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Book Two: Ahead Flank

Angi was drifting off, not quite asleep, when the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Angi, its Karen Duggan.”

Angi could hear worry in her voice; it woke her right up. “What’s wrong?”

“Have you heard anything about a fire on the boat?”

A chill went through her. Almost every patrol there were rumors like this, and almost every patrol they proved to be baseless. Well, not baseless, but usually exaggerated somehow, a grain of truth mutated in the Petri dish of a bunch of wives with too much too worry about and not enough real information. “No I haven’t heard anything, Karen.”

“Please,” she said, “tell me if you know anything. I am really freaking out about this.”

Angi sympathized with Karen, who’d moved out west with Brendan, thousands of miles from her family just weeks after getting married — just like she and Danny had. She remembered that hopeless feeling of not knowing anything, the feeling that everyone else somehow knew more. “Karen, I haven’t heard anything, I swear, but I’ll ask around. Why don’t you tell me what you’ve heard.”

“I was talking to one of the chief’s wives at the exchange, and she said they had a friend at SUBPAC who said that they had to order some equipment for the boat and rush it to the shipyard in Japan, said that something had been damaged in a fire and had to be replaced. She sounded like she knew what she was talking about, but shit, what do I know?”

Angi thought it over. It sounded ominously specific. And those chiefs’ wives always did seem to have access to better information than the wardroom wives…

“Karen, I am going to make some calls, and I’ll get right back to you. But I am sure it’s nothing. If it was bad, the Navy would have told us something by now.”

“Okay, Angi, thanks.” Angi could tell that her last statement had made her feel better. Only someone on their first patrol would believe it.

She called Denver Kincaid first.

“Denver, have you heard anything about a fire on the boat?”

“Molly Hein just called and asked me the same thing,” she said. “Do you think there’s something to this?”

“Molly might have just heard about it from Karen, too…I don’t know. I think I’m going to call Cindy,” she said.

“Let me know…”

“I will. I’m sure everything is fine.”

“Cindy, this is Angi.”

“Hello Angi, how are you feeling?”

“Fine, just tired all the time…listen, sorry to bother you, but a couple of us have heard something about a fire on the boat.”

She paused to await a response from Cindy. There was none.

“It’s just…I thought if there was an announcement getting ready to make the rounds, maybe you could let me know, so I could head off some of the panic with the new wives, you know…”

Still Cindy said nothing.

“Cindy are you there?”

“Yes, Angi, I’m here. No I haven’t heard anything about a fire. But I am sure everything is okay. If there was a fire.”

For the first time, Angi felt a real stab of dread. Cindy was the absolute worst person in the world at keeping secrets, and everything she said just confirmed to Angi that something had gone wrong. If it was just a normal, baseless, meandering patrol rumor, Cindy would have wanted to dissect every detail, add her own elaborations, usually colored with her multiple decades of experience as a submarine wife. By not saying anything, she was saying everything.

“Cindy, is there anything you can tell me?”

“Angi, I am sure everything is fine.”

As Angi hung up the phone and replayed Karen Duggan’s phone call in her mind, something else occurred to her. Why in the hell would repair parts for Alabama be heading toward a shipyard in Japan?

The wives in port adhered to a hierarchy that roughly mirrored the one their husbands followed at sea — it just made thing easier. The captain’s wife was in charge, the XO’s wife was second in command, the rest of the officers followed in line, and the enlisted men’s wives followed a whole separate organization, one of petty officer’s, chiefs, senior chiefs, master chiefs, and the Chief of the Boat, a system of rank and protocol that even after six patrols Angi only vaguely understood. But one rule was crystal clear: the divide between the wives and the men in uniform could never be broached. She could call the captain’s wife, but never the captain.

But Angi was on her last patrol, was pregnant, and was pretty sure the navy had something they should be telling her. She felt like the navy owed it to her. She dialed one more number. And after speaking to a yeoman and a civilian secretary, she finally got through.

“Captain Soldato.”

“Mario, this is Angi.”

“Angi, how are you feeling?”

“Captain, did something happen on the boat?”

He cleared his throat. “Angi, you know I can’t talk about stuff like that. If there’s word to go out, it will come through the usual channels…”

“Mario, please, I won’t tell anybody, I just really need to know…”

“I’m sorry, Angi, I hope you understand…” Angi could hear the regret in his voice, and desperately tried to read his tone for clues…she regretted that she hadn’t driven onto base to ask him in person. She had considered it, but thought it might give Cindy Soldato enough time to let him know about the rumor. She felt her head spinning with fear, she couldn’t even picture what it would mean to have a fire on a submarine. What was there to burn? What would happen to the air?

“Captain was there a fire?” she could hear the desperation in her voice.

There was a long pause, she could feel in the silence Mario considering telling her the truth, and she could feel him rejecting it.

“Angi, I’m sure everything is fine.”

Captain Soldato hung up and felt horrible. It was the plague of ships at sea, the way the wives could seize on any grain of information and work themselves into an absolute frenzy. Cindy had called him earlier this morning and told him about the rumor — Angi had not been the first to call her. He told Cindy pretty much what he’d told Angi — that even if something had happened, everything was okay now. And he couldn’t say anymore, which pissed Cindy off. He wished he could just tell her that they’d had a fire in the damn laundry, no one was hurt, and in a couple of weeks even the laundry would be repaired. But to disclose that would disclose that the ship would get a new washing machine in two weeks, which meant it had a port call in two weeks, which would lead to a million other questions, a million other rumors. As much as he hated to leave poor Angi in the dark like that, he had to.

But something he wouldn’t tell Angi, or Cindy, and that he even hated to admit to himself: he was worried too. He’d poured over the Alabama’s message, and was able to piece together from the scant information inside that the fire had been serious, not just a smoldering pile of poopie suits. There’d been water damage on three levels, which indicated several hoses had been brought to bear. The ship had fought electrical grounds for two hours after the fire was extinguished, some of them serious, meaning a lot of water had been discharged from those hoses. And then the ship had to ventilate with the diesel for almost two hours. Meaning there was a lot of smoke. A lot.

But the most disturbing thing in the message was a single line about how the fire hose closest to the scene had been made useless, pressurized and immovable in its rack. It disturbed Soldato because most of his comrades at squadron took it to mean that someone onboard Alabama was really fucking stupid — some dumbass had arrived at the scene and flat-out panicked, turned the valve lefty-loosey and taken a fire hose out of service. And he didn’t believe that. Some captains he knew liked to look back at their old boats and see how things deteriorated once they stepped away. But Soldato knew too many of the men, respected the captain and the XO too much. The ship, and the crew, were not fuck ups.

Which left a disturbing alternative — someone had done it on purpose. It was the one thing that all the engineering genius in the world couldn’t account for. It was the reason they worked so hard to screen the men before they even set foot on the boat, and that in the history of the force, submarines had accepted only volunteers. A saboteur was a nightmare scenario, and the idea of it worried the captain so much that he missed a refit review meeting for the USS Florida, as he sat at his desk and brooded.

Jabo checked the ship’s position again on the chart. He had just taken the conn, the officer of the deck on the six-to-midnight evening watch, still pleasantly full after a meal of spaghetti and meatballs. He could still smell the garlic bread, and hear the clatter below decks of the meal being cleaned up.

They were on track…barely. They’d run some drills that afternoon, what few drills they could run without slowing the ship much below the required twenty-two knot SOA: a radioactive spill in the engine room, an electrical grounding isolation exercise, a fire in the engine room. All lame, except for the fire. During that one they’d gone quickly to PD, practiced ventilating, and while they were up acquired the broadcast — Jabo still needed to review those messages. And, in a huge departure from the simulation while at PD, they shot what trash they could. A submarine disposed of trash by compacting it into metal cylinders ten inches in diameter and shooting them from the bottom of the boat in a device that functioned much like a torpedo tube. Getting rid of garbage was turning out to be one of the real limiting factors of their rapid advance across the Pacific. Like going to periscope depth, shooting trash required the ship to slow. But unlike acquiring the broadcast, shooting trash took more than twenty-three minutes, and the metal tubes were starting to pile up. The trash room was at capacity, and the overflow was now stacked in the torpedo room like cordwood. The smell was starting to become an issue, and the crew had taken to marking the ripest cylinders with yellow post-it notes so that, when the opportunity to shoot a few cylinders presented itself, the foulest would be sent to the bottom of the ocean first.

But Jabo’s next six hours represented the distillation of their priorities. There would be no going to PD, no shooting trash, and, most importantly, no slowing down. If they kept at twenty-three knots, by the end of his watch, they would have just made their way back to the red dot that marked their required position on the chart. By the end of the midwatch, they would have gotten ahead enough to allow another quick trip to PD, another broadcast, and maybe send a few more cylinders of trash to their watery grave.

He read the deck log entry from the last watch’s trip to PD and something caught his eye.

“Did you take this sounding?” he asked Flather.

“Yes sir.”

It was 1,850 fathoms. The chart, at the position of their fix, read 2,900 fathoms. “That’s a big difference.”

Flather shrugged. “Since it was more than ten percent off, we told the navigator and the captain. It’s in the standing orders. There’s still plenty of water under us.” And that was true. A fathom was six feet, so even at their current depth, with the current sounding, they had more than 1,000 fathoms, or six thousand feet, of water between them and the ocean bottom. Still, the discrepancy bugged him.

“Does that bother you?”

Flather shrugged again, this time in a way that said: I’ve got much bigger shit to worry about. “You know how these charts have been — they’re pretty sketchy. So I’m not entirely surprised that some of the soundings are a little off.”

“A little? It’s over a thousand fathoms off. A fucking mile.”

“Maybe it’s the fathometer,” said Flather. “It’s less accurate in very deep water.” Jabo could see that Flather was getting his back up, insulted by any implied inaccuracy on the chart or in the sounding.

“True enough,” said Jabo. “But let’s take another one. It’ll make me feel better.”

“Captain’s permission?”

“Don’t need it to use the secure fathometer at this speed.”

“Be aware that the secure fathometer is even less accurate, and this speed will degrade the accuracy even more,” said Flather. He was being pissy now.

“Noted.”

Flather turned to the console on his left, spun a few dials and flipped some switches, in a minute he was ready to go. He turned to Jabo for final confirmation.

“Go ahead.”

He pushed the button at the center of the console. A discrete, focused pulse of sound shot from the bottom of the boat to the ocean floor, then bounced back to the sensor on the hull. The fathometer measured exactly how long it took the sound to make its journey. It then corrected the speed of sound for the ocean’s temperature, one of the values Flather had entered, added in the depth of the boat, and in less than a second, displayed the depth of the ocean: 1,840 fathoms. Flather noted it in his log, then wrote the number, in his tiny, neat script, next to their estimated position on the broad, featureless chart of the Pacific that was supposed to tell them where on the planet they were. The consistency of the two readings, to Jabo, probably ruled out equipment malfunction. Which meant one of two equally disturbing possibilities: either their chart was inaccurate. Or they weren’t where they thought they were.

Someone cleared his throat at the conn and Jabo turned. IC2 Lester stood waiting with his clipboard. Lester absent-mindedly turned and reset the timer for the BST buoys as he waited to get Jabo’s attention. The “beast buoys” were distress beacons attached to the side of the boat with explosive bolts, designed to float to the surface and alert the navy that a Trident submarine was in serious trouble. A number of things would cause the buoys to automatically launch: excessive depth, certain conditions inside the hull, and a timer that had to be manually turned at least once every three hours. If no one thought to turn the timer in that amount of time, the logic went, then everyone on the boat must be dead. In one legendary Trident submarine incident, USS Michigan in drydock forgot to secure the buoys, as they are supposed to be in port, and then no one wound the timer. After three hours, just as designed, the explosive bolts fired, the twin buoys rocketed off the side of the boat, crashed into the drydock basin, and began broadcasting their distress signal, a frequency that was continuously monitored around the clock by three dedicated teams of radiomen around the world. According to the legend, the president of the United States was actually awoken before the buoys were shut off, and the captain was relieved of command before the sun came up. Good electricians, like Lester, turned the BST timer habitually, every time they walked by it.

“Yes Lester?”

“Review my logs sir?”

Lester was the Auxiliary Electrician Forward, a roaming watchstander with responsibilities all over the forward section of the ship. The Officer of the Deck was required to review and initial his logs periodically, but a good watchstander, like Lester, would prompt the OOD to take a look when something was wrong. Jabo really wanted to study the chart, puzzle over that inconsistent sounding. But Lester knew what he was doing, he’d spent two years on a fast boat before coming to Alabama. Jabo knew he wouldn’t be bothering him without reason.

