent all but a few moments in the control room staring at charts. The ship had completed its preparations to submerge, and they’d just taken a sounding, confirming that the water beneath them was as deep as expected. After two nauseating days rolling on the surface, everyone was eager to submerge, so the XO was encouraging the OOD, Lieutenant Kaiser, to hurriedly shift the watch to the control room and get down from the bridge.

The last lookout dropped down from the ladder, directly in front of the conn, and Kaiser came soon after. The Nav noticed that there was only one “Open” indication left on the Chief of the Watch’s panel, a single green “O” in a row of amber lines; the indicator for the lower hatch to the bridge. As Kaiser spun the ring that sealed the hatch, the nav watched the light turn from a green “O” into an amber-colored straight line, a line that continued the length of the COW’s panel. It was an elegant representation of their status: the ship was completely sealed.

Suddenly, his own throat began to tighten, as if the wheel that Kaiser spun also controlled the flow of oxygen into his lungs.

“The ship is rigged for dive,” announced the OOD.

The navigator realized with sudden, overwhelming panic that he was locked in a steel tube driving through the ocean, and would remain so for more than one hundred days. He felt the ship running out of air, his lungs constricting, starving. There was a chorus of voices in control then, the usual yammer of everyone doing their part to get the ship submerged safely. But Mark knew at least a few of those voices muttering in the background were voices in his head, warning him about the danger only he could see.

He stumbled out of control into the watchstander’s head at the bottom of the ladder; one of very few places you could be truly alone on the boat. Everyone noticed him stagger out, of course, but the same people had seen him virtually live in control for two exhausting days. And this was his first patrol, before there’d been even a whisper about his odd behavior amongst the crew or the wardroom. Most of the men assumed he’d just done an admirable job of controlling his bladder until an opportune time, or perhaps had finally succumbed to sea sickness. Mark splashed water on his face from the head’s tiny steel sink, and tried to pull himself together. Gradually he began to control his breathing enough to return to the control room, where an endless series of charts awaited his review.

Ever since then, he’d recognized that the first day at sea was the hardest, that moment when the ship became a submarine. It was a moment he dreaded, but one he was prepared for. He knew that after that first day submerged, all patrol, every patrol, he’d have trouble separating what really happened to him with what was going on in his mind, the voices of the crew from the voices in his head. The problem, he knew, was getting worse. Stabbing himself in the leg was bad; Maple hadn’t been able to make eye-contact with him since. But he knew it was Jabo he had to be careful around, the smartest junior officer on the boat. The rest of the officers might think the Nav was just a little odd, a little stressed out. But he had a feeling he wouldn’t be able to fool Jabo for long.

Now it was the start of his fifth patrol. He had thought that he would just tough it out, his last patrol before rotating to shore duty, and then he’d vowed to himself to get help. He’d find a civilian doctor who would treat him in secret, away from the Navy’s watchful eyes. Maybe it was as simple as a pill he could take, he’d read about things like that. A good prescription and a shore tour were just what he needed. Maybe he and Muriel would even patch things up. Of course, that had all been wishful thinking before the patrol began and their orders changed.

Now he knew he would never see land again.

The nav realized his eyes were shut, and snapped awake. The bright, fluorescent box of the Officer’s Study was empty except for him and his charts. He had a splitting headache, and the color scheme of the OS did nothing to relieve it, everything in the room was painted a different shade of orange, with the exception of the brass clock, the only nautical touch in that sterile space. The Nav noticed with a sigh that the clock had stopped; keeping those old-fashioned clocks wound, six of them placed throughout the ship, was yet another responsibility of the navigator’s. He turned back to the clean chart in front of him.

In the case of nautical charts, unblemished was not a desirable thing. It meant the charts had never been used, and hence never been updated with the frequent changes and revisions that they received from a variety of sources, including the NOAA. Their home charts, the ones near Puget Sound, were smeared and smudged with notes and numbers that had been added as more detailed depth surveys were taken, sand banks shifted, and, occasionally, ancient shipwrecks were identified beneath the waves. When planning the ship’s track with those charts he could be confident that while there were many hazards, every hazard had been identified. But now, they were not only steaming through an area that the Alabama had never been through, it was an area far from the traditional shipping lanes to and from Asia. The new charts he’d received from Group Nine were pristine, with vast swaths of light blue that, the navigator knew, did not indicate a lack of hazards, but a lack of information. With a stack of bulletins and messages, he was adding what few updates he had, but the charts were still dominated by unmarked stretches marred only by the dark pencil line of the ship’s track that the navigator had laid out. The ship was travelling so fast, it was all he could do to keep up with their track, getting a chart updated and approved by the captain and XO just in time to hand it to the OOD as they raced westward. He involuntarily glanced at the stopped clock again; he didn’t know what time it was, and he didn’t how long it had been since he’d slept. He glanced at the edge of the chart, the small island of Taiwan, the looming mass of China.

His hands started shaking at the magnitude of what they were doing, at the magnitude of his role in it.

The end of the world, he heard, in a voice that was not quite his.

You have to stop this submarine.

Danny Jabo was not born to be a naval officer. There was nothing remotely nautical in his family heritage, nor was there anything suggesting he was destined to wear the gold braid of an officer, which even in the navy of the world’s greatest democracy carried the faint whiff of aristocracy. His father was the son of a farmer who’d learned to repair air conditioners at the county’s vocational school. He’d passed on to Danny a keen mechanical aptitude, which helped him in the Navy, and an uncomplaining, tireless attitude about hard work, which helped him more. His life had not been without drama or tragedy — he had a little brother die in the crib when he was just five, a loss from which his sad-eyed mother never completely recovered. But it was a solid, good upraising in Morristown, Tennessee, forty miles east of Knoxville, at the edge of the Appalachians. There was an old joke that navy chiefs told when asked where they would go upon finally retiring. I’m going to strap an anchor to my back, they said, and start walking inland. When someone points to me and says, “hey, what’s that thing on your back,” that’s where I am going to live. His hometown, Jabo thought, when he first heard that joke, is that place.

He’d learned about ROTC scholarships from his high school guidance counselor, and applied to both the air force and the navy, mainly because both services, on their brochures, seemed to offer something that was more technically alluring than the Army’s marketing literature. One part of the process required him to go to Fort Knox, Kentucky, home of the nearest available military hospital, and get a physical, an event that marked the first time he’d ever set foot on a military installation of any kind. Both services, impressed by his grades, his test scores, and his glowing recommendations, offered him full scholarships. The deal both services offered was this: they would pay for 100 % of his tuition to any school that he could get into that offered their particular flavor of ROTC. Danny and his father researched the issue carefully, and after a flurry of applications to southern schools, Vanderbilt was the most expensive school with ROTC that he could get into, and thus, they figured, the best deal. Vandy offered Navy ROTC but not Air Force. So before he even entered the Navy, Danny became a Commodore.

And eight years later, after three summers at sea, a college degree, and a year of the navy’s exhaustive nuclear power training, he found himself wandering the passageways of a Trident submarine. It was sometimes dizzying to think about, like he had just awoken one day and discovered that he was one of twelve officers on a nuclear warship. But at the same time, he knew he’d made the right choice, because he loved his job, and couldn’t imagine serving on a carrier, one of hundreds of officers and thousands of men, or on some supply ship or auxiliary, no matter how necessary those support ships were. He loved being part of an elite group at the tip of the spear, and he knew that he would miss that prideful feeling most of all when he resigned his commission.

He was looking for Hayes Kincaid. They were about to watch Enter the Dragon in the wardroom, and he knew Kincaid would want in. Soon, after the rigors of the three-section watchbill fully set in, he knew they wouldn’t be able to burn a flick together like that. Whenever one of them was off watch, the other would either be on the conn or in the rack, getting what sleep he could. So he thought they should enjoy it while they were able.

He suspected Kincaid was exercising in Missile Compartment Lower Level so he headed that direction. Kincaid was a dedicated athlete, and one of few men to return from a patrol in better shape than when he left. Their workout gear was limited, but Kincaid made the most of it with every spare moment, putting himself through punishing workouts. The centerpiece of his routine was the treadmill, on which Kincaid attempted to run five hundred miles every patrol, tracking each run on a sheet of graph paper.

As Jabo walked by the Officer’s Study, he saw that the door was closed, and wondered if Kincaid might be in there, perhaps reviewing some charts or writing a letter home for the impending mail call. He put his ear to the door before knocking; the way things were going he didn’t want to interrupt some high-level discussion between the XO and CO, afraid they might drag him into the conversation. He heard something, muted talking, muttering on the other side. He lightly knocked on the door with one knuckle and the talking stopped. He knocked again, and opened it.

The navigator sat alone at the table, a pristine chart in front of him.

“Oh, hey Nav. Just looking for Kincaid.”

The navigator didn’t say a word, didn’t nod or respond at all.

“You okay, nav?”

Still without saying a word, the navigator bent back down over the chart and resumed making corrections. Jabo watched him for just a second, and then closed the study’s door.

Well, he thought. That was fucking weird.

Angi took the Kingston to Edmonds ferry, on her way to Muriel Taylor’s condo. She was able to walk onto the ferry, leaving her car behind in Kingston and saving five dollars, as the Taylors lived within walking distance of the other ferry terminal. She’d decided to make the short, pleasant trip across Puget Sound to tell her friend about the baby.

The cat was not quite out of the bag, but it soon would be. Cindy Soldato, for all her good qualities, was not discreet, and besides, Angi was showing to the point that her pregnancy would soon be undeniable. She and Muriel had drifted apart in the last two patrols, but they had been close friends at one time, and Angi would always be grateful to her for showing her the ropes when she first arrived, all the things a clueless new navy wife needed help with, from getting a military ID card to how to shop in the Navy Exchange. Back in those days, they both often talked about how they wanted to have a child when the time was right — and how the time seemed like it would never be right. Muriel had withdrawn since then, and rarely attended any of the social functions that brought the wardroom wives together, so they rarely spoke anymore. Muriel’s absence was accompanied by the predictable rumors of trouble in their marriage. But Angi decided she still wanted Muriel to be one of the first people to know about her baby, and that she would tell her in person.

She called ahead but Muriel hadn’t answered, so she took a chance and hopped on the ferry anyway. Even after three years, the Washington State Ferries had not lost their novelty, and she loved drinking her latte (decaf now) and watching the scenery from a window seat, hard to believe the ride you could get for a six bucks. There were days, and especially nights, when the thought of pregnancy scared Angi very much, most often in the form of her wondering if she was up to the task. But there were more days like this, when she was excited beyond words, happy to be pregnant, happy that she and Danny were doing this. She felt the ferry rumble as the big engines reversed; they were pulling into Edmonds.

She disembarked and made the quick walk through the ferry terminal into the cute streets of Edmonds. Coffee shops, crafty boutiques, a music store that was somehow surviving the age of digital music. A few nice restaurants that were still closed because of the early hour. She thought with a brief pang of loneliness how nice it would be to eat dinner there with Danny, watching the ferries come and go.

Soon she was at the door to Muriel’s condo; she could feel the effect of the pregnancy in the short walk, she felt more winded than she should have been. Just as she was getting ready to knock on the door, it flew open, and she saw Muriel, looking completely shocked and exhausted, standing in the doorway, the room behind her filled with cardboard boxes.

“Muriel?”

“Angi? Oh my God…” She put her hands over her mouth.

“Are you moving?” she asked, stating the obvious.

Muriel shook her head, and started to motion her in. “What am I thinking…there’s no where to sit. Let’s go get some coffee. Or maybe some wine.”

I can’t have either, thought Angi, but she decided to wait. It seemed they both had big news to share.

They went to Waterfront Coffee Company, an old hangout, and it made Angi remember how much time the two of them used to spend together, and how long it had been. At the counter, Muriel ordered a double shot of espresso, and Angi ordered a decaf latte.

“Decaf?” Muriel said. “It’s only ten o’clock.”

Angi smiled, and pulled her hands down to her hips, pulling her oversized windbreaker tight across her belly.

“Oh my God!” said Muriel, and her face finally brightened, looking something like the Muriel she used to know, optimistic and always enthusiastic. “How long?”

“Almost three months,” she said. “You’re almost the first person here I’ve told. I had to talk to Cindy to get the ball rolling on some of the insurance stuff.”

“Well if Cindy knows, I’m surprised I haven’t heard yet.” The heavily pierced employee handed them their coffees across the counter, and they found an isolated table in the back.

They spoke at length about the pregnancy: the due date, the morning sickness, the odds (unlikely) that Danny would be by her side at the birth. Finally the conversation hesitated and Angi decided to ask.

“So…moving?”

Muriel looked down at the scratched table and nodded.

“Are you guys going to your next duty station? Does Mark have orders for shore duty yet?”

“He might,” she said. “I have no idea. But I’m going home.”

Angi hesitated, knowing the rest of the story would come out. It certainly wasn’t uncommon — every patrol, a certain number of wives would just decide they couldn’t take it anymore, and head back to wherever they’d come from. Being a Navy Wife was hardest during deployment, and that’s also when leaving was the easiest. But it was still shocking, and sad, to see it happen to a good friend.

“Can I ask why?”

Muriel took a deep breath. “Honestly Angi…I think Mark is going crazy.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’d been little things, of course, but I just wrote it off to the stress. I mean, don’t they all have to be a little crazy to do what they do? But I really started to worry after his third patrol, Mario’s last. Mark had just completed all his command qualifications, and Mario had given him a stellar fitrep. Everybody is telling us he’s going to screen early for XO. And then — he doesn’t.”

“Oh no!”

“So he starts working even harder than normal, round the clock, all the time wondering how he failed the Navy. He’s pouring over old fitreps, looking for faint praise, anything that might have stopped him from screening early. Now keep in mind, it’s not like he’s been passed over— he just hasn’t screened early. But there’s no telling him that.”

“I know it’s a really tough jump, from department head to XO.”

“Even tougher now because they’ve gotten rid of so many boats — Mark’s year group has just been decimated. I understand all that. But I start to see changes in him. He stops eating, for one thing. He’s losing weight like crazy, and he didn’t have that much to begin with. And then the nightmares start.”

“Nightmares?”

“He starts moaning in his sleep, every couple of nights, really tortured sounds, sometimes bordering on yelling. I tell him to get to a doctor, you know, a psychiatrist, but he won’t hear of it, says that will be the end of it, that he’ll never screen if the Navy thinks he’s crazy.”

Angi nodded, and didn’t say what she was thinking: that Mark was right. Nothing would end a career faster.

“Here, look at this,” said Muriel, digging something out of her gigantic purse. She handed Angi a small black book.

“A bible?”

“Right about the time he doesn’t screen early, he starts reading two books constantly. Whenever he’s home, which is not that often, he’s sitting there reading either the bible, or Rig for Dive.”

“Rig for Dive?”

“Some old World War II submarine book. He’d sit there with both books, at the kitchen table with a highlighter in his hand, like he was studying them. Goes from one to the other…Rig for Dive to the Bible and back. This is a guy, keep in mind, who didn’t spend a Sunday in church the whole time he was growing up. Didn’t even want to get married in a church, I had to insist on it. Now he’s studying the bible like his life depends on it. Look inside.”

Angi flipped it open. There were passages highlighted in a rainbow of colors. Muriel had been right; the density of highlighting increased rapidly near the back of the book, where nearly every word was highlighted. There were also densely written notes in the margins. Angi looked close. “What does this say?”

Muriel nodded. “That took me a while to figure out too. They’re equations. Engineering equations. He’d write them all over the freaking bible while he was reading about Armageddon.”

“Do you have the other one? The submarine book?”

“No, I looked. I think he took that one with him. I guess he gave up on the bible.”

Angi felt a deep sense of unease as she paged through it; it did look crazy. The juxtaposition of all the mathematical symbols against the numbered, columned pages of the King James Bible was positively creepy. But still…

“They’re all nerds,” she said. “One time I caught Danny writing on a notepad as he watched football — he said he was ‘keeping score in hex.’”

Muriel nodded vigorously. “I know what you mean, but I’m his wife. Something is definitely wrong with him. So finally, after he refuses to listen to me about seeing someone, I invite over my neighbor one night to meet him. A neighbor who happens to be a psychologist.”

“Oh Muriel…”

“That’s pretty much what Mark says as soon as he realizes who he’s talking to. Asks the guy to leave, very politely, and then tells me that I am trying to ruin his career. No I’m not, I said, I’m trying to help you!”

She started crying then and Angi reached out to touch her hand.

“So, he pretty much moves onto the boat at that point. I didn’t see him or talk to him for a week before. When they left early — I didn’t even know. He didn’t even call me. So, I sat around here for a week, and just thought — I guess our marriage is over. So I called the movers and here I am.”

“I don’t know what to say, Muriel. I’m so sorry.”

She looked down at the table. “He was such a sweet guy when we got married. And smart! My God, he was smart, the smartest boy I’d ever met. And now he’s a wreck. I swear, Angi — I hate the fucking Navy.”

Angi held back on that one — she wasn’t about to defend the Navy in this situation.

“The only thing I’m wondering about now…should I tell someone?”

“What do you mean?”

“Should I tell somebody that I think they’ve got a certifiable nutcase onboard the Alabama? Should I give this bible to someone?”

Angi thought that over. “I don’t know, Muriel.”

“I don’t either,” she said. “What would I tell them? That my husband has been having bad dreams and reading the bible? They wouldn’t believe me, so fuck it. Let the Navy deal with him.”

As Angi rode the ferry home, she wondered if she should say something. After all, it wasn’t just the Navy’s problem. Her husband was onboard that boat, the father of her unborn child. And if the navigator was losing his mind, that was probably information she should share with someone. But, she kept coming back to what Muriel had said — she didn’t have a lot to go on. Nightmares and bible reading, hardly enough evidence to declare a man insane. And what if Muriel was wrong? What if she was just another disgruntled Navy wife trying to stir up trouble for her husband? A call like that really could spell the end of Mark’s career, just the suspicion it might cause, especially as he was on the verge of screening for XO. Danny had certainly never said anything about the Nav going crazy, just that he worked harder than anyone he’d ever met and wasn’t particularly fun to hang out with. But certainly, he’d never said anything about the man losing his mind. She looked at the black surface of the water as they sped across the Sound. She remembered the first time she’d ridden the ferry during Danny’s first patrol, how while looking out at the water she was almost struck dumb with the thought: Danny’s under there. As the ferry pulled back into the Kingston terminal, Angi decided just to keep Muriel’s conversation to herself. If there was a possibility that the Navigator was going crazy, she’d just have to add it to the long list of things she worried about while Danny was at sea.

Kincaid watched as the red digital numbers on the treadmill turned from 4.9 to 5.0. Halfway there. He felt strong. He wasn’t breathing too heavy, and the dull pain in his right knee had departed, as it usually did around mile three. He cranked up the speed to 7.0, put the incline up another half percent. He felt his legs respond, a satisfying tightness in the hamstrings, and felt the sweat start to soak through the collar of his T-Shirt.

Kincaid was the only black officer on the boat, and one of just six African-Americans on the entire crew. The Navy was historically the least integrated service, Kincaid well knew, and the nuclear navy was the most lily white part of the whole operation. In addition, Kincaid was the only prior-enlisted officer on the boat. He’d signed up right out of high school, gone to boot camp at Great Lakes Naval Training Center, and completed the whole, grueling, nuclear power training pipeline as an enlisted man. He got halfway through one patrol on the USS Tecumseh, and in looking around at the officers it occurred to him: I’m as smart as those guys. So he applied for a special commissioning program for nuclear-trained enlisted men, got accepted, and attended Hampton College on a full ride courtesy of the US Navy. Then he went through the nuclear training pipeline all over again, this time wearing khaki and an ensign’s gold bars.

All that made him a few years older than his JO peers: he was twenty-seven. But Kincaid made sure none of them thought they were in better shape. He devoted every spare minute to working out, using every piece of the paltry exercise equipment the ship stored in Missile Compartment Lower Level: the treadmill, a rowing machine, a stationary bike, and a punching bag. Unfortunately, everything except the treadmill and the punching bag was broken. It had all been scheduled for replacement, but their orders had changed before the new equipment arrived. The broken gear didn’t disrupt Kincaid that much; his routine centered on the treadmill. But it bothered him deeply, as a submariner, to go to sea with shit broken.

Kincaid tried to run five hundred miles every patrol, tracking his progress on a sheet of graph paper taped to the state room wall. Each sheet from each patrol went into green half-inch binder. Whenever possible, he did his run in ten-mile increments, which took him about ninety minutes. It was the longest he could go, especially early in a patrol, without pissing people off for monopolizing the treadmill. Already, though, the competition down there in Missile Compartment Lower Level was starting to wane. People were getting lazy. A new patrol was like the New Year: everybody had resolutions. I’m going to qualify chief of the watch. I’m going to learn to play guitar. I’m going to lose twenty pounds. But usually by the third week, he pretty much had the place to himself.