He crossed the conn and took the clipboard. He scanned it quickly, wanting to see if anything jumped out at him before asking Lester what his concerns were. There were only a few red circles on the sheet, from the last watch, when they’d been at PD. They’d ventilated briefly, and the oxygen level in the ship had actually drifted high out of spec, slightly beyond the twenty percent they tried to maintain with their normal underway O₂ bleed. (There was an upper limit for oxygen because too much of it could make fires more likely and intense.) Since going back deep, the crew of Alabama had managed to breathe it back down into specification. And for the last two hours, Jabo could see everything was in black. He scanned over the rows that were the normal areas of concern; hydrogen, electrical grounds, the bilges. Everything at first glance looked good. But that’s why they put smart guys like Lester on the watchbill: to let them know what was wrong before alarm bells started going off.

“Check out Freon,” said Lester.

Jabo scanned the second sheet, where a long list of contaminants were measured by CAMS, the ship’s computerized atmospheric monitoring station. Freon was, indeed, drifting higher, especially in Machinery Two.

“That’s weird,” said Jabo.

“I know,” said Lester. “Especially since there’s no refrigeration gear back there. And look at this…” Lester flipped ahead a page, to a row in which he checked the temperatures of the two main freezers, which were almost directly below their feet.

“Not out of spec…”

“But getting there,” said Lester. “They usually go high before meals, as the cranks are going in and out of there getting food, but usually by now they’re going back down. They’re still going up.”

Jabo sighed. “I’d say we may have a refrigeration problem.”

It was one of those things they didn’t spend a lot of time teaching you until you actually arrived on a boat: the importance of the ship’s numerous refrigeration plants. An ensign was conversant on his first day on the boat in the language and philosophy of nuclear propulsion, thanks to a year of rigorous training, both in the classroom and at a working reactor. He could also fake it reasonably well in a conversation about torpedoes or sonar, or any of a handful of tactical systems that he’d studies at submarine school for three months immediately before reporting to the submarine. But refrigeration was one of those things they were expected to learn at sea, despite the fact that it was a system whose collapse could affect almost every other system on the boat: and it wasn’t at all about the food stores. The same plants that cooled the ship’s refrigerators and freezers provided cooling water to all the ship’s electronics as well.

“Chief of the Watch, get Chief Yaksic to control.”

The chief of the watch was already sending the messenger to the goat locker; like any good COW he’d been eavesdropping and anticipating. “He’s on his way, sir.”

A whoop on the panel and a blinking red alarm light caught the COW’s eye.

“Number one oxygen generator is shut down on high voltage,” he said.

Motherfucker thought Jabo. His blood started pumping and he started running through procedures in his mind, aligning priorities, trying to figure out what the fuck was going to happen next, and what he could do about it.

Petty Officer Howard made a slight adjustment to the voltage of the number one oxygen generator, and waited a moment to verify that the individual cell voltage was drifting back down. Since they’d started up the machine that afternoon after the drills, voltage had been edging high again, a tendency that had worsened in recent days. He’d calculated in his head that he had just enough time to complete a round of logs before getting back to the machine and adjusting it, lest its own protective systems shut it down because of the excessive voltage. The machine needed maintenance, real maintenance, with contractors, engineers, and work plans. But that would probably have to wait until they were in port, if not dry dock. In the meantime, it was his job, for six hours at a time, to keep it running.

The oxygen generators were some of the most advanced, most temperamental, and most important machinery on the boat. They manufactured breathable oxygen from the only raw material that the submarine had unlimited access to: water. Using high voltage electricity, the generators ripped the H₂O of water into its constituent parts: hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen was pumped overboard and the oxygen was either piped into the boat or stored in banks for later usage. But the net result of this giant exercise in basic water chemistry was a machine that combined high voltage electricity with high pressure cells of two of nature’s most explosive gasses. Which is why most men on the boat routinely referred to the oxygen generator as “the bomb,” and why almost every oxygen generator in the fleet had hanging somewhere near it a picture of the Hindenburg.

It was Howard’s skill at running the oxygen generators, he knew, that had kept him away temporarily from the green table — captain’s mast — and whatever variety of punishments awaited him for the dryer fire. The captain and XO wanted to take him to mast, which would, at the very least, mean he would have to re-qualify every watch station. And probably worse: he might lose rank, he might lose money, he might even be kicked off the boat. Shit, who knows — they might even send him to the brig. He’d gotten a recent free pass for his DUI, so he was not expecting leniency. Even if he knew that he was not at fault for the fire.

But they had to keep Howard on the watchbill for now because of the oxygen generators. Only two other men were qualified to run them. If they busted him, they’d have to go port and starboard in machinery two, meaning each watchstander would have to stand an exhausting cycle of six hours on watch, six hours off watch, instead of the normal three-section watchbill of six on, twelve off. Apparently, the captain and XO didn’t want to have the oxygen generators, along with the other crucial atmosphere control equipment in the space like the burners and the scrubbers, tended by exhausted men. So they’d reluctantly delayed Howard’s punishment. Howard knew he was lucky — Captain Shields was a merciful man. Merciful to him, merciful to the men who would stand port and starboard in his absence. Captain Soldato would have done the opposite, would have taken him to mast the night of the fire, busted him, screamed at him, and laughed as they racked his shipmates and gave them the good news that they were six on and six off for the rest of patrol because of Howard’s fuck up.

So Howard was determined, absolutely determined, to stand each watch flawlessly. That, combined with the passage of time, might make whatever sentence they eventually passed on him a little more lenient. And his secret hope: if enough time passed, maybe he would find out what actually started the dryer fire. Although, certainly, he was the only person on the boat that thought the crime was unsolved. He’d been working on it, writing down what little information he had, a few thoughts about the possibilities, trying to piece it altogether before they finally got around to hanging him. He kept his notes on two neat sheets of yellow notebook paper, and when he was on watch they were on his clipboard, directly behind his logs, so he could record his ideas as they occurred to him, points of data that, when fully assembled, would prove his innocence.

As he finished tweaking the oxygen generator back into compliance, it was that clipboard he grabbed, ready to take another perfect round of logs in machinery two, a small step on the road toward redemption.

He started on the level he was in, third level, taking logs on all the operating machinery. No burners were running, but, oddly, two scrubbers were. This despite the fact that carbon dioxide was at zero, because of the recent ventilation. He finished his round of logs on both machines, noted the high but appropriate temperature of each: both were running perfectly, if needlessly.

He descended the ladder to Machinery 2 Lower Level. In addition to the machinery that concerned him as a watchstander, it was also home to the ship’s modest complement of exercise equipment. But no one was working out — with the tempo they were operating everyone was too tired to exercise. It was too bad, it was nice having the company down there, made the watch go a little faster to watch someone else using the space recreationally, even if he was at work. It depended on the person, of course.

During the first hour of the watch, the navigator had come aft to work out, wearing faded blue USNA gym shorts and a plain white T-shirt stretched across his bony shoulders. Howard caught himself staring at the pink, starburst-shaped scar on the nav’s knee, from when he’d stabbed himself with the dividers in control: that story had rapidly become legend with the crew, further evidence that craziness was tolerated among officers. It was another example of Captain Shields’s willingness to give second chances; rumor had it that the XO wanted to throw the nav off before his knee had scabbed over. The navigator had caught him staring at the scar and Howard quickly averted his eyes and finished his logs. He made note of the nav’s presence in the same section of the logs he would have recorded the smell of smoke, flickering lights, or mysterious rattles that might give away their position to the enemy.

Howard saw gratefully, upon descending to lower level for the second time, that the navigator had already gone. He stood at the bottom of the ladder and took the emptiness in, true solitude being unusual on the boat. He realized he was staring at the deck, zoned out in a way that surprised him: he was actually relatively well-rested. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs, then lifted a deck plate to check the level of water in the bilge, one of the entries on his logs.

He put his pen to the paper and tried to write DRY but couldn’t remember how to get the word started. When he remembered, he couldn’t get the tip of his pen to the appropriate box, directly below the DRY he’d written an hour before.

Shit. He stood, shook his head again. Something was wrong, he realized, he was suddenly leaning on the aft bulkhead, trying to get his bearings, his back cold against the steel. It was getting harder for him to think, he started to slide down into a seated position.

Even as he faded out, he realized that something was out of place. It was a knack all experienced watchstanders had, the ability to know that something was out of position before they’d actually isolated what it was, an ability they’d gained by staring out at a normal line up for hundreds of hours. Reactor operators in the engine room were known for it, an uncanny way of looking at their panel of over fifty indicators as one giant picture, sensing immediately that some dial had moved form its normal position, even though it would take another half second to figure out which one. Howard experienced the same thing surveying Machinery Two Lower Level.

Part of him knew he needed to climb the ladder; whatever was wrong seemed worse in lower level. But then he isolated exactly what was wrong: a small valve in the very corner of the space, a valve he’d never seen operated, a valve that was always closed, its purple-handled operator perpendicular to the pipe. The handle, Howard realized through a fog, was sticking straight out, parallel to the pipe, and the valve was wide open. This could be it, he thought with his last conscious breath, lunging toward the valve. I’ll shut it, save the day, save the crew. The fire will be forgotten. He collapsed with his hand outstretched, the clipboard crashing against the deck.

“Get him yet, chief?”

“No sir,” he said, growling machinery 2 even as he spoke. “Howard’s not answering.”

Jabo’s mind raced, electric, in casualty mode, even though no alarm had yet sounded and no urgent words had yet crossed the 4MC. Something was happening — he knew it wouldn’t be long.

The oxygen generator was shut down, Freon was creeping up high in machinery two, the ship’s freezers a level below him were warming up, and, most ominously, Howard was not communicating with them from the space where two out of three of these events were taking place. It could be that Howard was simply combating the problem, and whatever was going on he deemed more important than answering the COW’s calls. That was a real possibility, and it was something Jabo was sensitive to, the fact that sometimes a situation demanded action more urgent than updating control. Not more than a few minutes had passed since the oxygen generator shut down; it was very possible that Howard had his hands on the knobs, trying to make the thing safe, recoverable, and that a report was forthcoming.

“Quit calling him,” said Jabo.

“Aye sir.”

Jabo saw Lester at the ladder to control, ready to go.

“Yes,” said Jabo. “Go down there, see what’s going on, see if he needs help.”

“Aye sir,” said Lester, already running down the ladder, giving the timer of the BST buoy a twist as he passed.

Jabo thought it over, trying to connect all the dots. He thought back to his pre-watch tour, remembered seeing Howard in Machinery Two, dutifully on watch a few minutes early, reviewing his logs, something else out of the ordinary that he couldn’t quite remember. The one piece of the puzzle that still didn’t fit was the Freon in machinery two, he couldn’t figure that one out. How did Freon get down there? Would Freon somehow shut down the oxygen generator? Jabo didn’t see how it could, and he remembered that the number one generator was getting a little squirrelly, it had shut down on high cell voltage twice early in the patrol. But somehow the watchstanders had figured out a way to keep it running, some adjustment they could make to it during the watch. Jabo seemed to remember hearing that Howard was the one who’d figured it out, he was always kind of a prodigy with those machines. So why had it shut down? And why did Jabo have a bad feeling that he was missing something, something big?

The 4MC speaker crackled. Jabo knew that whatever was happening was about to start.

“Injured man in Machinery Two!” came Lester’s voice across the scratchy speaker. “Petty Officer Howard is unconscious!” He sounded winded, his breathing heavy.

“It’s the Freon,” said Jabo out loud. He grabbed the 1MC. “Injured man in Machinery two, Petty Officer Howard is unconscious! High Freon levels in Machinery Two, all hands in the missile compartment don EABs.”

He hung up the mike. He heard steps running below and around him as the crew responded to the alarm. Some of those footsteps, he knew, were the captain on his way to control. “All ahead one third,” he said, and the helm’s hand shot to the engine order telegraph, which soon matched the order with a ding of its bell.

“All ahead one third, aye sir. Maneuvering answers ahead one third.”

“Dive make your depth one-six-zero feet.”

“Make my depth one-six-zero feet aye sir,” said the diving officer, and he began giving orders to the helm and lee helm, bringing the ship shallow, ready to clear baffles and go to periscope depth, ready to ventilate. The change in bells and the depth change had already slowed the boat to under fifteen knots. The big rudder as they cleared baffles would slow them more, below ten knots so they could pop up, raise the snorkel mast, and get whatever bad air they needed to off the boat, bring clean air on. Jabo thought about the track on the chart, what this was gong to do to their speed of advance, but he quickly pushed it aside — that was not at all his priority at the moment. Making the ship safe was his duty. And he knew he was missing something…it gnawed at him.