The thought made him feel stronger, as he listened to the repetitive slapping of his Nikes on the belt beneath his feet. He didn’t listen to music when he ran. The treadmill ran on a non-vital electrical bus, the first busses, by design, to start shutting down if things went wrong with the ship’s electrical plant. On his first patrol as an officer, he’d been on the bike when the 2MC announced a reactor scram. Another JO was listening to some heavy metal on his head phones, trotting along dumb and happy on the treadmill. Kincaid yelled out to him, but he didn’t hear him any more than he heard the announcement. A second later the bus dropped, the treadmill shut off, and the JO ran clear over the rails, flipped over, and broke his collarbone. So Kincaid decided he could live without the music, listening instead for any announcement, bang, or alarm that would make getting off the treadmill a good idea.

He saw Jabo climbing down the ladder at the far forward end of the compartment. He spotted Kincaid and struck a Kung Fu pose. Kincaid jacked up the speed a couple of more tenths, feeling competitive. Jabo was strong, a natural athlete, one of those guys Kincaid would want next to him if he ever needed to be dragged out of a smoke-filled compartment. But he didn’t want Jabo to think for a minute that he was in better shape. For a variety of reasons, Kincaid usually had a chip on his shoulder about other junior officers. But liking Jabo was effortless. And in addition to being his best friend, he was a superb naval officer: smart, loyal, and good. He took on every task with a complete devotion to getting it done properly. A word popped in Kincaid’ head that he didn’t think he had ever used to describe another human being. Jabo was dutiful.

Jabo had made his way to his side. “Come on Hayes, let’s go.”

“Let’s go what?”

“We’re burning Enter the Dragon.”

Kincaid looked down at the console. “Two and a half more miles.” He consciously made his words sound as easy as he could. “Almost done.”

“Thirty minutes on the treadmill,” said Jabo, pointing to a laminated sign that hung on the bulkhead. “That’s the limit. I’m here to enforce the rule.”

“Fuck that. You see anybody else down here?”

“Maybe I want on it.”

“When I came down here, it still had my stats from yesterday on it. Ten miles in an hour and twenty-two minutes.”

“Maybe it was somebody else.”

“No one else on this pig could do that run,” he said.

Jabo put his hand over the red emergency stop button.

“Don’t you fucking do it!” said Kincaid, laughing now.

Jabo feigned he was hitting the button again. Kincaid was losing his rhythm laughing. He finally dialed down the speed, and brought the treadmill to a stop. “Alright, motherfucker. Seven point five miles. Let me go write it down and I’ll meet you in the wardroom.”

“An old guy like you shouldn’t be running like that anyway,” said Jabo. “Gonna fuck up your joints.”

“Old guy? Feel like going for a race?”

“I feel like watching a movie,” he said. “Eating some shitty food, drinking some watery Coke, and watching a movie while we still can.”

The movie ended just in time for Jabo to complete his pre-watch tour prior to relieving Hein on the conn. In missile compartment third level, the level where the majority of the crew slept in nine-man bunkrooms, Jabo stopped at the ship’s laundry. Petty Officer Howard was wearing boxers and a t-shirt, doing laundry while reading a well-worn copy of The Shining.

“Shouldn’t you be studying for your quals?” asked Jabo, pointing at the book. Howard was his favorite kind of sailor — enthusiastic without being a kiss ass, smart, and funny — the kind of guy you didn’t mind spending a couple of hundred days a year with sealed in a steel tube. He’d gotten himself in trouble after the last patrol, driving drunk from the E Club on base to the barracks. It was a classic kind of stupid, avoidable, young man’s mistake — the distance from the E Club to the barracks was about two hundred yards. Howard had said he wanted to get his car out of the E Club lot because he was worried his stereo would get stolen. Jabo was one of several officers who’d gone to bat for him after the incident.

Howard thumped his chest, where his silver dolphins would have been if he’d been wearing his uniform. “I qualified last patrol, sir! You know that.”

“What about Diesel watch? Chief of the Watch? Diving Officer? There’s always something to qualify for.”

Howard rolled his eyes. “Ok sir, let me get my poopie suits clean and I’ll get right on it.” He stood and peered into the small glass window on one of the ship’s two dryers. “Looks like they’re almost done.”

“Excellent. You can come up to the conn on the next watch, I think we may be going to periscope depth to get the broadcast, you can sit with the Chief of the Watch.”

“Seriously?” Howard was paying attention now. On a normal patrol, trips to PD were rare. Offering a seat like that to Howard was a big deal, giving him a leg up on a big watchstation qualification. “What time?”

“Come up about halfway through the watch,” said Jabo. “I’ll see what I can do. I’m not even positive we’re going, but I know we need the broadcast…if you happen to be in the control room when we do, and you’re prepared, I don’t see why you can’t get the signature.”

“Thanks sir, I’ll be ready!”

“Good,” said Jabo, and he continued his tour.

He finished the tour, as always, in the control room, reading the captain’s night orders, checking the deck log, and looking at the CODC display, the Officer of the Deck’s view into the ship’s sonar suite.

“What’s that?” said Jabo, pointing to a contact designated Sierra Nine. They’d been tracking it loosely for the whole watch.

“Not sure,” said Hein. “We’ve been trying to get away…not really doing any good listening at this speed.”

“But he keeps hanging on?”

“Still there every time we slow down.”

Jabo punched a few buttons on the console, bringing up the contact’s estimated course and speed.

“She’s following us? That’s what you’ve got in here.”

Hein shrugged. “Who knows? We’re going so fast, it’s hard for us to listen.”

“But easy for someone to listen to us.”

Hein smirked a little…Jabo could tell he didn’t really believe they were being followed. But he knew they should be assuming the worst right now, and he didn’t like the complacency he saw from his friend Hein at that moment. It was sloppy thinking for an OOD. It would be hard, but he vowed to learn more about Sierra Nine during the six hours of his watch.

Jabo crossed the control room to finish his pre-watch tour with a check of the ship’s position on the chart. Even with all the advanced, electronic navigation at their disposal, the ship’s position, marked in pencil on a paper chart, was still a cornerstone of navigation. Jabo took his time as he did it, even though he could tell Hein was eager to get off the conn now that his six hours were nearly up.

“Are these our assigned areas?” Jabo asked QM1 Flather, the assistant navigator, who was standing nearby with a pencil tucked behind his ear. He looked as exhausted as the navigator did, all the last minute changes to their patrol orders had taken a toll on him as well.

“Here, here, and here,” said Flather, wearily thumping his thumb on a succession of three blue boxes that progressed westward. “They are changing fast because we’re moving so fast.”

“Where are the orders?” Flather handed him over a clipboard with their assigned areas from Subpac. Jabo carefully checked all three areas on the chart, verified that all three had been drawn in correctly. It was critically important. Staying inside the proper rectangle at the proper time ensured that they wouldn’t collide with any other US submarine, as no two boats would ever be assigned overlapping patrol areas. Conversely, if, while in the assigned areas, they heard another submarine on sonar…it wasn’t friendly.

Jabo then looked over the ship’s track on the chart. He checked the time of the dead reckoning, followed the track to the left, realizing with shock that Flather had actually plotted their predicted position, three hours into the future, past the left border of the chart, into the margin.

“Where’s the next chart?” said Jabo. “Why haven’t you changed?”

“Not approved — Nav’s still got it,” said Flather. “Still going over the updates.”

Jabo frowned and Flather shrugged. He looked up at Hein.

“There’s no chart.”

Hein came over to join them. “I think the Nav’s almost done with it, he’s finishing up in the officer’s study. I’ve been asking him about it for the last hour, he finally stopped picking up the phone.”

Jabo tapped his finger on the table. “I need to see that chart.”

“Ah shit, Danny, it’s six o’clock already. I’m starving.”

“Sorry, Jay, really. I’ve got to see where we actually are before I take the conn.”

“Alright,” said Hein, falling wearily into the captain’s chair. “Fuck. Go find him. Quickly please.”

Jabo slid down the ladder out of the control room and headed for the officer’s study where he’d last seen the nav. He felt bad — relieving the watch late was a bad deal, and doing so more than a few times could quickly lead to a reputation that he didn’t want. But on the other hand — he didn’t feel right about taking the watch without seeing where they were going. Hein should have insisted on getting that chart into the control room. He knew that they were operating under some extraordinary circumstances, but his instincts as an Officer of the Deck, honed over three long years at sea, wouldn’t allow him to take the watch when their position was plotted into blank space on the margin of a chart.

He stuck his head in the Officers’ Study. The nav wasn’t there, but the chart was. He also noticed, to his displeasure, that the coffee pot had been left on, and the space was filled with the bitter smell of the scorched, empty pot. Jabo glanced at the chart. The stamped box at the bottom had not been signed, which was required before he could use it for navigation. Where the fuck is he? Thought Jabo, as he rolled up the chart. It irritated him that the Nav would walk away from the chart like that when they had needed it in control for at least an hour. He couldn’t imagine what a higher priority would be. He walked down another ladder, to the wardroom, and walked in.

The captain and XO looked up at him over their coffee cups. “Danny, aren’t you supposed to be relieving young Jay?” said the Captain.

“Yes sir, just need to get this chart approved by the nav, thought I might find him in here.”

The captain and XO looked at each other. “You need that chart for the next watch?” said the XO.

He hesitated for just a second — he knew what he was about to say would put both the Nav and Hein up shit creek. “We need it right now. They’ve got us plotted in the margin, heading off the edge.”

A look passed between the XO and captain. The captain sat back and raised an eyebrow. “No chart at twenty knots. Jesus Christ.”

“Give it here,” said the XO, pulling a pen from his pocket. “I’ll approve the fucking thing.”

As he reached for his pen, the 4MC crackled. The 4MC was an amplified phone circuit designated for use in emergencies only. Just the sound of its distinctive static was enough to trigger an adrenalin surge from an experienced submariner.

“Fire in missile compartment third level!” came the announcement. “Fire in the ship’s laundry!”

The chart forgotten, Jabo bolted from the wardroom without a word and headed aft, toward the fire. He heard the XO and CO clamor up the ladder to control behind him. As he ran, he was surprised to see the navigator hurrying forward, donning his flash hood and his firefighting gloves, also moving toward control. The navigator was supposed to be in control during emergencies, so he was going in the right direction. But for all his responsibilities, he didn’t have much to do aft of the forward bulkhead, and Jabo wondered what he was doing back there while a needed chart was languishing on the Officers’ Study table. All thoughts about the nav disappeared as Jabo smelled smoke and saw an orange glow coming from the laundry where just minutes before he’d been chatting with Petty Officer Howard.

There is no such thing as a minor fire on a submarine, a sealed tube containing 154 men and a very finite quantity of breathable air. Fires consume oxygen as they emit toxic fumes, most notably carbon monoxide. Fires threaten electrical systems as wires and breakers melt and scorch. And throughout the ship ran pipes full of high-pressure fluids and gasses, substances that didn’t react well to open flame: hydraulic oil, high pressure air, and pure oxygen, a breech in any of which could turn a simple fire into a blowtorch, and a compartment into a furnace. The ship’s pure oxygen was manufactured just aft of the laundry, in Machinery Two, and it was the oxygen generators that Jabo thought of as he ran to the scene.

“Lieutenant Jabo is the man charge!” he shouted as he arrived. Men were hustling, several in their underwear, fresh out of the rack. He spotted MM1 Jantzen, who seemed to be the second highest ranking man on the scene, already putting on a sound powered phone head set. He relayed to control that Jabo was in charge. Both Jabo and Jantzen pulled their EABs, or emergency air breathing masks, over their heads. He breathed in to pull the mask against his face, verifying the seal of the rubber, then plugged into the manifold over their heads. He took a deep breath of the cool, oily-smelling air.

The navigator’s voice on the 1MC announced, “Fire in the Ship’s Laundry, Lieutenant Jabo is the man in charge. The fire main is pressurized.”

Jabo turned; there were fire hoses located throughout the ship, twenty-two in all at every level and compartment, and memorizing their locations was one of the first things a new man did when he reported to the boat. There was one directly behind the laundry, and he was surprised that there wasn’t already a hose team at the scene ready to unleash, they were trained to put water on a fire in seconds.

But there was a problem; he saw a group of men frantically pawing at the hose. He leaned over, then detached from his EAB manifold, took two long steps, and moved closer.

“What’s wrong?”

Petty Officer Yowler looked up at him, his face red and sweaty behind the mask with frustration. “It’s pressurized in the rack!” he said. “We can’t get it off!” Jabo saw what he meant. Someone had turned the valve on before the hose had been removed from its rack, engorging it with water and freezing it in place. It was immovable and useless to them. He stopped himself from asking who the fuck did something that stupid — there would be time to worry about that later.

He tapped three men on the shoulder who were standing around the rack, struggling with the hose. They turned, and since they all had EABs on, hiding their faces, Jabo glanced at their chests. One of the three did not have dolphins. “You know what you’re doing with that hose?” he asked the nub.

“Yes sir!” he shouted through the mask. It was the new guy, Hallorann. Jabo was pleased to see him rush to a hose and a fire.

“Okay — forget that hose. Go up to Mike Seven, bring that hose down here from second level. String two of them together if you need to.” He pointed to three others. “You go get Mike Two, up forward. Get both fucking hoses on this fire now!” The six men ran off without a word.

Behind him, two men had stuck two portable carbon dioxide extinguishers into the laundry and exhausted them with a quick white blast. It didn’t slow the fire at all. The lights in the missile compartment suddenly went out, the non-vital electrical bus either being secured as a safety measure or as a side-effect of the fire. Diagrams of the ship’s electrical system ran through Jabo’s mind like a series of rapidly advancing slides; he thought about the weapon’s system 400 Hertz generators one level above them. With the lights out he could see the orange glow of the fire through the billowing gray smoke that was pouring from the laundry.

Jabo had been in fires before on the boat, all the previous ones being electrical, in nature, or “Charlie Class” fires. The biggest had been on his second patrol, when the breaker for a main seawater pump breaker exploded in the engine room. With those types of fires, once the electricity was secured, if it was secured quickly enough, the fire usually diminishing rapidly. But this appeared to be an “alpha” class fire, one feeding on some kind of fuel and leaving ash behind. He heard Jantzen reliably relaying the information about the pressurized hose frozen uselessly in its rack to control, and imagined the XO seething at the news.

Both hose teams arrived almost simultaneously, both nozzlemen jacked up, ready to rumble, one hand on the hose, one hand on the nozzle.

Jabo stepped back, out of their way. “GO!” he shouted.

Both hose teams stepped forward and the nozzlemen threw open their nozzles. High pressure saltwater shot forward in two white, cold torrents. It was the only time you’d ever see submariners enthusiastically bring seawater into their space. Salt water was corrosive and undrinkable. It gathered in their feet in puddles that turned into streams, water that would find its way lower and ruin much of what it touched. The water that hit the fire, in the meantime, turned into clouds of steam and floated upward, filling the missile compartment, and would condense and lead to grounds on electrical systems that would take days to isolate and fix. Seawater was an enemy to a submarine, something they obsessively fought to keep outside the “people space,” but here they were shooting it into the boat as fast as they could bring it onboard. They did it because there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that was better for fighting a fire than large volumes of water. Within seconds you could feel the nature of the situation change, as the acrid smell of smoke gave way to the heavy softness of billowing steam, and the orange glow shrunk, then disappeared.

“Stop!” said Jabo. He had to tap both nozzlemen on the shoulders to get them to throw the bales forward and stop the flow of water. He cautiously stuck his head in the laundry, a crowbar in one hand and a battle lantern in the other, shining its beam through the haze through haze.

There were two washers and two dryers. One set looked to be completely ruined; charred and blackened. Jabo hoped that the other set might be saved — otherwise it would be a long, smelly trip to Taiwan. The charred dryer was stuffed with blackened rags— overstuffed, probably the cause of the fire. Using a crowbar, he gently pulled open the sagging door to the dryer to verify that the fire was out. Something caught his eye inside, something foreign atop the rags. He pulled out the smoldering object, and the words on the cover were still recognizable. It was The Shining.

He dropped it to the deck and walked out of the laundry where Jantzen was waiting for him. “To control, the fire is out. Sending in an overhaul team and setting the reflash watch.”

Jantzen repeated his words into the phone.

Jabo was at the scene for another thirty minutes, overhauling the fire and setting the reflash watch, the whole time sucking air in his EAB as the smoke remained thick and the air unbreathable throughout missile compartment. Finally he was relieved by Lieutenant (j.g) Retzner, who Jabo knew, after his one patrol, was qualified enough to supervise the recovery efforts, even without dolphins on his chest. Once he got through the bulkhead to the forward compartment he was allowed to remove his tightly-fitting EAB, to his profound relief. In Crew’s Mess he sat for a moment and drank two glasses of water, parched and exhausted from the fire. He noticed the tips of his shoelaces had burned down to the knots.

MS1 Straub approached him, wiping flour from his hands. He’d already begun to prepare dinner. “Lieutenant? You’re wanted in the wardroom.”

The captain, the XO, and Lieutenant Maple, the Damage Control Assistant, all sat around the table. A large pitcher of ice water sat between them, and they let Jabo drink another glass before they began. The smell of smoke clung heavily to his clothes, and he wondered again if they were going to be without an operational laundry for the next two weeks. The wardroom’s bearing repeater showed they were slow at 160 feet, executing a wide turn to the left. Clearing baffles, he knew, preparing to go to periscope depth so they could ventilate the smoke from the ship.

“Good job at the scene, Danny,” said the XO. “I’m glad you were there.”

“Thank you sir.”

“What do we think happened?” asked the captain.

Lieutenant Maple spoke up. “It sounds like a dryer was overloaded with cleaning rags, and then secured without cooling. It got overheated as it sat there. In addition, there was a book inside the dryer. That’s probably what caught fire first.”

“A book? In the fucking dryer?”

“Yes sir. We’ll find out whose book during the investigation.”

“I already know,” said Jabo with a sigh. All eyes turned to him. “It’s Howard’s. I saw him reading it on my pre-watch tour. In the laundry.”

“And the fucking genius decided to stow it in a clothes dryer,” said the XO. “Wonderful. You saw this on your pre-watch tour?”

“That’s right.”

“Well then, this brings us to our second problem. I guess you didn’t notice that Mike Six was pressurized in its rack.”

Jabo shook his head. “I thought someone turned it on too early during the firefighting, in the heat of the moment.”

Maple shook his head. “We talked to everyone at the scene. They said it was pressurized in the rack when they got there, before the fire even started.”

“And I don’t suppose you remember looking at the hose during your tour and seeing otherwise?”

Jabo shook his head. Fuck, he thought, he’d been standing right there. “No, I didn’t look at it. I like to think I would have noticed if it was pressurized like that, but I can’t swear to it. I talked to Howard for a few minutes and moved on.”

“Alright then,” said the Captain, putting his fists on the table. “Training opportunities for all, officers and crew.” The captain’s X1J phone, a direct line to the conn, buzzed beneath the table. He spoke briefly to the OOD and hung up. “Looks like we’re ready to go to periscope depth and get the smoke off the boat.” He left the wardroom with Maple in tow.

When the door shut behind him, the XO smiled. “You fucked up Danny. You should have seen that hose.”

“I know sir. I fucked up. It won’t happen again.”

“And Howard fucked up too.”

“Yes sir, it looks that way.”

“I’d like to take that fucker to mast right now, but the fact is, we need him on the watchbill. We’d be port and starboard in machinery two without him. So we’ll wait, until either we pull in and get a new A Ganger, or until someone else qualifies machinery two. You’re going to handle the investigation. Do it during all of your spare time.”

“Yes sir.”

“No point in telling Howard about this — I don’t want him to know helping somebody qualify will get him to mast faster.”

“Good idea sir.”

The XO leaned back in his chair, sighed, and cracked his knuckles over his head. “You think he pressurized that hose, too?”

Jabo was a little shocked by the question. He’d assumed that someone had thrown open the valve in the excitement of arriving at the scene, a stupid, but somewhat understandable, mistake. But if the hose had been pressurized in the rack before — the XO was asking if Howard had done something much more serious than fuck up a load of laundry. “I don’t know…you think he’d fuck around like that?”

“Just asking the question.”

“Sir, Howard may be a fuck up. But he’s no saboteur.”

“Well let’s hope that this was just a pure act of stupidity then. And God help the sailor who did it when I find out who he is. Get up there to control and see if you can help, Hein has been on the conn forever. Relieve him at periscope depth”

“Relieve Hein at periscope depth, aye sir.”

When Jabo walked out of the wardroom, Howard stepped out from behind the ladder to control, looking worried.