Ensign Duggan stomped into control, started putting on the headphones by the white board on which they tracked casualties. The navigator was right behind him, he would take over making announcements to the ship and run the damage control efforts as Jabo brought the ship to periscope depth.

“Freon?” said Duggan to the navigator as he put his headset on. Jabo was concentrating on the green CODC sonar display, looking for any contacts to come into view that might impede their trip to PD. Things would start materializing now, the sounds of distant ships that had been masked by their own relatively high noise level borne of their high speed. Jabo could feel the up angle in his feet, the dive was aggressively driving up, pleasing him.

“Yes,” said the navigator. He spoke into the 1MC, announcing to the entire ship, “Rig for General Emergency.”

“Freon’s harmless, right?” said Duggan to the nav when he hung up the mike.

“Yes,” said the nav. Jabo could hear the annoyance in his voice, and he felt it too. Now was not the time for Duggan to either seek nor display knowledge; they were fighting a real casualty. “It’s harmless,” continued the nav. “But it’s heavy; it displaces air.”

Which means at the moment, in machinery two, it’s pretty fucking harmful, thought Jabo. He pictured it all pooling back there now as they took the up angle, collecting invisibly against the bulkhead and the wall of the diesel fuel oil tank. The up angle was good, the Freon would roll backwards, away from the berthing areas. Jabo wondered how the berthing check was going, wondered if they would soon hear about any one else unconscious. Depending on how much Freon was back there, it could be above the second level deck plates now, gathering like an invisible pool of water that Howard may have unknowingly descended into. Jabo pictured it, rising like floodwater up to the oxygen generators, the burners, the scrubbers…

That’s when it finally clicked.

He grabbed the 1MC, saw the nav raise an eyebrow at that, as did the captain, who was just entering control. Jabo almost shouted into the microphone.

“Secure the scrubbers!” he said. “All hands throughout the ship don EABs. There may be phosgene in the atmosphere!”

Everyone in control reached for an EAB, as did Jabo.

“Both scrubbers are secured,” said the navigator sourly, getting the report on the phones. He still didn’t have an EAB on, and Jabo fought the urge to snap back at him, order him to put one on. The captain also stared at him a little befuddled, but he pulled an EAB from the overhead and put it on, and the nav then followed suit.

Jabo stepped down to the CODC display, pulling on his own EAB; the trip to PD was suddenly more urgent. He remembered his pre-watch tour: both scrubbers were running for no apparent reason. There was no doubt that Freon had somehow filled Machinery Two, and with two scrubbers running at temp, it was more than enough to create Phosgene gas, just as the message had warned. It sounded like they had unlimited Freon back there and unlimited heat from the scrubbers; it was like they were running a fucking phosgene factory. They had to get up quickly and get clean air onboard. If the sonar screen was clear when they slowed down, Jabo was going to recommend to the captain that they emergency blow to the surface.

But the screen wasn’t clear, not even close. Surface contacts were everywhere. Blowing to the roof might add a collision and flooding to the list of shit going wrong. The captain leaned over his shoulder as he stared at the congested sonar display.

“Phosgene?” His voice sounded distant coming through the built in mouthpiece of the EAB.

“Yes sir, there was just a message about this a few days ago — the new refrigerant can mutate into Phosgene at very high temps, and both scrubbers are running back there.” “Both scrubbers are running?” said the captain with a raised eyebrow.

“Not sure why.”

“Noise isolation exercises last watch,” said the navigator, with his back turned to them. He was somehow eavesdropping even with the headset on and a dozen people jabbering in his ear. “We were determining the TIMS baseline.” TIMS was a system of noise meters on virtually every machine on the boat. Originally designed to aid in sound silencing efforts, they’d learned to use it for maintenance. A baseline for every connected machine was established, and if the noise level went up, it could mean something was going wrong with the machine and someone needed to take a look. They periodically had to run equipment to gather baseline data.

“And that might create phosgene?” asked the captain.

“Yes — we received it in a safety flash last week.”

“I don’t remember that.” Jabo saw him file it away. They both were focused on the grainy green sonar display in front of them, where several bright white bands indicated that they were not alone in their patch of ocean.

From sonar: “Conn, Sonar we have six contacts…”

“We see them,” said the captain. He was touching them on the screen, he stopped on the brightest one. “What do you hear at two-one-zero, the contact designated Sierra Two?”

There was a pause, and then Petty Officer Leer, the sonar supervisor, appeared at the door to control. What would normally be a five second walk took a minute as he unplugged his EAB, walked to them, and replugged in the manifold by the CODC in control, the look of concern evident even through his plastic mask. “These guys just came out of nowhere when we slowed. We’re effectively surrounded by them. Maybe a fishing fleet, maybe squid boats.”

“Distance?”

“I’ll need a TMA maneuver to be sure, but we can hear the screws turning, clear RPM counts — they’re close. Probably within two thousand yards. I thought I could hear chains rattling on one of them.”

“So fishing boats. Very close fishing boats.”

“That’s right.”

“Danny, give them a TMA maneuver.”

“Helm, right full rudder.”

“Right full rudder, aye sir! My rudder is right full.”

“Make your course zero-one-zero.”

“Make my course zero-one-zero, aye sir.” Leer took a deep breath, unplugged his mask, and trotted back to sonar.

The ship began turning immediately, and the white bands shifted radically on the screen. Assuming that the contact’s course and speed remained constant, the ship could change course like this and calculate with a fair degree of accuracy the distance and course of the contacts: it was the art of Target Motion Analysis. Performed skillfully, this would allow them to choose a safe place to arise to periscope depth. But turning also unveiled the section of ocean that had been behind the submarine, its acoustic blind spot, or baffles. As they turned, two more white bands emerged.

“Wonderful,” said the captain.

Leer was back in sonar and on the mike. “Conn Sonar, two new contacts coming out of the baffles. Eight now in all.”

“We see them,” said the captain.

“Sonar, conn, we’ll take two minutes on this leg an then do another maneuver.”

“Aye sir.”

Jabo looked away from the console and saw Lieutenant Maple standing there with a green book of all the ship’s piping diagrams. He was breathing heavy, the mask of his EAB was fogged from perspiration.

“Are you here to solve the mystery of the Freon?” said the captain.

Maple nodded, and opened the book to the page he’d saved. “Right here,” he said. “Freeze seal piping. It’s the only Freon pipe anywhere down there. Yaksic went down there and the valve was wide open. He shut it, but it probably dumped the whole system.”

“Freeze seal,” said Jabo. “Fuck.” He cursed himself for not thinking of it. Whenever maintenance was done on a high pressure water system, the water had to be isolated from the work, lest the workers be sprayed by water that was high pressure, high temperature, or, in some cases, radioactive. Good practice required that the work, and the workers, be protected by at least two closed valves. But sometimes, by virtue of the location or other unusual circumstances, two valves weren’t available. In these cases, flexible tubes of Freon could actually be wrapped around the pipe, and freeze a slug of water in place, a frozen chunk of ice that could seal a system amazingly well — Jabo had seen them perform hydrostatic pressure tests with 1000 psi against freeze seals. So throughout the ship ran purple pipes linked to the central Freon reservoir, in case this kind of work was necessary.

Yaksic had appeared in control at Maple’s side.

“Yaksic, any good reason that valve may have been operated?”

“None sir, not even by accident. It’s out of the way, just above the deck plates in lower level.”

Jabo’s internal clock ticked — enough time had gone by, they needed to make another maneuver, he didn’t want to waste a second getting to periscope depth. “Sonar, conn, turning to port for TMA.”

“Aye sir.”

“Left full rudder, aye sir, my rudder is left full.”

“Make your course two-three-zero.”

“Make my course two-three-zero, aye sir.”

The ship swayed again, and Jabo watched the CODC display. Thankfully, no new contacts appeared, although the eight they had to track now presented a daunting enough challenge. The picture was starting to form in his mind of the ocean over their heads, the relative position and size of the fishing boats. He’d chosen the course two-three-zero because it looked like it might be a safe path to PD, and because it kept them generally on track, although they were so slow he didn’t see how they could ever make it up on their voyage to Taiwan. Jabo started thinking about periscope depth, the preparations to ventilate, calculated how long it might take them to replace the ship’s bad air with good: fast with the blower, faster with the diesel, fastest with both. Petty Officer Hurd, the fire control operator, had appeared at the side of the conn — it would be his job to plug and unplug Jabo’s EAB as he spun around on the scope. There was a lot of chatter in control, rigs being reported, people looking up facts about Freon and Phosgene. Jabo forced himself to focus on the CODC. His job at the moment was to get the ship up to the roof, so they could get the bad air off and the good air on. Everyone else would take care of everything else, but his job was to get the boat up if the course was good.

It was not.

Leer came into control, without his EAB so he could hustle faster.

“Put that fucking thing back on,” ordered Jabo.

“Turn right!” said Leer. “We are driving bearing rate on Sierra Six!”

The captain came over to the CODC, he and Jabo both saw that Leer was right. The Sonarmen could actually listen to the contacts with their headphones, didn’t have to wait for the data to accumulate in visual form on the screen, and what Leer had heard was very, very close. By “driving bearing rate,” Leer meant that the Alabama’s own motion was causing the change in bearing rate, as opposed to any motion by the contact — which meant they were dangerously near.

“Right full rudder!” said Jabo.

“Right full Rudder aye sir…my rudder is right full…”

The big ship swung right, and the bright band of Sierra Six’s noise bent away from them, but it was so close now…

“We’re going right under them,” said the captain calmly. “Rig the ship for collision.”

“Rig for collision!” said the navigator into the 1MC, and the chief of the watch sounded the collision alarm. Not even the hull of a giant freighter could hit them at a depth of 160 feet — that’s exactly why that depth was chosen to prepare for periscope depth. But these were fishing boats, and there were a lot of things they might be dragging: nets, chains, maybe even an anchor. And that’s if they’d correctly guessed about the nature of the surface boat. It could be even worse if it was dredging, laying cable, trawling…there were a great many reasons to avoid driving your submarine underneath a surface ship.

“Go deep, captain?”

He shook his head. “No point now. We’re already under them.”

They continued to swing right, but the noise of sierra six was a bright band that had consumed the display. The captain toggled one of the display’s switches, changing the scale so they could see more. Jabo was amazed at his calm.

As they passed under Sierra Six, they could hear a pinging through the hull, a watery, high pitch ping as regular as a metronome.

“Their fathometer,” said the captain, still watching the display. Sierra Six was behind them now. The captain waited… “steady here.”

“Steady as she goes!” ordered Jabo.

“Steady as she goes, aye sir,” said the helm, as he swung the rudder left to steady the ship on the bearing at which the ship was heading at that moment. They were pointing almost due north. “Sir, ship is steady on course zero-zero-five.”

“Very well, said Jabo.

“This is it,” snapped the Captain. “Let’s go up.”

Jabo stepped back and put his hands on the orange ring over his head. “Raising number two periscope.” He swung the ring to the left and the scope smoothly and quickly rose until the eyepiece came into view. He put his right eye to the scope and was now looking into the ocean.

Still spinning slowly around, searching 360 degrees around them, he twisted the handles toward him so that he was also looking up, looking for anything that was too close. He couldn’t see Sierra Six, the visibility underwater was not that far. Had he seen anything, he would have ordered emergency deep without hesitation. But it looked clear after three complete circuits around. Getting up briskly was crucial now, this was when the ship was at its most vulnerable. While no ship on earth could run into them at 160 feet, the same was not true as they ascended to periscope depth. Once they got to PD, they would actually be able to look around with their eyeballs, see the types of ships around them, the course and speeds they were on — it would be easy to make smart decisions. But the journey from 160 feet to PD was fraught.

“Dive make your depth seven-eight feet.”

“Make my depth seven-eight feet, aye sir.”

As they were trained, the control room instantly went silent with that order. The ship pointed up slightly, and they began to rise, as Jabo spun slowly around, continuing to verify that nothing would obstruct their trip to the surface. A lone fish swam frantically in front of the scope, trying to get out their way, a trail of tiny bubbles in his path. The water lightened as they rose, turning from a dark, almost blackish green to a lighter aquamarine. Jabo could see the sun through the water as they rose; he was somewhat surprised that it was so bright out. They’d kept the boat on Pacific Time, and he’d lost all track of what time it was in the world above them. The scope broke through the water as Jabo continued to spin. The only sound was a slight hiss every time Hurd unplugged and replugged his EAB, which kept him from wrapping the hose around the scope as he spun. It was a sacred rule — between 160 feet and PD, no one but the OOD was allowed to speak, and the entire control room awaited to hear one of two reports from him once the scope was clear: “no close contacts,” or “emergency deep!”