“Howard. We were just talking about you.”

“I didn’t do anything!”

Jabo grimaced. “Howard, you want to know my personal philosophy in situations like this? Say the following words: ‘I fucked up, and it won’t happen again.’”

“But I didn’t!”

“Howard, they found your book in the dryer. On top of a big pile of rags.”

“I know — Yowler told me. I didn’t wash any rags. As soon as my poopies were dry, I got out of there — I was going to head to the conn to go to PD, like you said.”

“And the book?

“I keep that book in there, shoved between the deck and the hull. I would never put it in the dryer!”

“So what do you think happened?”

Howard shook his head. “I have no idea. But I got my poopies out of the dryer and left. I was changing in my bunkroom when they called away the fire.”

Jabo thought it over — it was weird. Howard had just been drying poopies, he’d seen it with his own two eyes. And why would he throw a load of rags in after, along with a book?

“I don’t know what to say Howard. I fucked up too — I should have seen that hose pressurized in the rack. And if you did make any mistakes — take responsibility for them, you’ll come out better in the end.”

Howard shook his head at that, and walked away frustrated, his young man’s sense of justice violated. Jabo walked up to control, still reeking of smoke, his feet tired and his head pounding, and took the conn from an equally exhausted Lieutenant Hein.

He pressed his right eye to the periscope and turned slowly around, one complete revolution every minute. It was dusk, and the ocean was like glass, smooth to the horizon where sea and sky met, different shades of the darkest blue. Ship control was easy and the scope stayed a steady three feet out of the water; Jabo calculated that the distance to the horizon was about 2.5 miles. So the Alabama’s periscope pointed up in the exact center of a five mile diameter circle, inside of which, Jabo verified with each revolution, there were no other ship was in sight, no running lights of any kind, white, red, or green. He looked west and saw nothing, no running lights of any color. If Sierra Nine was out there, he couldn’t see it. Alabama was profoundly alone.

The Navigator spread his charts out in the Officer’s Study and erased the track that he had carefully laid out in the days before. They hadn’t lost much time. The Captain had opted to use the diesel engine rather than the blower to ventilate the ship, which did the job in about half the time. Within two hours at snorkel depth, all atmospheric tests in the missile compartment proved benign so they stopped the rumbling diesel, and descended back to 400 feet. In total they’d lost almost three hours during the fire, almost half a watch. Which meant they were behind, and would have to move even faster to make up their track.

It was so weak, he thought. A fire in the laundry.

Optimism had shot through him when he first heard the alarm, smelled the smoke. And the closest hose made useless! Maybe the fire would cripple the ship, he thought, turn them around, end their disastrous journey to Taiwan.

But that was stupid, he now knew. A mere fire in a clothes dryer wouldn’t stop this ship, this mission, not even close. Huge forces were at work, malignant forces. And he was an idiot to think that a few burning rags could stop that. But would what could?

Almost all equipment on the boat, like the washer and dryer, came in pairs. For just this reason: redundancy meant reliability. There was only one reactor, but that sacred machine was incredibly well protected by men and machinery. It was hard to imagine an equipment malfunction that could make them turn around.

But people were different. The submarine had lots of equipment but few people. Already the watchbill was stretched to the limit. If crewmen started dying, then the ship would have no choice but to turn around. Especially if they died in large numbers.

The navigator’s tried to stop his hand from shaking by refocusing on the chart. He was running out of time: they were halfway to Taiwan.

Mary Beth Brown picked Angi up at her house in her new Lexus. They took the Kingston Ferry across the sound, and then drove to Bellevue, home of the Bellevue Square Mall. The parking lot looked like a luxury car dealership, and Angi knew it was Microsoft money, perhaps with a sprinkling of Starbucks fortunes interspersed as well. It was much different than the Fords and Chevys that populated the lot at the Silverdale Mall, where she lived, a blue DOD sticker on every windshield. As they walked in, Angi noticed how the two malls even smelled different, Bellevue smelling like very good coffee, while the mall in Silverdale smelled of burnt popcorn

“So, one more patrol?” Mary Beth asked, as she waited for the Jimmy Chu black pumps in size 8, marked down to a mere $350. Unlike some of the officers’ wives, for whom Navy service seemed like a sacrifice, Angi had never had money, and neither had Danny. Danny’s dad was a heating and air conditioning repairman, while Angi was raised by a single mom who worked in an ink factory. She never once thought of herself as poor, but, looking back, they certainly never had an excess of money lying around. One of the stranger things she and Danny had in common was that neither one of them, in their entire lives, had ever gone on a family vacation.

So to them, the Navy salary had never seemed like a hardship. In fact, she drove a new car, a Honda Accord, for the first time in her life, and she absolutely loved the house they’d purchased together with a VA loan. But, after spending a few hours with Mary Beth Casazza, whose husband had lined up a job at Microsoft before getting out of the navy the year before, she was starting to become aware of the things she couldn’t buy on Danny’s lieutenant’s salary, even with sea pay, sub pay, and the nuclear power bonus tacked on.

“That’s the plan,” Angi said, considering trying on a pair of Manolo Blahniks, even though she would never, she vowed, no matter how much money they someday might make, ever spend that much on a pair of shoes. “If I’m not mistaken, I think he’s already turned in his letter.”

Mary Beth rolled her eyes. “Isn’t that amazing, when you think about it? That you don’t know? That the Navy can just do whatever they want to him, as long as they want? I’ll bet you can’t wait to get out.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Angi. “Danny’s never hated the Navy, and neither have I.”

“But the baby?” she was smiling.

Angi raised an eyebrow.

“Cindy Soldato told me.”

Angi nodded. “I guess it’s ridiculous to pretend it’s a secret any more, now that I’ve told Cindy. I’m a little over three months.”

“You must be so excited!” said Mary Beth. She had the shoes now, was sliding her feet into them. “And Danny will be back…”Angi watched her doing the math in her head.

“Oh no, honey. .”

She nodded. “Yes…probably not back in time. That’s okay. My mom will come in town.”

Mary Beth put her hand on her arm. “No, honey, it sucks.”

“You’re right. It does suck. But we’re not the first to go through it.”

Mary Beth was shaking her head. “Soon, you won’t have to worry about any of this shit. Has Danny applied to Microsoft yet? Larry says they are hiring Navy guys like crazy right now, love the nukes”

“Didn’t you say he’s working all the time?”

Mary Beth nodded. “In comparison to the real world: yes. But compared to the Navy? He’s home every night. He’s home for dinner probably three nights a week. And he’s home every Saturday and Sunday, just like he’s supposed to be. And the money…let me tell you Angi, you’ll get used to it in a hurry. We’re going to France this summer. After I get that out of my system, maybe I’ll talk Larry into getting me pregnant.”

At the register, Mary Beth decided at the list minute to get another pair of the same shoes in brown.

The submarine was, in many ways, just an arrangement of tubes within tubes. Different tubes contained different fluids: water, air, steam, radioactive coolant, refrigerant, drinking water, pure oxygen and pure hydrogen all coursed through different parts of the ship. Some fluids were at high pressure, like the hydraulic oil kept at a deadly three thousand pounds per square inch: a tiny stream ejected from a pinhole leak in that system could pierce a man’s skull. Other systems ran at low pressure but were hazardous in other ways, like the burbling, unending stream of sewage that 154 men created as they lived their daily lives. Most of the tubes ran from fore to aft, the main axis of the submarine, carrying their cargo from its source to its conclusion. Twenty-four of the biggest tubes, however, pointed straight up and down, as they contained Trident nuclear missiles, the submarine’s reason for being. The biggest tube of all was the submarine itself, a giant tapered tube of HY-80 steel forty-eight-feet wide at its widest point, and five hundred and forty eight feet long, blunted at the forward end by the sonar dome, and pinched off at the other by the seven-bladed screw that propelled them through the Pacific Ocean.

Being a qualified officer on the submarine meant being able to identify every one of those tubes on sight: what it contained, where it ran, the implications of a breech. To learn it all was daunting, as the pipes ran everywhere, layered on top of each other in every direction, but the patrols were long, diversions were few, and the men had all been screened carefully for their intelligence and their ability to work tirelessly in pursuit of engineering knowledge. Ensign Brendan Duggan was on his first patrol, in the first stage of the process, tracing the pipes and ducts of a few isolated systems at a time, learning how they tied together to make some part of the boat function. By his third patrol, he’d know every pipe of every system, and be able to hand draw most of the systems with every valve in place. Danny Jabo, on his sixth patrol, was in the final stage of the learning process. Having learned the physical composition of every system, he was tasked with learning the philosophy of its design, why it was a certain capacity, why one material had been chosen over another to construct it, the trade offs that the engineers had made in designing it, between safety, efficiency, and silence.

As part of this process, Jabo was walking Ensign Brendan Duggan through the boat, pointing out valves and ducts, attempting to help him qualify Battery Charging Line Up officer. Jabo knew almost nothing about Duggan. He was an academy guy, Jabo remembered, from somewhere in the south. He’d heard that he knew something about bluegrass music, and a rumor that he’d brought to sea a dulcimer, or a mandolin, or something like that. Thank God he’d had the sense to keep the thing stowed thus far: a nub officer couldn’t be seen doing something as frivolous as playing music.

Battery Charging Lineup Officer was traditionally the first thing a new officer qualified on board, usually in his first week at sea. The BCLU verified that the ship’s ventilation system was operating normally prior to a battery charge, as charging the battery released a number of undesirable elements into the ship’s atmosphere: hydrogen being the most dangerous. It was an unavoidable byproduct of the process that crammed electricity into the battery’s wet, acid-filled cells. Prior to the charge an enlisted man went through the ship and set everything up, but such was the importance that an officer was required to physically verify the position of every valve and every switch. To learn the battery charging lineup was good for a new officer because it took him through every area of the ship. An officer who knew what he was doing could complete it in under thirty minutes. Like so many things a new officer on a submarine did, it was at once tedious and highly important.

Duggan’s qualification was important to Jabo because it would put him one step closer to the watchbill, which might, at some point, result in an extra six hours of sleep for him. Which was why Jabo was willing to take an hour out of his sleep prior to taking the watch to walk through the ship with him, in an attempt to get Duggan to the point where he could withstand an oral examination by the engineer and get qualified, a small step toward becoming useful.

“What’s this?” Jabo asked, pointing to a large, humming machine in Auxiliary Machinery Room 2.

“A scrubber,” said Duggan confidently. “At least one of them has to be running during a battery charge.”

“Correct,” said Jabo. “What does it do?”

“Removes carbon dioxide,” said Duggan.

“What creates carbon dioxide?”

“I do,” said Duggan. “We all do. It’s a product of respiration.”

“Right,” said Jabo. Which is why non-qualified personnel on the boat like Duggan were sometimes called “scrubber loads.” Along with non-qual, nub, dink (short for “delinquent”), and host of other insults. “So how does it remove CO₂?”

Duggan hesitated just a moment, recalling a scrap of information from his memory. “It heats up a catalyst…”

“What catalyst?”

“MEA. It heats up the MEA…”

“How hot?”

Duggan stopped. “I don’t know.”

“Look that up,” Jabo said. Duggan was frustrated, he could tell, thinking this was more information than he needed to know to perform the battery charging line up successfully. “You’re going to need to learn it sooner or later,” said Jabo. “You might as well learn it now. And it’s important — this is actually one of the hottest pieces of machinery on the boat. You should know how hot. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Duggan, writing down the “look up” in his little green notebook.

“And what’s this?” said Jabo, continuing the tour, laying his hand on a machine on the other side of the space.

“A burner. Removes hydrogen.”

“And?”

Duggan hesitated a moment. “It removes something else?”

Jabo laughed. “Now, that’s something you really should know. Carbon Monoxide.”

“Okay,” said Duggan. Jabo noticed that he had brought the battery charging checklist along with him. “Let’s go through the whole thing, see if you can actually do the line up. Ready?”

“Sure,” said Brendan. He was eager to get started, eager to qualify something, contribute something. That yearning was a good quality, and at this stage in Brendan’s career, the only aspect of his personality that Jabo cared about. Jabo was already walking forward, to the battery well, where the procedure would start.

“Danny? Can I ask a stupid question?”

Jabo stopped. “Sure.”

“The scrubbers remove carbon monoxide, right? And the burners remove hydrogen and carbon monoxide, right?”

Jabo nodded. He was starting to wonder if they were rushing through this…that was pretty fundamental stuff. “So what’s your question?”

“What about everything else?”

“Everything else?”

“Yeah, I mean, that’s three things we’re actively removing from the atmosphere. All this equipment, all these systems operating, organic compounds breaking down, people living inside here for months at a time, I mean, surely those aren’t the only three things building up on the boat, right?”

“Well, we monitor for a bunch of things, as you know. I suppose if anything else built up to a dangerous point, we’d go up to PD and ventilate.”

“Sure,” said Duggan. “I told you it was a stupid question.”

“No,” said Jabo. “I’d tell you if it was. Actually it’s a pretty good fucking question.”

They’d made it to the battery well, in the lower level of Auxiliary Machinery One, right next to the diesel, the ship’s two most important back up energy supplies sharing a room at the bottom of the submarine in the forward compartment. Jabo knelt next to the hatch of the well. “Okay, what do we have to do now?”

“Get OOD permission.”

“Before that.”

“Oh shit.” Duggan hesitated a minute, and then stood and removed his belt and pens from his pocket.

“That’s right,” said Jabo. “Remove all metal.” He stood to do the same. He didn’t enjoy going in the battery well — one of the reasons he wanted to get Duggan qualified in a hurry. The hundreds of liquid acid cells in that tight compartment emitted a strange, sour smell, and Jabo always left the well feeling itchy for hours. But he couldn’t let Duggan go in by himself. “Are we ready?”

Duggan nodded. Jabo pointed to the phone.

Duggan picked it up, and growled control with the phone’s tiny lever. Slightly nervously, he said, “Chief of the Watch, Ensign Duggan, request permission to enter the battery well. For training.” He awaited a response. Jabo heard the Chief of the Watch relay a request from the officer of the deck. “I’m with Lieutenant Jabo.”

He covered the phone with his hand and looked at Jabo. “He said to wait one.”

“That’s weird,” said Jabo. Surely Hein wanted another officer to qualify for the battery charging line up as much as he did…he started unconsciously reaching for his belt, sensing something was about to happen.

Hein’s voice on the 1MC: “All officers report to the wardroom for navigation brief.”

That explains it, thought Jabo. “We’ll finish this up later,” he said to Duggan, who dejectedly put his belt back on.

They were assembled in the wardroom once again, for a navigation brief describing the second half of their journey to Taiwan. The mood was considerably less jovial than it had been during the first brief. After two weeks of straight three section watches they were all tired. The fire had shocked them all out of complacency, and the watch officers had become more demanding of the crew, and the senior officers more demanding of the watch officers. Looking around the wardroom table, Jabo saw a lot of hollow eyes, a lot of men who’d been living on caffeine for too long.

The captain rapped the table with a knuckle. “Alright Nav. Let’s get started.”

The Navigator propped up the small scale chart on the tripod once again, showing the great circle route to Taiwan. He’d made a red “X” on the their current location. “Here we are,” he said, hitting it with a pointer.

“Is that your whole brief, nav?” asked the CO. Everyone but the navigator chuckled.

“No sir,” said the Nav. He fumbled to pull another chart down and put it across the easel.

“Just put it on the table, nav,” said the XO. “All you JOs get your greasy fucking elbows off, learn some goddamn manners.”

Everyone backed off and the nav unrolled a huge white chart of the Pacific Ocean across the table. There were boxes marking their assigned areas, and their track, moving relentlessly westward. “Because of the time we lost during the fire, we’ve had to increase our SOA to twenty-two knots. And I’ve built into that going to PD twice a day for the broadcast.”

“Just a half hour per trip, gentlemen,” said the XO. “So no fucking around up there. Slow down, clear baffles, get up, and get the broadcast. We’ll need to shoot trash at the same time, and anything else we need to do slow.”

Jabo stared at the chart. Other than the marks made in the navigator’s neat pencil, it was almost devoid of information, an unmarked expanse of pale blue. He ran his fingers along the ship’s track. “It’s so bare,” he said. “There aren’t even that many soundings.”

“These areas are far from the major shipping lanes,” said the navigator, looking down at the floor, avoiding eye contact. “And far from the normal Trident operating areas. They don’t get updated as frequently, and these areas aren’t surveyed like our normal waters.”

Jabo nodded; it made sense. Some of their normal operating areas were surveyed so well that they could fix their position within a few feet just by taking a series of soundings, measuring the water’s depth, determining the exact contour of the ocean floor and finding a match on the chart. Looking at a chart like the one in front of them could lull a watch officer into a false sense of security, as it appeared to describe a vast area of deep, featureless ocean.

“So at twenty-two knots, how deep do we need to be, Lieutenant Morrissey?” asked the Captain. Morrissey was on his second patrol, trying desperately to qualify OOD. The question the captain asked related to the ship’s “submerged operating envelope,” part of the bedrock of running the ship safely, and something every OOD was supposed to know so well that it became part of his intuition. Morrissey furrowed his brow in thought.

“Six hundred and eighty feet?” he said.

“Is that an answer or a question?” said the XO. “Grow some balls.”

“My answer.”

“Well you happen to be right. Now I’ll ask one of these smart ass OODs why that is. Lieutenant Kincaid?”

“Two things limit depth at that speed,” said Kincaid. “A stuck stern planes incident, and the threshold for cavitation.”

“Is that right, Morrissey?” said the XO.

“Yes sir.”

“So what’s this cavitation that Kincaid is so worried about?”

“The noise made by collapsing bubbles of water vapor in the low pressure area behind the ship’s propeller,” said Morrissey.

“Good job. At that speed we need to run pretty deep so that we don’t pop out of the water in an accident, and so that we don’t cavitate and make a lot of fucking noise so the bad guys know we’re coming.” He paused. “Which brings us to the second reason we are here. Danny, dim the lights.”

Suddenly intrigued, Jabo leaned back in his chair to hit the switch. The XO clicked a few keys on his laptop and projected a grainy image onto the movie screen pulled down at the front of the room. It was a black and white satellite photo of a two submarines at a pier, tied along side each other, head to tail. He instantly recognized it as a Soviet design, the long, blunt conning tower being distinctively Russian. It took him just a moment longer to identify the specific class.

“Anybody know what these are?” he asked.

“Russian,” said Jabo. “Kilo Class.” There was a murmur of admiration among the other JOs at Jabo’s acumen. The short squat body of the enemy boats and the somewhat blocky lines of the hull made them look at the same time primitive and yet seaworthy, as indeed they were. Kilos were one of oldest and largest classes of submarines made by the Russians and the Soviets before them.

“You’re sorta right, smart ass. They’re Soviet Kilos, but these particular boats belong to our friends the Red Chinese. Our friends in intel tell us that these are a particular version of the Kilo called a Project 636 boat. Jabo, do you know what that means?”

“They call it the ‘black hole,’” said Jabo. “Because it disappears from sonar.”

“Correct again. Running on its battery, it’s one of the quietest submarines in the world. We’ll have training on it tomorrow night in the wardroom after dinner. Danny, I think you just volunteered to give it. So study up tonight while you’re on the midwatch. Teach us what we need to know: max speed, sound signatures, armament, etcetera. Got it?”

“Aye, aye sir.”

The XO cleared his throat and turned to the captain. All were silent, waiting to hear why they suddenly needed to understand the specs of this particular Russian submarine.

“On the broadcast, about an hour ago, we received a message from SUBPAC saying that these two boats have departed the Chinese submarine base at Ning-bo. Heading for the open seas. Anybody want to guess what they’re doing?”

No one said anything.

“Me neither,” said the Captain. “But we’ve been reminded by SUBPAC, who has been reminded by the national command authority, about how important our mission is. And we’ve also been reminded that China considers the seas we are entering to be their sovereign, territorial waters. So if they were to identify an unknown submerged contact in those waters…let’s just say we’re not going to let that happen.”

For a moment they all just stared at the screen, absorbing the fact that the boats depicted in the grainy, aerial image were now their adversaries.

The captain continued. “We have to get to Suao in time, and we have to get there undetected. This is the mission we’ve been handed, and I intend to complete it successfully. So follow the navigator’s track, and memorize every angle of the submerged operating envelope. If we stay inside it then the best minds in the Navy assure us that we’ll remain undetected and safe. Be smart. Any questions?”

“No sir,” they all said in unison. Jabo glanced at the navigator, the only other man not staring at the movie screen, perhaps lost, he thought, in a mental calculation of how far they’d come, and how far they had yet to go.