“Scope is breaking…” it was momentarily obscured by a splash. Then it was out.

“Scope is clear.” Jabo turned three complete times, noted all the contacts right where he thought they should be, but none were on top of him, none had the narrow profile of boats on a collision course. He counted them as he spun, counted nine, one more than they’d seen in sonar. But after three complete revolutions he was certain that they were not going to run into anybody.

“No close contacts!” Jabo said.

The control room watchstanders breathed a collective sigh of relief, and began filling the silence again with their orders, comments and recommendations. Jabo kept his mask pressed to the scope. “Sonar, conn, mark surface contacts on the following bearings…” he pressed the red button the scope handle each time the crosshairs in his scope hit the center of one of the fishing boats. “Mark…mark…mark…mark…” Nine times he marked a contact, and each time Hurd called out the bearing as he pushed the button. After a complete revolution, satisfied he’d marked all the visible contacts, he switched the scope to high power and began a search of a ninety-degree arc of ocean. He let Hurd work on the contacts’ solutions in fire control. While satisfied that they were safe at their current course and speed, he was concerned that they had somehow missed one in sonar, one that was close enough to see.

“Sonar conn — which contact is the one we missed?”

There was a pause, the Leer’s voice on the mike: “Designate Sierra Nine. About zero-four-five relative.”

Jabo swung the scope to the starboard beam and rolled the handles forward to put the magnification in high power. Yes, there it was, another fishing boat. His heart raced for a minute as he discerned a narrow angle on the bow — it was pointing right at them. Then he saw the black ball hanging from the front super structure: the day shape for a boat at anchor. Out of the corner of the control room, by the navigator’s chart, he heard an unusual whooping alarm that took him a second to identify: it was the ESM alarm. ET1 Daniels, the ESM operator, spoke up.

“Sir, we have a Siren Echo surface radar, bearing zero-five-zero.”

“Siren Echo?”

“Soviet-era military shipboard radar.”

“Soviet military?”

“Yes sir.”

Jabo stopped rotating a minute, took another long hard look at Sierra Nine. It sure looked like a fishing boat. But he could now hear the rhythmic whine of the radar on their ESM antenna, in time with the rotation of the radar antenna he could see atop the little boat’s highest mast.

“Sierra Nine is at anchor.”

The captain was in his ear. “See anything to make you think it’s not a fishing boat?”

“No sir. Maybe they bought that radar at a salvage auction or something…”

“Or maybe somebody out here is looking for submarines.”

The other odd thing about Sierra Nine, other than its high-grade military radar, was that it appeared to be at anchor in what was supposed to be very, very deep water. “Quartermaster, mark charted depth.”

Flather took a second to read the chart. “Two thousand fathoms, sir.”

“That’s really deep for a fishing boat to anchor in, isn’t it?”

“Really deep,” said the Flather. “I doubt he has that much chain. Maybe it’s a sea anchor.”

It’s possible, thought Jabo. It was curious, for sure. “Take a sounding,” he said.

Flather turned to the fathometer, calibrated it, and pushed the button. “Two thousand fathoms,” he said. “Just like the chart says. At this depth and speed — that should be a good reading.”

At least where we are, thought, Jabo. But that fishing boat appeared to be holding fast, like a boat would at anchor. He considered giving a slight right rudder, so they could edge closer, take a look. As he stared out at the boat, a dozen other tasks popped into his mind, things he’d pushed out of the way for the harrowing trip to periscope depth. They’d need to transmit another casualty report. That message would go, to among others, Captain Soldato, the commodore, who would probably start to wonder what the hell was going on inside the boat he had just recently left in good working order. But there was something weird about Sierra Nine, anchored there in the middle of a fishing fleet, her high-quality military radar spinning away. And no one topside hauling nets or traps. If he were just a little closer, he could maybe see inside, see what was on the deck…

He heard hard, determined footsteps on the control room ladder, and recognized them as the XO’s. Jabo heard him plug into the EAB manifold at the top of the ladder, and take a deep breath, then another, he was winded, as if he had made the trip from Machinery Two to control without stopping to breathe. Jabo listened to the hiss of twenty pound air being forced into the mask and taken into the XO’s lungs and waited for him to make his report to the captain. Finally he spoke.

. “Howard’s dead.”

Angi drove the short distance from their house to the Trigger Gate. They lived off base in a small house on a circle of small houses surrounded by towering Douglas Firs, every home inhabited by a family, civilian or military, whose livelihood depended on the fleet of eight Trident submarines that called Bangor, Washington, home: Ohio, Michigan, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Alaska, Nevada, and Henry M. Jackson. And while Angi and Danny lived off base, they were barely off base, just a few hundred yards from the gate, and within earshot of the enormous cranes of the distant Delta Pier, whose endless beeping they heard day and night as they rolled back and forth on their railroad tracks, preparing boats for their next patrol. As she pulled up to the gate, the young sailor in dress whites saw the gold bar of her windshield’s sticker that denoted an officer, snapped to, and saluted her as she passed.

She was to meet the Soldatos at 48 North, the base’s all hands restaurant. It was part of the “upper base,” a complex that included the exchange, the commissary, the chapel, and the gym: almost every place that Angi ever needed to go. Not only were the submarines invisible from the upper base — you couldn’t even see the water, separated as it was by most of the base’s 7,000 heavily wooded acres. The piers were a much different, grittier world, wet and slightly dangerous, guarded by men in fatigues with guns, populated by workers with hardhats and tattoos. Crewmen weren’t even allowed to wear their working uniforms, their cotton khakis and dungarees, on the upper base, which looked more like a community college campus than it did a port for eight ships of war. Some of the old salts, in the most derisive words they could muster, accused it of looking like an Air Force base.

It was a lunch she’d put off as long as possible. Cindy Soldato had been calling with increasing frequency, her heart (perhaps) in the right place, but her attention could be suffocating. Angi was the only pregnant wife in the wardroom at the moment, and Cindy could focus her considerable energy upon her, generous with her advice about everything from filing military health insurance claims to breast feeding. In one week, her own mom would arrive from Knoxville, and Angi wondered if she would be able to survive all the mothering she was about to endure.

When she walked into the restaurant Cindy and Mario were deep in conversation, always a funny contrast to see them together. Mario was small, dark, highly animated, his hands moving with every phrase, leaning forward toward her. Cindy on the other hand was a fair Southern belle with perfect posture, her hands folded neatly in her lap as she listened with a look of rapt attention that looked like it might have been practiced in front of a mirror. Cindy had met Mario when he was one of a group of midshipmen at the Academy drafted to escort Virginia debs to some kind of cotillion. Early in Danny’s tour, at a wardroom party, Angi made the mistake of mentioning they were both from the South. Cindy’s smile had tightened and she didn’t respond: the old prejudice of the plantation south against those from the mountains endured, even in a Navy town along the Pacific Coast, even with a woman who’d scandalized her family, she liked to boast, when she married an Italian Catholic from Cleveland. Mario saw Angi walking toward them and stood.

“Angi!” He looked down at her belly unabashedly.

“Angi, please sit down,” said Cindy, actually pulling a chair out for her. “How are you?”

“Fine, fine,” she said. “I feel really good. I was sick a few days last week, but thankfully that phase appears to be over.”

“Good!” said Cindy and Mario together.

“About the worst side effect I have now is really weird dreams. And I’m tired— but that may just be laziness.”

They laughed. A waiter came by and took their orders: they all ordered chef salads. Mario’s phone was sitting on the table, every few seconds it would emit a short staccato buzz. He glanced down at it every time, but it never seemed worthy of much attention, he didn’t even pick it up.

“It never stops,” he said, noticing her interest. “They code the messages: a short little buzz like that means I need to see it but it’s not a crisis. Anything really important gets the ‘danger signal’: five short, rapid blasts.”

“You must come to resent that little thing.”

“Not at all,” said Cindy. “It’s because of that phone he can pay for our lunch!”

“It’s true,” he said. “In the bad old days, I would have been afraid to leave the pier, afraid something would happen and they wouldn’t be able to find me.” The phone buzzed once on cue, and they laughed again. He read the screen. “The Seattle Seahawk cheerleaders are going on base for a fundraiser…they want me to set up a tour of a boat for them.”

“Don’t give the tour yourself, Mario.”

“Why not?” he said, indignant.

“You’re an old man. Let some poor JO do it.”

“I am pretty old, it’s true. Most of the submarines were still diesel boats when I first went to sea,” he said to Angi. “Some of the old timers were World War II guys back then…I wish I would have gone to sea with some of them, heard their stories.”

That prompted Angi. “Captain, have you ever heard of a book called Rig for Dive?”

“Sure…it’s a classic. Written by Crush Martin, captain of the USS Wrasse in World War II. In his first two patrols he sunk something like eighteen Japanese ships. Became a war hero and wrote that book.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

He shook his head. “No…he wrote that book, left for his next patrol, and never came back. They think the Japanese got him somewhere in the Yellow Sea, but we’ll never know. It happed to a lot of those guys…it was unbelievably dangerous. But Crush Martin is kind of a patron saint of the sub force…a real warrior.”

“Wasn’t he controversial somehow?” said Cindy.

Mario nodded, impressed with her knowledge of submarine history. “Yes…in his first patrol, he sunk a Japanese troop carrier with a torpedo. Then they surfaced, and a bunch of the crew were floating around, clinging to wreckage and lifeboats. Martin ordered his men to machine gun the survivors.”

“Oh my…” said Angi.

Soldato shrugged. “They say that’s why he didn’t get the Medal of Honor — that incident. Because by any measure, tonnage, number of ships, he was our most successful submarine captain in the war. This was at a time when the Japanese were winning every single engagement they were involved in: they almost didn’t lose a battle for the first two years of the war. We nearly lost Australia! The allies were devoting everything they had to Europe, and the only thing, I mean the only thing, slowing the Japanese down were the submarine skippers like Martin. Japan has virtually no natural resources, they depended on sea lanes to feed their people and feed their industry. Martin was making them starve. And he died doing it. But enough people thought he was a war criminal to keep the medal out of his hands.”

“Do you think he was a war criminal?”

The captain reflexively shook his head ‘no,’ but Angi could tell he was thinking about it. “I think…I think war makes you brutal.”

There was a heavy pause, then Cindy leaned in toward Angi, catching her slightly off guard. “So,” she said, “I hear Muriel Taylor has left town.”

Angi shifted uncomfortably. “Yes, I think that’s true,” she said. Cindy was a virtuoso gossip, Angi knew she couldn’t outmaneuver her. She decided just to say as little as possible.

“You two used to be good friends, didn’t you?”

“Yes…still are. Still good friends.”

“I wonder why she went home?” she said.

“Maybe she just needed to get away,” said Angi, trying hard to convey as little information as possible. Part of her wanted to discuss it with Cindy, and that’s what Cindy was counting on, she knew. And she resented Cindy for that, for trying to play her so she would have all the available information about all the wives. And even if she and Muriel had drifted apart, she wasn’t about to make her friend’s heartbreak part of a story that would circle Puget Sound before she got back home.

But if she had been at lunch with Mario alone — she would have liked to tell him. She wanted to know what a man of his experience would think of Mark Taylor’s odd behavior. Was it something that happened all the time to officers who’d been at sea for too long? She could certainly understand that, didn’t see how anyone could spend years of their lives underwater without going a little crazy. Or was it cause for genuine, immediate alarm?

“Well, I hope she enjoys herself,” said Mario, and Angi could hear the disdain in his voice. He knew she’d fled. And Angi could also hear his suspicion that she’d fled into the arms of another man — it was, unfortunately, far from unheard of. Two patrols before, one of the JO’s had run his car over their dog shortly before they’d gone to sea. His wife had ended up leaving him for their veterinarian, and, bizarrely, the JO always blamed himself. She could hear then in Soldato’s voice an absence of mercy, a rare glimpse for her of the captain that Danny and the other JOs feared so much: hard and unforgiving.

He wiped the corners of his mouth with his napkin. “New topic.”

“So…did you buy a crib yet?” asked Cindy.

“Not yet…none of that stuff. My mom is coming out, we’ll do it together. I think she wants to help.”