Every junior officer on his first tour had two major duties: he was both a watch officer and a division officer. As a watch officer, he would routinely stand six hour watches, either as Officer of the Deck or the Engineering Officer of the Watch. The OOD, in control, was the captain’s direct proxy, responsible for everything that happened to the ship during that period. Approximately three hundred feet aft of control, in the small sealed cube inside the engine room that was Maneuvering, resided the EOOW. He reported to the OOD, and was responsible for the numerous complex systems and procedures inside the nuclear propulsion plant. His mission, it was often summarized, was to keep, “the lights burning and the screw turning.”

The division officer role was in a sense the junior officer’s “day job.” He was in charge of a division of enlisted men with specialized training responsible for some specific area of the ship’s operations. While officers on the boat were generalists, expected to know everything, enlisted men were specialists. There was a division of men responsible for the sonar system, another for the missiles, yet another for cooking all the crew’s meals. These divisions each had a chief or first class petty officer with many years of experience who really ran things. But he reported to a junior officer who generally signed the forms, approved leave, assigned responsibilities, and, when necessary, administered discipline.

Jabo’s division was Radio; his title was Communications Officer. He reported to his department head, who happened to be the navigator, one of three department heads. The other two were the engineer and the weapons officer. Department heads, on their second sea tours, would occasionally stand watch, but their lives largely revolved around the department that they ran. Communicator on a Trident Submarine was an especially sensitive role on a normal patrol, because of the strict requirements that the sub had for staying in constant communication while on alert — ready within seconds to receive authorization and launch nuclear missiles should the order be issued.

In one sense, the extraordinary nature of their patrol made Jabo’s job as communicator easier: he no longer had the unending stress of worrying about the depth of floating antennas, the vagaries of sunspots on low frequency radio waves, and the fear that a few seconds of lost communications would make for a black mark on an entire patrol. But now, the ship had to download its entire day’s message traffic in a single burst, with each trip to periscope depth, so Jabo had to process a great many messages at once, drinking in two giant gulps what he used to drink all day long in sips. As communicator he was expected to read every single message, and then decide who else should read each one. Anything of particular sensitivity would be sent to the captain immediately. The ship had been at periscope depth at midnight when he took over the watch from Hein. As soon as radio reported that the entire broadcast was onboard, Jabo lowered the scope, went deep, and turned the lights back on in control.

“Ahead full,” he ordered.

“Ahead full,” repeated the helm, and the dinging of the engine order telegraph indicated that maneuvering also acknowledged the order. Jabo watched the ship’s speed rise.

“How long were we up there?” he asked the quartermaster.

“Twenty-three minutes,” he said, looking at a stop watch. “We’re getting better at this. Like an attack boat.”

Jabo nodded; it was good. A few weeks ago a thirty minute trip to PD would have been extraordinary; now it was routine. It was also a necessity if they were to get to Taiwan in time. Jabo rubbed his eyes and let them adjust to the lights in control. He wandered over the short distance to Flather and the chart.

“We’re right here,” said Flather. They’d also gotten a GPS fix while at PD, and Jabo was interested to see two pieces of information revealed by the fix. One, their dead reckoning, even at high speed, had been pretty accurate. The fix was just a few hundred feet off the last triangle that indicated their DR position. Flather had dutifully adjusted the DR track to account for the new fix. Secondly, they were right on track, right on schedule.

“Flather, does it ever bother you how blank these charts are? I wonder how good the data is.”

Flather nodded. “Yes sir, it does, sometimes. These areas just aren’t surveyed that well, not even by the merchant fleet. So we don’t have a lot of information to work with.”

“So do these charts ever get updated?”

“Not like our normal charts. We’re supposed to go through things like this,” said Flather, pulling out a thick, paper-clipped document from the shelf behind him.

“What’s that? Notice to Mariners?”

“Yep, NTM. They come out once a week — and this one’s fifty-eight pages long. Describes stuff all over the world that you might or might not want to incorporate into a chart. Normally, our charts are so up to date, these don’t usually help us all that much, we’ve already got the information. But in water like this…I’m reading every one of these freaking things.”

“You find anything in there that affects us?”

Flather nodded, and pointed to a box he’d drawn on the southwestern edge of the chart and highlighted in yellow. “That’s from this NTM. Some surface ship noticed some discolored water right there where the water is supposed to be 8,000 feet deep. Shouldn’t be any mud in water that deep. So it may be a sea mount of some kind, who knows. So I put in on the chart, even though it’s far from anywhere we’ll be. Maybe we’ll swing southward on the way home, who knows. But I wanted to get it down.”

“And you’ve got to read through all of these?”

Flather shrugged. “Me and the nav split them up, we’re trying to look ahead at the water we’re heading into. We’re about halfway through all the NTMs for this year, although I’m getting through them faster than the nav…he’s just got so much shit on his plate right now.”

Jabo flipped through the Notice. Every entry was marked by a latitude and longitude, followed by some piece of information: an ODAS buoy location off the coast of California had changed. A “dangerous wreck” had to be added to a chart in the Gulf of Mexico. The interval of a lighthouse’s flashing light in Ireland needed to be altered. Each correction was seemingly minor. But, Jabo knew, given the right circumstances, it was the kind of information that could turn a watch shitty in a hurry.

“Sir?” Jabo looked up to see RM1 Gurno standing at the conn with a clipboard. “The broadcast for your review.” It was a bonus for them, the OOD and the communicator being the same person, one less officer to track down or wake up in order to get the broadcast reviewed.

Jabo walked up. “Anything good in there?”

“Nothing you need to wake the captain for. But look at this safety flash.” He opened up to it and pointed to a paragraph.

Safety flashes were messages they received when the navy had identified a safety concern that needed immediate attention. They usually resulted from death or serious accidents, and were thus more interesting reading than the normal message traffic about wind warnings off Bremerton and new regulations about the disposal of plastic at sea. Jabo read the paragraph.

“Holy shit…”

“I know!” said Gurno, giggling.

“How do you get a testicle ripped off on a rowing machine?”

“I don’t know, but they are now officially banned on Navy ships. We’re supposed to put an Out of Commission tag on ours right now. Did you see the boat?”

Jabo looked. It was the USS Michigan, also based out of Bangor. “Oh man…” he said. “I know a ton of guys on that boat. I wonder if it was an officer.”

“No way,” said Gurno. “The victim had testicles.”

The watchsection laughed appreciatively.

The story of the lost testicle and the rowing machine was indeed brief, and lacked the horrifying details that they would have to get the minute they returned to land. His eyes drifted toward the next safety message…something about R-118, the new refrigerant they’d taken on in their refit, some new warning about it. His eyebrow raised when he saw that apparently, this variety of Freon could mutate into Phosgene, a kind nerve gas, when exposed to very high temperatures. Thanks for letting us know, Navsea, he thought to himself, after we’re already sealed inside a can with the stuff. He scanned to see the classification of the message, thought it might be interesting to share with his father if he could, the heating and air man. He heard the laughing in the control room stop and looked up to see why. The XO was standing in front of him, a stack of books under his arm.

“Sir.”

“Danny. Anything good on the broadcast?”

“Someone lost a nut on the Michigan.”

“That is good news. Here,” he said, handing over the books. “For your training tomorrow…information about Kilo class submarines. Make it good, lots of pictures so the young ones don’t let their attention wander.”

“Yes sir,” said Jabo. He took the stack of books and the XO wandered over to take a quick look at the chart before leaving control for a few hours of sleep. Jabo wondered if the XO actually expected him to read, digest, and then summarize all those pages in one watch. He checked his watch. He had four hours left on the conn and still needed to read through the broadcast. Well, he thought. Giving training on Kilo submarines was a lot more interesting than analyzing the effects of chlorides on the steam generators, or studying the navy’s latest personnel policies. Because, in addition to the roles of Watch Officer and Division Officer, every junior officer on the Alabama had a third role that was just as mandatory. This fell under the category of, “shit the XO tells you to do.”

At 3:15 in the morning, Hein wandered into control.

“Head break?” he asked Jabo.

“Shit yes,” said Jabo. “Thanks.” Head breaks were the most needed on the midwatch, because of the vast amounts of coffee consumed, and the hardest to come by, because everyone who could be sleeping was in the rack. They quickly exchanged the keys and Jabo bolted from the Conn as the quartermaster was recording the relief in the deck log.

“This is Lieutenant Hein, I have the Deck and the Conn.”

As the helm was acknowledged, Jabo darted back up the ladder and grabbed a few of the books that the XO had left for him.

“Just a head break Jabo!” shouted Hein.

“This will just take me a second…”

He bolted down the ladder into the watchstander’s head where he took a fantastically long and satisfying piss. He washed his hands and took the books into the Officers’ Study.

The Navigator was there. He looked up from his chart without smiling or speaking, and then went back to work. Jabo edged around the table to the locker in the corner that contained the books he was looking for.

The shelf held their small library of submarine history, all the classics both modern and ancient, novels and nonfiction: Wake of the Wahoo, Hunt for Red October, Clear the Bridge, and Run Silent, Run Deep. Jabo was looking for anything that might liven up his lecture on the Kilo.

“Brushing up on your submarine history, Jabo?” said the Nav. There was something snide in his tone.

“Doing some training for the XO…”

“If you’re looking for Rig for Dive, I’ve got it.”

“I don’t think I need it — that’s World War II, right?”

The nav chuckled. “Yes. Good guess.”

Jabo felt himself getting pissed off at the Nav’s smirk. “Crush Martin, right? Lost his boat after that?”

The Nav suddenly turned and swept his hand over the row of history books. “They’re all about lost boats. Lost men. All the nonfiction ones, anyway.”

“Not all of them…”

“Let’s see…” The Nav tapped one of the book’s spines. “The Wrasse went down somewhere in the Sea of Japan, nobody knows where: ninety-two men.” He tapped another. “The Tang, sunk by one of her own torpedoes, 74 men lost.” He pulled an ancient paperback half way out to read the cover. “The Wahoo, gunned down by Japanese planes in the La Perouse Straits, 79 men. Fifty-two submarines this country has lost in all. Three thousand men still onboard.” He pulled another book out and threw it on top of his chart: U-Boat Commander, by Gunther Prien.

“Our enemies haven’t fared any better. The hero of Scapa Flow wrote this right before his boat disappeared. “

“Dangerous work,” said Jabo, feeling the need to say something.

“Suicide,” said the Nav. “And submarines are built for suicide missions.”

“Not anymore…”

The Navy laughed hard at that, almost a bark. “Jesus, Jabo. You really believe that? You think anyone has ever believed that a Trident Submarine would ever come back from a war mission? How loud do you think we’d be during a launch of our twenty-four missiles? How far would that sound carry? How vulnerable would any Trident be during a strategic launch? We’d be lucky to get all twenty-four missiles away before the first torpedo found us.”

“I don’t know…”

“Take a look, Jabo,” said the Nav, pointing to the other side of the room, to the books that contained all their war fighting tactics and procedures. “See if you can find a procedure for reloading a Trident submarine. There isn’t one. No one plans on us coming back.”

He sighed deeply and slumped back in his chair.

Jabo returned to the conn.

At 0545, just as the scent of frying bacon was beginning to drift into the control room, Kincaid arrived. As they were nearing the end of the formal turnover, Jabo brought up the incident in the Officers Study.

“So he said that we’re on a suicide mission?”

“That’s right,” said Jabo.

Hayes thought it over for a moment. “I’ve heard that kind of shit before. It’s something boomer sailors tell themselves to make it sound like what we do out here is tough.”

“I guess,” said Jabo. “I guess you had to be there. This didn’t seem like some kind of posturing. He seemed…”

“Depressed? Pissed off? He’s a department head. He should be depressed and pissed off.”

Just then, the navigator started walking up the ladder to control, a bundle of rolled charts under his arm. He walked right by the two friends without saying a word.

Hayes shrugged. “I’m ready to relieve you.”

“I’m ready to be relieved. Ship is on course two-seven-five, Ahead Full, depth six-five-zero feet.”

“I relieve you.”

“I stand relieved.”

“This is Lieutenant Kincaid, I have the Deck and the Conn.”

The watchstanders acknowledged in succession as Jabo signed the deck log, then walked the short distance into radio. He had a few minor matters he needed to take care of before he could lay down and get a quick nap before the real workday of the ship began. He handed off the previous night’s messages to Gurno which he had finally read and reviewed. “Route these to the navigator, please. He’s in control.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” said Gurno, fresh from a shower and breakfast. Jabo could barely keep his eyes open.

He reviewed and signed some planned maintenance charts for the division. Leaving radio, he briefly considered breakfast, but decided he needed sleep more than he needed food. So he stumbled down to his stateroom, shut the lights off, and closed his eyes knowing that soon he’d be awoken as the day’s drills began with the general alarm; or the flooding alarm; or, maybe, if the XO was in the mood for something exotic, the rapid, high-pitch beeping of the missile emergency alarm. The ship’s tight schedule would somewhat neuter the drills; they would have to simulate emergency blows, snorkeling, and trips to periscope depth, most of the things that made drills fun and interesting. But there would still be drills, and that still required everyone to be awake, no matter if you’d been up all night on the midwatch.

Jabo didn’t fall asleep right away. He was still troubled by his conversation with the navigator. But like all submarine officers, he’d learned that when given the opportunity to sleep, you must sleep, no matter how disturbed you were from the last watch, no matter how pissed you were at the XO, and no matter how depressed you were that you had to wake up in a few minutes for the next round of bullshit. You had to fall asleep fast because you didn’t know how many hours, or days, might pass before you got another chance. That pressure alone had kept him awake on his first patrol, that feeling of panic that he needed to get to sleep in a hurry, but couldn’t. Since then, he’d mastered the art of falling asleep quickly.

Jabo started breathing deeply, pretending to sleep being the important first step. He had a few vivid, happy memories that he retreated into at times like these. All of them were about Angi.

He recalled the time he’d been driving home from the base early one morning, the refit after his second patrol, exhausted after an all-night watch in the engine room during a marathon round of testing on the primary relief valves. As he drove through a pouring rain, the sour smell of the engine room still clinging to his khaki uniform, he was startled to come upon Angi as she ran down Westgate Road. She was running away from him and didn’t see him. She seemed oblivious to the rain, even though she was drenched, from her sleeveless Nike running shirt to her Saucony running shoes, the one luxury she allowed herself on their meager budget.

He slowed down so he wouldn’t pass her too quickly, not wanting to splash her, but also wanting to watch her a little longer. He was struck, once again, that someone so beautiful could love him. She was athletic, but she didn’t like it when Jabo described her that way. She was southern belle enough to think that adjective was an alternative for beautiful, a backhanded compliment in the same way that her grandfather inevitably described bigger girls as “healthy.” But that’s not how Jabo felt — to him there was no better, no more alluring description of his wife’s physical beauty, the way her body was young, strong, and fast. Her shirt clung to her skin in the rain, and water ran down her toned legs, each step sending up a splash that would find its way, eventually, into Puget Sound.

He fell into something that was deeper than sleep, something like an attempt to heal, or hide.

He’d been asleep two and a half hours when the first alarm sounded, about two hours longer than he’d been counting on. There’d been a debate in the wardroom among the drill team about whether or not they might allow a brief period of snorkeling. The captain finally decided they could, as long as they grabbed the broadcast at the same time and only ran the diesel for about fifteen minutes. This took time to work into the drill plan, which allowed Jabo to sleep for those extra minutes, and when he heard the fire alarm sound, and jumped out of bed and into his poopie suit, he felt good for the extra sleep, felt like a million bucks, hoped he would be he first officer to the scene so he could take charge, put out the simulated fire with non-simulated enthusiasm. When Kincaid’s voice announced after the alarm that the fire was in the Supply Office, Jabo was already sprinting aft, thinking about what hoses were closest, how pissed the Supply Officer was going to be if they moved a single sheet of paper on his desk, and how much fucking fun his job was.

The dinner plates were cleared away and Jabo hurriedly set up the projector and the computer. The first image was an interesting one he’d found of a Kilo actually being delivered to the Chinese atop a cargo ship. It was rare to see a sub completely out of the water like that, and seeing how easily it fit atop the cargo ship highlighted how small it was. It took up barely half of the big ship’s top deck.

According to the watchbill, Jabo was supposed to be on the conn; it had been twelve hours since his midwatch ended and it was his turn again. But he’d been assigned to do this training, so the XO had detailed the engineer to relieve Hein for the training period, which pissed the eng off on a number of levels; if a department head needed to be assigned some menial duty on behalf of a junior officer, then philosophically he believed it should never be him, as the head of the most important, most demanding department on the ship. Secondly, the act seemed to imply that the engineer didn’t need to know anything about Kilo submarines; he was the engineer after all, concerned about the reactor compartment and aft, and he was always sensitive to being slighted as a kind of support officer, a non-warrior. But someone had to be on the conn during Jabo’s training, and the XO, for whatever reason, decided to send the sullen engineer to control, perhaps if for no other reason he thought his three-section junior officers needed a break more than him.

“Danny, let’s get started,” said the XO. He flipped off the lights.

“This was the first Kilo submarine purchased from Russia by the People’s Liberation Army, in 1995,” said Jabo. “Now the Chinese own a total of twelve of these boats. Our intel tells us that two are Type 636, the most capable platform, and as the XO mentioned last night, one of the quietest submarines in the world.”

“But they’re diesel boats, right?” asked Ensign Duggan. “They’re only quiet when they’re running on their batteries.” Fresh out of the navy’s nuclear power training, he’d been indoctrinated to believe that nuclear propulsion was the pinnacle of human achievement, and that all other modes of power generation were dirty, noisy, and primitive.

“Don’t underestimate this new generation of diesel boats,” said the XO. “I’m sure that Danny will get into the specifics, but they can run a long time on their batteries.”

“Four hundred miles at three knots,” said Jabo.

“There you go.”

“But they’re on the surface the rest of the time?” said Duggan. “Running the diesel?”

“That’s right,” said the XO. “And you know what that sounds like to us? When they’re running their little diesel?”

Duggan shook his head.

“It sounds like a fucking diesel. Like a fishing boat, or a merchant, or any other fucking thing in this ocean that runs with an engine and a propeller. And then they kill the engine, submerge, and disappear.” Jabo felt bad for Duggan. Like every newly reported ensign, he’d been absolutely living in the engine room, trying to qualify Engineering Officer of the Watch. No one really expected him to know about the capabilities of enemy subs, they wanted him to know how to charge the battery, shift the electric plant, and answer a bell: keep the lights burning and the screw turning.

“The 636 boats were improved over older Kilos in a number of ways,” said Jabo, after he felt like Duggan had had enough time to squirm. “But especially in sound silencing.” He clicked through to a new photo of the Kilo, an aerial shot of a boat on the surface, a puff of white diesel smoke coming from behind the sail. “The main shaft speed has been reduced to lower noise, and the entire hull is covered in sound-absorbing anechoic tiles.”

“But they’re still pretty crude, right?” asked Duggan.

There was a silence…he’d had a chance to shut up, and had declined, in an effort to look smart. Ensigns were told sometimes in training that their leadership would respect them for speaking up, for being an active part of the conversation in the Wardroom. This, of course, was bullshit.

“You think we don’t need to worry about these guys?” said the XO. “Is that what you’re saying, Duggan? Think I’m wasting your time here?”

“No sir…”

The XO’s forehead vein started to bulge. The Captain sat back and smiled, ready to enjoy the show like the rest of them.

“Okay, Duggan, let’s assume for a minute that you’re right and the best analysts at NATO are wrong, and that these improved Kilos are pieces of shit.”

“That’s not…”

“Let’s also assume that they aren’t very capable operators, that they are not disciplined, because God knows, the Chinese are known for being happy go-lucky dipshits, aren’t they Duggan?”

“XO…”

“So, since you’re fresh out of Sub School let me ask you a simple question. Duggan, when you are war gaming, and you put three shitty fighter jets against one really good fighter jet, who wins?”

Duggan, Jabo was happy to see, had finally decided to stop talking and take his beating in silence.

“I’ll answer: the shitty jets usually win. You might get one, maybe two, but three on one is too much. How about…three shitty tanks against one really kick-ass American tank?”

Duggan was looking at his hands.

“That’s right, kids, the shitty tanks win. So, how about…two shitty subs against a one billion dollar US Trident submarine with the best minds in the country aboard? Now, how about two not-so-shitty diesel subs versus one Trident? How about two pretty good diesel boats, perhaps the best, quietest diesel-electric boats in the world, against one Trident submarine manned by junior officers who think because they are nuclear trained college graduates that no fucking Chinese skipper in a diesel boat can ever hurt them?”

Everyone was quiet now. Duggan looked like he wanted to melt away.

“Okay, XO, I think you’ve made your point,” said the captain. “You oncoming guys — go take the watch. I am sure the engineer is breaking out in hives up there.”