“Of course she does. Does she have any other grandbabies?”

“No, this will be her first.”

“Oh my…how about Danny’s folks?”

“Them too…this is the first grandbaby all the way around.”

“How wonderful,” said Cindy. “Your mom must be thrilled.”

“I think she is…I also think she thinks I’m not ready.”

“Well you’re not! None of us ever are.”

Angi nodded at that.

“Have you scheduled the baptism?”

Angi nodded. “I’m going to wait until Danny gets home.”

“Oh,” said Cindy, a predictable note of judgment in her voice. Angi had heard it from her mother a dozen times. A baby was supposed to be baptized without delay. And she didn’t even know when Danny would be back, couldn’t put it on the calendar. But she was doing so much alone. She wasn’t about to do that without Danny.

Mario leaned in, sensing the uncomfortable quiet. He put his hand on hers. “I think that’s great, Angi. And Danny will be home soon enough to enjoy it.”

“Let’s hope so,” said Angi, once again surprised at Mario’s ability to bring her close to sentimental tears.

He was still looking at her with concerned eyes when his phone startled them with five short blasts.

Usually Kincaid couldn’t wait to pull his EAB off, the damn thing was uncomfortable, smelled bad, pulled his hair, and was just a general pain in the ass. You couldn’t move more than about three feet without taking a deep breath, unplugging, and plugging in somewhere else. It was difficult to understand people who talked to you through the small plastic diaphragm that allowed speech while maintaining the mask’s air tight integrity — and impossible to understand those who hadn’t learned yet that it didn’t work at all when you shouted. The clear plastic mask fogged up when you exerted yourself. No one could wear one for long without getting an unbearable, unreachable itch on the nose. The black rubber of the mask irritated his skin. But Kincaid, like everyone else in the missile compartment, had suddenly fallen in love with his EAB when they confirmed the presence of phosgene. Fucking phosgene: nerve gas. One of those things where a single molecule could kill you in seconds. A drop could kill a whole city. Shut down your whole central fucking nervous system. The thought made him reach back and tighten the straps of his mask behind his head again, they were digging into his skin now, but still he worried that a molecule might sneak by. He was ready to wear the EAB the rest of that patrol if necessary.

Kincaid was the man in charge in Machinery Two. He’d sent almost everyone else forward once they’d gotten Howard’s body out of there, there was just not much else to do. He still couldn’t quite believe what had happened. He’d been at sea with a dead guy once before, on his first patrol back on the USS Mendel Rivers, when some kid started throwing up one night, and didn’t stop until two days later when he was dead: they never did figure out what was wrong with him. They were somewhere in the Atlantic, somewhere they weren’t supposed to be, this was back when submarines still were the tip of the spear. Captain Rorbaugh didn’t want to have a burial at sea, and shoot the kid out of a torpedo tube, because they couldn’t afford to make that kind of noise. So instead they zipped him in a body bag and stuck him in the freezer. During his two week stint as a mess crank that patrol, Kincaid had to brush up against the thick, olive drab plastic that covered the body as he retrieved twenty pound boxes of tater tots and slabs of frozen hamburger.

“Control requests a status update,” said Petty Officer McCormick, his phone talker and one of the two other people left in the compartment. Yaksic was the other, he’d returned and was now periodically checking the air with ampoules, small glass vials that took one-time readings of specific airborne contaminant contaminants. Freon was still out of spec, as they could see by the dark blue stain inside the broken ampoule. About a million fucking times the legal limit. They had boxes and boxes of Freon ampoules, could check it once an hour for the rest of the patrol if they needed to. But Phosgene was different, they only had six of those: apparently no one at the Bureau of Ships thought nerve gas was a big concern to a modern submarine at sea, they were probably lucky to have any. They’d used two when they initially confirmed that phosgene was present — mainly because nobody could believe the first one. Kincaid still wondered exactly how Jabo had figured that out from the conn, and how close they’d all come to being facedown on the cold deckplates like Howard, a ghost ship. They’d decided to save the remaining ampoules for after they’d ventilated. They had no other way of testing for phosgene, and they couldn’t afford to waste them. But until then, there just wasn’t anything else to do in machinery two, so he’d sent everyone else forward, beyond the shut missile compartment watertight hatches, where they might be nominally safer.

“They want a status update?” said Kincaid, trying to contain his frustration. Me and two other guys are parked in machinery two hoping that there’s not any dry rot on these fucking rubber masks that might result in our immediate agonizing deaths, he thought, that’s our fucking status.

“The rig,” said McCormick. “They’re ready to ventilate, just waiting on us.”

“Oh, fuck,” said Kincaid. He’d sent everyone forward, there was no one to do the rig.

“I got it sir,” said Yaksic, grabbing the laminated sheet from the metal holder, and ably moving through the space, unplugging, plugging, checking valves, ducts, and dampers all while reading the sheet. Yaksic had done more than his share of saving people’s asses that day, thought Kincaid. In no time he was done.

“Rigged,” he said.

Kincaid nodded at McCormick who reported it to control.

“Start the low pressure blower,” on the 1MC. Not the diesel, Kincaid was glad to hear, even though the diesel would have moved the air a lot faster off the boat. But a diesel engine burned hot — and they’d learned a valuable lesson about high temps and Freon.

In his feet, Kincaid could feel the rumble of the blower. He checked his watch, watched thirty minutes crawl by.

“Check Freon,” he said to Yaksic, who was ready with an ampoule. He cracked it.

“No change, sir.” He held it up.

Kincaid did the math in his head — the ventilation half life with the blower should have been about eight minutes, maybe ten minutes max. Which meant after about thirty minutes, the level should have dropped drastically. But it hadn’t budged. “What the fuck,” he said.

“Maybe it’s just that high out of spec — the ampoules are swamped.”

“Maybe.” He looked at his watch again, leaned against the oxygen generator, and resolved not to check for another thirty minutes.

After an hour, control asked for them again to report the Freon level. Kincaid was actually impressed that they’d been able to restrain themselves that long — he pictured their position on the chart, falling further and further behind the track. But after an hour, the Freon level had still not dropped at all. “What the fuck!” said Kincaid. “Check the rig.”

Yaksic grabbed the card and went through the space again. “It’s rigged,” he said. “You can feel the air moving out of here.”

It was true, Kincaid could feel it on his hands, the motion of the air as the blower took its suction on their space. Fresh air from outside should be replacing it, and Kincaid longed to rip off his mask and smell it. But something wasn’t working the way it should.

“Machinery Two reports that Freon levels are not dropping,” said the navigator.

“Shit,” said Jabo. They’d been up for an hour, transmitted their message about the Freon and Howard’s death, gotten a terse reaction from squadron: Jabo pictured Soldato at his desk initialing the message with an angry jab of his pen before it was transmitted. They’d even managed to shoot some trash while they waited, a difficult job for men in EABs. Freon should have been sucked down to nothing after an hour.

“What do you make of that?” said the captain. “Something wrong with the blower?”

“I don’t think so — I can hear it. Kincaid has checked the rig twice.” Jabo thought it over, again pictured the pool of Freon gathered at the back of the space. The ventilation line up was designed, in large part, to get smoke out of a space. It hit him.

“It’s heavy,” he said.

“What?”

“Freon’s too heavy. What is it, twice as heavy as air?”

Maple appeared at his side, nodding. He got it too. “Four times. Four times heavier than air…”

“So the blower’s not moving it,” said the captain. “It’s just sitting there. Let’s get some fans down there, nav.”

The navigator called down to Crew’s Mess, where everyone was waiting in the masks for the casualty to be over, discussing the death of their shipmate, trading rumors about phosgene.

The supply officer, known affectionately on every boat as Chop, was in charge in Crew’s Mess. He was the only officer on the boat not nuclear trained, and sometimes seemed to exist solely to be the butt of jokes from smug nukes. This despite the fact that his responsibilities were among the broadest of any officer on the boat. If halfway through the patrol a carbon brush broke on a 400 Megahertz motor generator and they weren’t carrying a proper spare, he would be held responsible. He was also held responsible if pizza crust tasted funny, or if they ran out of Cheerios. His previous assignment had been on an aircraft carrier, where he was one of seventeen supply officers. His sole job had been to ensure the proper distribution of paychecks. Like every man around him, the Chop was worried about Phosgene, trying to fight off real terror about what the hell it might mean. And he was devastated about the loss of a shipmate. But, he felt with some shame, he was also worried about the coolers and freezers around them, the food supply for 154 men that was slowly warming.

“Chop, control requests four men be sent with two red blowers to machinery two.”

The supply officer nodded. Christ, he thought, I suppose that means the ventilation isn’t working. “Any volunteers?”

One man raised his hand. Hallorann, a striker. This shamed some of the more experienced men, and soon they had three other, slightly more reluctant volunteers.

“Go,” said the chop. “And keep those EABs on.” It wasn’t necessary to remind them.

He watched them struggle with the two big red blowers, getting them through the hatch while wearing EABs was no easy feat. That Hallorann was an impressive kid, he thought. He wondered is he would be interested in striking storekeeper.

Lieutenant Kincaid ordered them into position, pointing one blower into the bilge, and one above it. Hallorann saw what he was attempting to do, stage the blowers so they would boost the heavy Freon high into the compartment. He admired his ingenuity; obviously there was no procedure for what they were attempting to do. And it was difficult; anytime they moved more than about three feet they had to unplug their EABs and find a new manifold. Finally the big blowers were in place and aimed.

“Turn ‘em on!” ordered Kincaid. Hallorann found the switch and flipped it as did the other team. The big, powerful blowers came on with a roar. Hallorann could feel the air rushing through the compartment.

Out of the corner of his eye, Hallorann saw a yellow piece of notebook paper blow up from the bilge into which the blowers were pointed. It sailed through the space, and then landed against the curved wall of the hull, where dampness began to soak through it. He tried to reach for it, but it was just a little too far. He saw densely written, neat notes in numbered rows; it just looked like something that should be preserved.

Without giving it too much thought, he unplugged and leaned down to snatch it off the wall. He gave it a quick look; about half of it was still legible.

“Hey nub!” shouted Lieutenant Kincaid. “Get back on that fan!”

Hallorann shoved the page in his pocket and returned to his station. He returned to the fan, plugged in his EAB, and took a deep breath of the oily smelling air.

After an hour of running the red blowers in conjunction with the big low pressure blower, Yaksic took two readings and confirmed that Freon had, at last, drifted into spec. The officers deliberated in the control room, and decided, in light of their very limited ability to test for phosgene, to wait another hour before breaking one of the last two ampoules. When they did, Kincaid reported excitedly to control that the results were negative. The captain ordered them to confirm the reading with the last ampoule. And with that, after three and a half hours at periscope depth, Jabo picked up the 1MC mike.

“Secure from general emergency,” he said. “All hands remove EABs.”

There was a collective gasp of relief from the crew as they did. The XO rubbed his bare head, which showed red stripes from the rubber straps of the EAB. He turned to the navigator.

“Figure it out, nav. How fast and in which direction.” He turned to Jabo. “Officer of the deck — get down and get fast.”

“Dive make your depth six hundred feet. Ahead flank.”

The helm and the engineroom acknowledged both orders and the ship tipped forward as it drove down. Jabo, like the XO and every other qualified officer on the boat, began to do rough calculations in his head about how far behind they’d fallen and how fast they would have to go to make it up.

Jabo also thought about the all the noise they’d made: the roaring of fans, the clanking of hatches. He pictured sound waves in the sea, travelling for miles, and wondered if anyone was listening. He thought about Sierra Nine.

After dinner the navigator unveiled again the great circle chart of the Pacific and showed them their new track. The navigation brief took place with their dinner dishes still on the table, roast beef and gravy: time seemed suddenly compressed, there was a palpable sense of urgency to everything. Jabo noticed that the XO’s eyes rarely left the repeater in the corner of the wardroom that displayed their speed. As he finished his last spoonful of potatoes, Jabo felt heavy exhaustion set it. He glanced at his watch: it was four o’clock in the morning. He’d had a cup of coffee before dinner and poured himself the dregs from the pot before the nav began his brief, but caffeine could no longer counteract his lack of sleep.

“Bottom line,” said the XO as the navigator concluded his remarks. “Ahead Flank, as fast as we can go, with no more than two trips to PD every day. We’ll snatch the broadcast and away we go. I’ll be up there with a stopwatch timing you fuckers at PD. Clear?”

The JOs nodded and muttered affirmatively.

“Duggan, let’s practice the three-minute rule. How far do we travel in three minutes if we’re going ten knots?”

Duggan thought it over just a second. “1,000 yards.”

“Exactly right. So how fast do we travel a mile if we’re going twenty knots?”

Duggan puzzled over this one a moment longer. “Three minutes.”

“That’s right. You all get that? We’re going to eat up one nautical mile of ocean, two thousand yards, in three minutes, if we’re travelling twenty knots. One more question, Duggan. How fast are we travelling right now?”

Duggan looked panicked, strained to remember what the current ship’s speed was as they moved at ahead flank.

“I’ll give you a hint,” said the XO. “The answer is right above your fucking head in big red numbers.” He pointed to the repeater, as Duggan twisted awkwardly in his seat to get a look while the wardroom laughed in a release of nervous tension.

“Duggan, is that faster or slower than twenty knots?”

“Faster, sir.”

“That’s right. So, we’re going to travel a mile in less than three minutes. Let me show you how fast.”

The XO put his beefy left arm on the wardroom table with bang. “You guys ready?” He pushed a button on the side of his black digital watch making it beep. He watched the display, and after a short time, he banged the table again. “There. We just travelled a mile. Went pretty quick, didn’t it?”

Again the assembled officers mumbled in agreement.

“This is not what any of us are used to — and we need to be vigilant. Look ahead at every chart. Look at the next chart. Be aware, at all times, how fast we are moving and how far we are travelling.”

“This is going to tax every system on the boat,” said the Captain. “As well as the crew. We’ll be running fast and deep, and everyone will need to be on their toes. Barring any further disasters…we will still make it to Taiwan in time. The navigator assures me.”

They all turned to the nav who nodded humorously in response. Jabo thought he looked awful, like he’d lost weight from his already thin frame. He noticed that the nav’s dinner plate, still on the table, was untouched, he hadn’t eaten a bite. Jabo didn’t envy the nav his job now. But then again…everyone on the crew was going to be tested by the high speed run to Taiwan.

“Ok,” said the XO. “You all know what to do now. Get the fuck out of here and get to work.”

Jabo stood with the others but the XO grabbed his elbow as he did. Hein and Kincaid looked at him curiously as they passed, wondering, as Jabo did, what the CO and XO wanted to talk to him about. The Nav, rolling up his charts, was the last to leave, and he did so without a word. When the door shut, there was a moment of silence as the XO and captain looked at each other.

“Sit down, Danny.”

He did.

“You were investigating the dryer fire, right?” asked the XO.

“Yes sir,” said Jabo. “We were going to have an admin hearing after we pulled in.”

“Which means you haven’t done anything yet, right?” said the XO.

Jabo bristled. “Of course, sir, I have. I can deliver the draft report to you if you’d like to review it.”

“Stop being a pussy, Danny, I’m just fucking with you.”

The captain spoke. “Danny, since you were already working on the dryer fire, and since, frankly, I really need someone like you to work in this, you’ll need to do the report on Howard’s death, too. Obviously these two things are related, so we might as well keep you on the case.”

“Yes sir.”

“I know what you’re thinking,” said the XO. “That you don’t have time to do this.”

“Not at all, sir.”

“Good. Because obviously, if what just happened to us was an act of sabotage, this is going to bring a lot of attention to this incident, and to your report. I repeat: a lot.”

“Understood, sir.”

“And we’ll want a preliminary report to hand in the minute we tie up in Taiwan.”

“Yes sir.”

The captain sighed; Jabo could hear in the sound that the official part of their conversation was over. “I still can’t believe he did this. He went from making a small fire in the dryer to attempted murder.”

“And he did kill himself,” said the XO. “Speaking of that, what are we going to do with the body?”

The captain thought it over for a moment. “The port freezer…there’s more room in there. Confirm that with the chop. And let’s move the body now, while a good portion of the crew is sleeping.”

“Are we going to keep all those freezers online? With all that Freon lost?”

“The DCA is investigating, he’s hopeful we’ll be able to keep at least one of them at temp.”

“No burial at sea?”

“No time,” said the captain. “We’d have to slow down for that. Tell the chop to put him way in back, cover the body bag with more plastic. It’s not the first time I’ve been at sea with a dead body. The crew will get used to it. And frankly…it could have been so much worse.”

“Yes sir.”

The XO turned to Jabo. “When’s your next watch?” Jabo had to think for a minute, the casualty had gone on so long and screwed him up his internal clock. “Noon tomorrow,” he said. “I relieve Hein.”

The XO checked his watch. “OK. It’s six-thirty now. Go back to machinery two, work on the investigation for a couple of hours; look around, take notes, all that good shit. You’ll want to be able to say you went back there within hours of the incident. Then come forward and sleep for two hours, get up, shower, eat lunch, and take the watch. You should be feeling great after that, right?”

“Yes sir.”

Jabo stood, and began to walk to the door.

“Danny?” said the captain.

“Yes sir?”

“Don’t fuck this up.”

“Aye aye sir.”

On his way aft, Jabo stopped in Crew’s Mess, where the coffee was always fresh due to the huge volume they served up every day, and freshened up his cup. He then went to sick bay, in Missile Compartment Second Level, to see the body.

He was met there by the corpsman. Master Chief Cote was a distinguished-looking old chief with the gray hair and small, scholarly glasses that befit the crew’s sole medically trained crewmen. There were no doctors on Trident submarines, but the master chief had thirty years in the service, more time even than the captain. He’d had extensive training for independent duty, and was one of a handful of guys on the boat who’d been in long enough to see Viet Nam, where he’d served as a medic for a Marine rifle platoon. Angi had been horrified when she learned there were no doctors on the boat, but Jabo wasn’t just trying to make her feel better when he told her that he would rather put his life in the hands of Master Chief Cote than any doctor he’d ever known.

Master Chief Cote was still in sick bay, filling out paperwork about Howard’s body; the Navy had a form for everything. He looked up, unsurprised to a see a junior officer arrive in his space.

“Are you doing the investigation, Lieutenant?”

Jabo nodded.

He stepped aside so Jabo could enter. The room was tiny, the size of a broom closet. Howard had been placed in a body bag that was laid out across sick bay’s very narrow treatment table.

It was actually not the first time Jabo had seen a military-issue body bag. He and his father had hunted with a man who used them to transport the deer they killed. He raved about the thick watertight plastic and rugged zippers, the thick nylon loops that were perfect for lashing the cargo to the roof of his old Ford Bronco. Jabo could still remember unzipping the bags up in the guy’s garage, the thick, wet smell of the of the deer’s fur, the pool of congealing, cold blood that would collect in the bag’s lowest crease.

“You want to see him?” said the master chief.

Not really, thought Jabo. But he thought he should. He nodded and leaned back so the master chief could open the bag.

He pulled the zipper down to Howard’s neck. He didn’t look peaceful, like people always said. He looked stunned. And his eyes were cloudy, Jabo thought probably because they’d dried out.

“Did he die from the Freon or the Phosgene?”

“Not sure,” said the master chief. “But I think the Freon — I think he suffocated. I read a little about Phosgene, and apparently it’s an agonizing way to die, with violent muscle spasms and seizures and the like. Howard didn’t look like that.”

Jabo thought he’d probably looked at the body long enough. He didn’t know what he should be looking for anyway. He pointed at the bag’s zipper and the master chief closed it back up.

“You ever have a dead guy at sea before, master chief?”

He nodded. “Three times, but only once on a submarine. The first two were on carriers, which isn’t that unusual. You put five thousand guys on a ship for six months, somebody’s going to die…it’s almost mathematically unavoidable. The first time was on my first Westpac, on the Enterprise, some old warrant officer had a heart attack. Of course we had doctors onboard, a whole room full of them, so I didn’t get to do much. Watched them give him CPR, then pronounce him dead. They took him off the boat within an hour on the COD flight. I don’t even think most of the crew was aware of it— that’s how it is on those big boats. I never heard the guy’s name.”

“The second time?”

“Another carrier: the Carl Vinson. I was a chief by then, and this time was a little more dramatic. It was some poor kid, I think he was a third class electrician, just walking on the flight deck. They weren’t even doing flight ops, which is when it is actually dangerous up there, he was probably just grabbing a smoke. I remember it was a beautiful day. Anyhow, he walked by this little forklift that was carrying a big sheet of steel, God only knows what it was for, and the thing hadn’t been lashed down properly. The sheet fell off and just pinned the kid to the deck. But it was so heavy, it just crushed him, suffocated him. They couldn’t move it, they had like ten guys on it but it was just too heavy. Just like with that chief: he was off the boat before the sun went down.”

Jabo thought the chief seemed unaffected by the deaths…he described them in the same mildly regretful way the engineer might talk about a botched scram drill. “What about the one on a submarine?”

With that, the master chief’s whole posture changed, and his face darkened. “That was bad. It was on the Baton Rouge, my second boat. We were pulling out of Norfolk on a really rough day. Everyone topside was wearing a safety harness and was clipped into the track. Those safety tracks were new then, we had just done the mod during our last overhaul. There was an A-Gang chief topside, one of the most experienced guys on the boat: Senior Chief Sellers. We were friends — his wife taught my wife to play golf. The captain had him up there because it was so rough, he wanted somebody with experience topside.

“We were only about an hour away from the dock, but it gets deep out there fast…not like out here, the continental shelf is close. So we were close to submerging already. I wasn’t topside at first, but I had to sign off on the report so I read all about it later. They were really scrambling to get everything buttoned up, rigged for dive, getting everybody below. The ship was just pitching and rolling like crazy, waves were breaking and coming clear up to the sail, water pouring into the control room. And at some point, as he was running around up there helping everyone else, Sellers slipped.”

“But he was clipped in, right?”

“That’s right. But he was wearing a long line, because he’d been in charge and was running the length of the ship. When he slipped, he fell almost to the water line before the line caught.”

“But it held?”

The master chief nodded. “It held him. And it held him above the waterline. Worked just like it was supposed to. He didn’t drown.”

Jabo felt bad for making him dredge up the bad memory. But the master chief continued.

“He just hung there, right above the water. But the waves would hit him, and he kept slamming against the side of the ship. By then they’d called me up there, and you could hear him yelling. At first, it was just like, ‘Shit! Goddamn!’ stuff like that, each time he hit the hull. But after a few minutes, he started screaming, in pain, as his bones started breaking. It was getting rougher but now we couldn’t submerge, not with the chief hanging there. We were all on the line, trying to haul him up, but every time we got him moving, a big wave would come and knock us down, or we’d lose the grip. By the time we finally pulled him up, he hadn’t made a noise for ten minutes. I knew he was dead. The ocean had beaten the shit out of him — broken almost every bone in his body. We put him on a stretcher and then we practically had to pour him into a body bag.” There was a long silence as they stared at the brown plastic that hid Howard from view.

“What happened after?”

The master chief sighed. “We stuck him in the cooler until we got to Roda. And after that, the Navy limited those safety lines to three feet in length.” He paused, and then took three Polaroid photos from his small desk. “Here…you might need these. I took them before we moved the body so there’d be some record of it.”

“Thanks master chief,” said Jabo, taking the pictures. “I guess I better get down there.”

Machinery Two showed few signs of the casualty. It wasn’t like the fire, which left blackened walls and a smell of smoke that still clung to that part of the missile compartment. The hazards in this casualty had been invisible, and if there were any residual affects, they were invisible too. All the damage control equipment had been stowed, and the place had been restored well by the crew and the watchstanders who didn’t want to be reminded that there were a large number of ways a man might die onboard a submarine.

Machinist Mate Second Class Renfro was on watch, just hanging the oxygen generator logs back on their hook when Jabo walked up.

“You guys port and starboard now?”

Renfro nodded. “Yeah, for now. I guess Padua is getting close to qualifying, but for now it’s me and Schmidt, six on and six off.” While he’d just begun standing port and starboard, Jabo could see that the prospect of it exhausted him.

“I’m doing the investigation…can I take a look at the logs?”

Renfro nodded and took them off the hook.

The sheet was creased and dirty. Each sheet of logs held twenty-four hours worth of information, four full watches, so the sheet on the clipboard was the same one Howard had used. Jabo could tell they’d hit the deck when Howard did. Looking it over, nothing jumped out as unusual, other than the oxygen generator drifting out of spec. If anything, they were sharper than a normal set of logs, they were written more precisely, each number and word written cleanly in the center of its block, the notes on back more detailed and thoughtful than the norm. Based on the logs only, Howard didn’t seem like a guy getting ready to murder the entire crew…he looked like a petty officer trying to impress his chief.

“You notice anything weird?” he asked Renfro.

“Not really,” he said. “I can’t believe he tried to kill us all.”

“We don’t know that yet. We may never know. The whole thing is hard for me to understand too.”

“No sir, I mean I really don’t believe it. I knew Howard, he wasn’t a nut case.”

“I liked Howard too, but isn’t that what everybody says after somebody has gone off the deep end? That’s the nature of being crazy, I guess, it’s unpredictable.”

“You really think Howard was crazy, sir? Then I guess your investigation is pretty much over.”

Jabo was stung by that. “You’re right. We still don’t know exactly what happened, and I’ll try my best to find out.”

Renfro nodded skeptically. “No sir, it’s okay. It’s just…I mean, if Howard wanted to kill everyone from back here, there would have better ways to do it than with Freon, for fuck’s sake. I mean, did he even know about the nerve gas shit? I sure as fuck didn’t. I asked around…nobody else in the division did either.”

Jabo nodded…it was a good point. That message had just come out. He was startled to remember that even the captain hadn’t seen it.

“And if I was going to try something crazy like that…I’d start right here,” he said, slapping the gray metal side of the oxygen generator. “You could flood this space with pure hydrogen in about five minutes. The alarm would be going off in control, but it would be over before anybody could get down here to do anything. Light your cigarette lighter and this thing would blow so hard it would crack the ship in half.”

Jabo nodded. It would be a much more efficient way of destroying the ship than dumping a few thousand pounds of Freon and hoping that it would mutate into a deadly gas like it was supposed to. And nothing and no one could prevent the watchstander in machinery two from doing it.

“Bring me a copy of those logs when your watch is over,” said Jabo, pointing. “I’ll be on the conn.”

“Aye, aye sir,” said Renfro, still a little surly. Clearly his loyalty to Howard as a shipmate and a member of the same division had trumped the suspicion that he may have tried to sabotage the ship. But even putting a shipmate’s loyalty to one of his peers aside…Renfro had made some valid points.

Jabo climbed the ladder down to lower level: the scene of the crime. He knew that none of the chemical compounds that had so alarmed them, Freon or phosgene, had any odor, but he still inhaled deeply, and smelled only the vague odor of diesel fuel and amine from the scrubbers above. He stepped across the space to the purple-handled Freon valve.

It was one of thousands of valve operators he’d seen thousands of times without ever touching, or even given much thought to. He had been involved in freeze seal maintenance in other areas of the boat. He wasn’t sure if that particular valve had ever been operated during his time on Alabama. A red DANGER tag hung from the operator now, hung there at the OOD’s order after the casualty had abated. It seemed superfluous now, since Jabo was fairly certain that there wasn’t an ounce of Freon left in the system.

He pulled the Polaroids that Master Chief Cote had given him from his pocket and looked them over.

He winced at the image of Howard’s dead body, rendered harshly in the electric flash. He was sprawled on the deck, his clipboard in front of him, the log sheet that Jabo had just reviewed on the deck behind him. There were three photos in all, of the same scene, taken from different angles. The quality was not great, and the light was poor, but overall the master chief had done an admirable job of preserving images of the scene. Howard seemed to be reaching for the valve handle; his whole body was oriented in that direction. But that didn’t make a lot of sense; it had taken a while for all the Freon to dump from the system, Howard wouldn’t have collapsed right after turning it. Maybe he’d turned the valve and then had second thoughts, but been overcome before he could save himself.

Jabo backed up and bumped into the treadmill. There was a red tag hanging from it, as well, this one signed by the corpsman. Apparently, the master chief wanted to keep people from exercising down there until they were absolutely positive that there was no atmospheric contamination to worry about….he would find out all the details when he read the captain’s night orders on his next watch. He breathed deeply and took in the whole scene. What had happened down there? What had Howard been thinking in those final moments? He took a look at the photos again, flipped through to the tightest close up that the master chief had taken.

In the photograph, Jabo noticed again the log sheet, that record that Howard had so carefully kept. It was lying on the deck beside him. And for the first time, he noticed that another sheet behind it, a piece of yellow notebook paper. Jabo was certain that it was not on the clipboard he had just reviewed with Renfro; he wondered what it might be. The resolution of the picture was too low to offer any clues.

He looked up, realized that he had been staring off into space a little, his mind a blank. It wasn’t Freon, he knew, or nerve gas. It was exhaustion. He felt a pang about the accusation in Renfro’s words, about how the verdict seemed already to have been made. He vowed to himself to conduct a real investigation, the best he could, but for now…he was tired beyond words. He hadn’t slept in a day, and would be on watch in a matter of hours. He checked his watch and verified that he had spent the two hours on the investigation that the XO had directed. He would go forward and get a couple of hours of sleep, and hope he could get through the watch without falling asleep on the conn.

He walked forward through lower level, both because he was too tired to climb a ladder, and to avoid the accusing eyes of MM2 Renfro.

He checked his watch as he neared his stateroom. The XO hadn’t been quite right. He would have about an hour and forty-five minutes to sleep before he took the watch. The exhaustion hit him in waves as he anticipated climbing in the rack. It wouldn’t be nearly enough, but it would be something, and his body longed for any rest.

He stepped through the door. The overhead lights were off but Kincaid was stepping into his Nikes, ready to go workout.

“Where the fuck you been?” he said. “You need to be getting some sleep, shipmate.”

“Investigating. And all the workout gear is secured.” He was already out of his poopie suit, down to his plaid boxers and T-shirt. He hung it on the door on the middle hook, his hook, and climbed into the middle rack and pulled the blanket over him. The entire process had taken him about ten seconds.

“Secured? What the fuck! Why is it secured?”

But Jabo was already in his rack with the curtain closed. His thoughts about the tragedy, plus the image of Howard’s dead, gray face charged through his mind, fueled by three cups of strong coffee and the residual adrenaline from combating the casualty. As his head hit the pillow, he allowed himself to think about Angi, and felt the sharp pang of how much he missed her, how much he loved her. He thought about their first date, the first time he kissed her, on the steps of McTyeire Hall. He remembered the sound the wind made in the dried leaves of the live oaks that surrounded them, the taste of her lipstick, the surprised way she inhaled a little when he made his move. And then he was asleep.

He never would have awoken from the noise alone when Hallorann entered; the young sailor was deliberately, theatrically quiet as he crept in. Hallorann considered leaving the document without a word, but the significance of it gnawed at him, even if he couldn’t attach words to its importance, and it had almost been lost once already. He wanted to convey it personally. And he felt like, for some reason, he should lose no time. He cautiously pulled back the thick red curtain to the middle rack to look at the back of Lieutenant Jabo’s sleeping head.

“Sir?” he whispered. He said it again, slightly louder. The only response was slow, even breathing. He reached his hand out, hesitated, and then pushed his shoulder.

The breathing changed rhythm slightly, but it took another sharp push before the lieutenant finally rolled over, and his heavy eyes fluttered awake.

“Sir?”

Jabo licked his lips. “What?”

“I talked to the OOD, Lieutenant Hein…he said you were conducting the investigation. I found this in machinery two…I was on one of the fan teams.” He held up the yellow sheet of paper. Jabo raised an eyebrow; even in his sleep he remembered the paper in the photograph.

“What’s on it?”

“Not much…I mean I’m not sure. But I thought you should have it.”

Jabo stared at him for a moment, and Hallorann was afraid maybe he was still really asleep, talking with his eyes open while his mind slept on. It was a phenomenon he’d become familiar with since his time at sea, where exhaustion and sleep deprivation were taken to levels he’d never known. But then Lieutenant Jabo cleared his throat, and said, “Put it there. On my desk.”

Hallorann hesitated, wanted to explain why he thought it was important, how the neat entries made over several days and dated carefully must mean that it was an important document. He was afraid it might get lost, as it nearly had been before, or forgotten, sitting among several piles of documents and books that crowded the lieutenant’s desk. He started to say something about the evident importance of the page, but when he turned back from the desk, the lieutenant was already asleep again.

He placed it on the desk as he’d been directed, then pulled the curtain back across Jabo’s rack and left. He was due down in the galley in an hour, it was the second day of his two-week long stint in the scullery washing dishes. Must be nice being an officer, he thought as he left: sleeping until nearly eleven o’clock in the morning like that.

The navigator was alone in the stateroom he shared with Ensign Duggan. Normally just a red curtain was pulled across his doorway, as department heads were expected to always be available. But he had closed the seldom-operated sliding door.

Not that he could sleep. He was too conscious of the ship’s speed and depth as they raced ahead, almost blind, through the dark ocean. The ship would shudder and groan occasionally, vibrating in resonant frequencies with the massive equipment in the engine room that was operating at its limits. He extended his hand to the hull, just inches from his pillow, and felt the cold steel, the sole barrier between him and the sea. He fought off the panic that always arose when he thought about it.

He wasn’t afraid to fall asleep, he just couldn’t, his body wouldn’t let him. He wasn’t afraid of nightmares, he knew the nightmares would come whether he was asleep or awake.

He heard a door shut to stateroom three, across the passageway, someone trying to be quiet. He shut his eyes just in case it was a messenger was making the rounds, perhaps with some messages they’d received during the extended trip at PD. It would be okay if he was seen asleep in his rack, but he didn’t want anyone to see him awake, brooding in the dark. He’d heard the whispering, didn’t need to stoke the rumors about his strange behavior. He unconsciously scratched the wound on his knee. A few minutes passed, no one came to the door, and he reopened his eyes.

The commander was sitting in his chair. The nav recognized him immediately, both from the old khaki dress uniform, the war patrol pin on his chest, and the scars across his face that told of past campaigns. He looked just like the photograph on the back cover of his book. It was Crush Martin.

“Are you proud of yourself?” he said. He was fuming. The only light was the tiny fluorescent fixture above their pull-out sink, so the commander was backlit, his features stark, his mustache and hair pitch black, his skin white. Thin scars ran down his face, like worm-eaten wood, reminders, the nav was sure, of past battles.

“I did what you said…” said the navigator. “A man is dead because of me.”

“And you thought that would be enough? Did you think one dead sailor would make them turn the boat around and give up?”

“It could have been more.” But he realized how stupid he’d been.

“Never,” said the commander. “You could have filled the freezer with bodies, and they would keep moving west, as long as the ship can move. You’ve barely even slowed them down.”

“But I…”

“Do you have any idea what’s at stake!” he thundered. Slamming his fist down on the desk. “Your ship, your mission, is going to be the catalyst of the apocalypse! And you turn a Freon valve…and think that will be enough. Idiot.”

“Sorry…” whimpered the nav.

“Maybe it’s not too late,” said the commander. “But you have to start acting with the appropriate level of vigor.”

“What should I do?”

“You’ve got one of the most important jobs on the boat,” said the commander. “And it’s not because you can turn the handle on a purple valve. There’s a reason I chose you, the navigator, for this mission. You’re one of the few men who can single-handedly destroy this boat.”

“How?” asked the navigator.

But he was already gone.

Jabo slept exactly twenty-five minutes after Hallorann left his stateroom, and when he awoke, he did feel much, much better. He knew it wouldn’t last, knew there would come a point early in the watch where no amount of coffee could overcome the sleep deficit he’d accumulated, but for the moment he just felt grateful for the one hundred and five minutes of sleep he’d gotten. And Hallorann’s fear had been accurate….he had no recollection of talking to him, or of the yellow sheet of paper that was sitting on his desk, lost among a sea of paper that was awaiting his review. But Jabo felt so good that he walked to the shower whistling, with a towel around his waist, and when he came back to the stateroom, ten minutes later, he was humming. Kincaid was back, sweaty and winded, taking off his running shoes.

“Did you violate those safety tags on the treadmill?” asked Jabo.

“I considered it. Fucking stupid. I ran in missile compartment upper level as best I could. I hate running up there.”

“I’ll talk to the cruise director.”

“Fuck you. I’m glad you got your nap in, slacker.”

Jabo laughed at that, started stepping into his poopie, while Kincaid nosed around his desk. He held up the yellow paper and laughed.

“I see that nub found you with this…he was trying to get everybody to look at it, we finally realized you are running the investigation, sent him down to you.”

Jabo took the sheet, began to vaguely recall the conversation with Hallorann. More clearly he remembered seeing the yellow paper in the master chief’s Polaroids. He looked at his watch. “I need to take the watch,” he said. “I’ll take a look at it on the conn.”

“I have a feeling if you don’t, that nub will come after you. He seems like a determined type of guy.”

Molly Hein came to Angi’s house already in her workout clothes, and then they left together in Angi’s car. They were already a little late for the step aerobics class in the gym base that they attended every Tuesday and Thursday when the men were at sea. The instructor was Dee Dee Hysong, the ridiculously fit, ridiculously blonde wife of a lieutenant on Alaska.

“We’re going to be late,” said Angi. “Dee Dee is going to glare at us.”

“That’s why I like being late,” said Molly. “But that’s not why she glares at us. It’s because you’re in better shape than her. She can’t tolerate that.”

Angi patted her belly. “If that’s true, she’ll be happy to see this.”

“How much longer do you think you can do stuff like this?”

“As long as they let me. Then we can just start going to McDonald’s and getting fat together.”

“You’ll never be fat,” said Molly. “You’re one of those mutants.”

Angi laughed. “Just because you drag me to these classes. You’re a good influence on me.”

“You’re a bad influence on me. I’m going to tell Jay I want to have a baby now.”

“God, don’t blame me for that…”

“Hey, if I can’t get a job, what the hell…I might as well stay barefoot and pregnant.” Molly, like her husband, had a degree from MIT. But with the frequent moves and the limited opportunities in a navy town, she’d been unable to get a career started. Angi had studied to be a teacher at Vandy, and was fully licensed to teach kids with learning disabilities — in Tennessee. After arriving in Washington State, she learned that the requirements and licensing were sufficiently different that it would take half their sea tour, and an equally significant chunk of Danny’s sea pay, for her to obtain her Washington state license. She sympathized with her friend’s frustration.

Angi turned on to Trigger Road, the short drive complete from her house to the gate. Cars were backed up as uniformed marines checked every ID and looked over every auto. A stern gunnery sergeant was supervising the stepped up inspections.

“Heightened security,” said Molly. “Must be because of all the China stuff.”

“The protestors are here, too,” said Angi. There was a small cadre of them just outside the gate, aging hippies in tie-dye, peasant skirts, and white pony tails, handing out flyers with large smiles on their faces. They’d had a long-standing agreement with the base, who allowed them to show up on Tuesday mornings and exercise their freedom of speech just outside the gate while submarine sailors worked to defend that right inside. One of them approached Angi’s car, and she started to roll down here window.

“You actually take their flyers?” said Molly.

“Usually. Just seems rude to say no.”

“God, you are a such nice person.”

Angi took the paper from an older looking man wearing a peace-sign medallion and a crucifix. He nodded thankfully and moved on to the car behind them. She looked it over.

“AMERICAN NUKES TO PROVOKE CHINA??!!!” There was a black, cartoonish silhouette of a surfaced submarine above the headline, with a nuclear trefoil symbol, as well as the red stars of the Chinese flag.

Recent statements by the State Department indicate a serious reinterpretation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty is underway. Officials in the current administration seem to believe that providing Taiwan with nuclear weapons would not be a breech of the treaty which has been honored by the United States (and 189 other nations) since 1970, and is considered a cornerstone of international nuclear peace efforts.

China meanwhile has stated that it will not tolerate a nuclear Taiwan, and that it will consider any attempt to arm Taiwan as an act of war. The Red Army is on alert and the Chinese fleet is operating feverishly.

Are we going to provoke China into starting World War III? Is the United States trying to provoke a nuclear conflict? Are the destabilizing nukes coming from behind these gates?

A car honked. Angi, startled, dropped the flyer into her lap. She realized her heart was pounding. The Marine at the gate was waving her forward, looking annoyed at her for holding up the line.

Two cars behind her in that line was Captain Mario Soldato. He saw Angi’s Honda, but Angi did not see him, and he prayed silently that the commotion would not cause her to turn around and spot him. Angi was smart, very intuitive, and knew him well; if she saw him, she would see the worry in his eyes and that would make her worry. He turned around and glared at the lieutenant in the minivan who was leaning on his horn; the junior officer, noting the four stripes on Mario’s shoulder boards, quickly let up.

Mario had taken a rare afternoon off to spend with Cindy and her sister Sue Ellen, who’d flown in from South Carolina, where her husband, a Marine, had just made colonel. The two sisters were intensely competitive about their husband’s careers, and they both were enjoying the fact that their husbands had made O-6, held command, and were now assured not only of decent pensions, but of having served complete, fulfilled careers. Mario took pleasure in the sisters’ conversations, who in a very old-fashioned, southern way, regarded their husband’s military successes as their own. He’d met them for lunch at The Keg, in Bremerton.

“Tom’s boys are in charge of security at the sub base,” said Sue Ellen.

“That’s an important support role,” said Mario.

“Stop it,” said Cindy, slapping his hand as he laughed.

“Anyway…” Sue Ellen continued, laughing at the joke. “While one of those boats was deployed, it seems one of the young enlisted wives took up with one of Tom’s Marines.”

“Oh my.”

“They were very serious, and when the boat finally came back, after a six month Westpac, as you can imagine this young sailor was distraught.”

“I would think,” said Mario.

“So the captain of this boat, Mario, you might know him, Mark Procopius?”

“I do know him…”

Sue Ellen rolled on, not interested in the details. “So this Captain Procopius schedules a meeting with Tom, to tell him about the whole thing, how distraught this sailor is. And you know what Tom tells him?”

“I can only imagine.”

“He says, ‘Captain, I can understand why you’re upset, but I can’t be responsible for every Navy wife in Charleston who decides she’d rather be with a United States Marine!”

Cindy launched into a defense of the attractiveness of submariners when his cell phone rang.

“Soldato.”

“Captain, this is Bushbaum. We’ve got another flash message from 731.”

As his Chief of Staff explained, Soldato felt a stab of guilt, not for the first time, about being on shore duty, and for taking a half day away from the pier, as if trouble at sea was somehow his fault. Disaster had again befallen Alabama, and this time, someone had died: that’s all he knew, all that could be communicated on the unsecure cell phone that he always carried, and even that message was spoken in military jargon that was impenetrable to outsiders. He hung up without saying goodbye, and stood.

“Gotta go,” he said.

Cindy turned her head so he could kiss her cheek. She resumed her conversation with her sister before Soldato was gone, unshaken by his sudden departure. She’d been a navy wife too long to ever assume a full meal together was a guarantee.

He sped to the gate where the protestors and added security were slowing him down. He tried hard to control his temper at the two disparate groups that were holding him up, the earnest Marines with their clipboards and inspection mirrors, and the protestors with their glazed eyes, sandals, and smudged pamphlets. He declined to accept one when they came to his window. He actually had a lot in common with the protestors, it occurred to him. Like the protestors, Mario had spent hours worrying about the US, China, and Taiwan. But his concerns at the moment were far more immediate.

He finally made it to the gate and zipped through before the Marine had even lowered his salute. Down Trigger Road and to the pier, he ran up the stairs at squadron headquarters where Commander Bushbaum was standing by his desk with the message. He handed it to him without a word, knowing better than to offer an interpretation before the commodore had read it. Soldato imagined the scene in control as it was typed by the radiomen, vetted by the communicator, and then hurriedly approved by the captain and transmitted. He fought back the urge again to think that none of this would have happened had he still been in charge.

He dropped the message to his desk and rubbed his temples. Bushbaum took this as a signal that it was time for him to speak.

“I guess the good news is that they still think they can make it to Taiwan in time.”

“I know every man on that crew,” Soldato snapped. “Including the dead one.” He let the reproach hang in the air.

“Sorry sir…I didn’t mean…”

Soldato waved his hand in a way that said…that was a stupid fucking thing to say, but we’ve got more important shit to worry about at the moment. “After six hours at PD fighting the casualty…in EAB’s for Christ sake….they still might make it.”

“And it’s a good thing,” offered Bushbaum cautiously. “The CNO’s office is asking for updates almost hourly. His number two called me the other day to tell me that a White House speechwriter was working on something, wanted some facts and figures about Alabama. He thought POTUS might actually be there in Taiwan for the weapon transfer.” Bushbaum was an absolutely naked careerist, the reason he’d been able to make 0–5 at the age of thirty. He couldn’t keep the glee out of his voice at being just two degrees removed from the Commander in Chief.

Soldato looked back down at the message and tried to read into it what he could. A massive Freon leak, phosgene gas, a dead sailor. Six hours to replace all the bad air with good: a shit ton of Freon. Soldato tried to imagine how that much could be dumped, and failed to come up with a scenario. He imagined large amounts of food were turning bad inside the coolers of the Alabama. At the speeds they would be travelling, they wouldn’t be able to TDU it fast enough. They might run out of food. Odor would become an issue, although it was the least of the issues in his mind.

“Is Navships aware of this Freon-to-Phosgene conversion?”

“They knew there was a theoretical concern.”

“More than theoretical now, I guess.”

“They’re revaluating the advantages of the new refrigerant.”

Soldato had to wait a moment again for his anger to subside at that galactic fuck up by Navships, and then looked back down at the message. “Revaluating,” he said. “I’ll fucking bet. If I had more time, I’d track down that cocksucker EDO who recommended this change.”

“Did you also notice, ‘In conjunction with the previous incident.’”

“The dryer fire.”

“Right. That caught my eye too,” said Bushbaum.

It bothered Soldato, too, although he couldn’t put his finger on why. Words were like gold in a message like that, you didn’t include them unless you absolutely had too. These weren’t letters home, they were the first piece of paper in a stack that would grow into a mountain of documentation. They would be studied for months, possible even years, as the bureaucracy went to work and tried to figure out who to blame. Especially with a sailor dead…the incident would employ an army of investigators and desk jockeys for months to come. There was an art to writing messages like that, to include every essential fact and not one thing more.

“Why mention that the two investigations are in “in conjunction?”“

Bushbaum shrugged. “They’re being done by the same guy?”

“Probably.”

“But why mention that?”

“Maybe they think the two incidents have a common cause.”

Bushbaum stepped back. “What in the hell could be the common cause of a dryer fire and a Freon dump?”

Soldato hesitated. “A saboteur.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time. You’re too young to remember, but when I first got in the navy, during Vietnam, it was a real concern. They called it “Stop our Ship,” or SOS. Set fires, threw wrenches into reduction gears, sailors refusing to show up, shit like that.”

“On submarines?”

“No, it was mostly those pussies on carriers.”

“But you think it might be politically motivated? Because of the Taiwan mission?”

Soldato shook his head. “I doubt it, those orders are secret to the crew, only the officers know.”

“You think maybe an officer…”

“No,” said Soldato, cutting him off. But the thought chilled him. The boat’s equipment had been designed by some of the most brilliant engineers in the world. But none of that mattered without the right men in charge, from the newest enlisted man all the way to the captain, with whom all the responsibility ended up. Admiral Rickover, the patron saint of naval nuclear propulsion, had personally interviewed every officer in the program, knowing that strong men would be the fleet’s greatest asset. And if somehow the wrong guy made it into the wardroom of a nuclear submarine…

“I’m glad they didn’t put anything about sabotage in the message…we’d have NIS banging down our door right now.”

“If that’s what it is, they’ll need to figure out for themselves what’s going on inside the Alabama. The NIS can’t help them where they are now.”

Bushbaum walked to a large map on the wall and took note of the approximate position of the Alabama. “We’ll need to figure out how to let the families of the crew know about the death when the boat hits Taiwan. At least we’ve got a week to figure that out.”

“They’ll find out before then,” said the captain with a sigh. “They always do.”

Here’s how they found out.

Lieutenant John Knight was Engineering Duty Officer who had recommended the change to the new refrigerant — he was the cocksucker EDO that Captain Soldato had fantasized about finding and beating. He was a Naval Academy graduate who’d dreamed of being a submarine officer himself, but at his pre-commissioning physical, he’d learned to his shock that he was colorblind. Submarine officers need to be able to distinguish the red and the green of port and starboard running lights from the periscope; colorblindness was a disqualifying disability. Knight became an EDO because it was as close as he could get to being on a submarine.

He was in charge of a group of engineers, both civilian and military, who were charged with understanding every facet of the submarine fleet’s air conditioning and refrigeration plants. The switch to a new refrigerant, designated R-118, was the result of an exhaustive two year-long study that he and his team had conducted. They’d approved the new Freon because it was more stable in transport, it was more efficient within refrigeration machinery, and yes…it was cheaper. And many different varieties of Freon can, theoretically, break down into other possibly dangerous by-products under various conditions. But the studies they’d done, in conjunction with the manufacturer, had indicated that the amount of R-118 and the amount of heat necessary to cause the transformation into Phosgene were enormous. Like good engineers, they’d decided that the advantages of the change outweighed the potential risks. And, in reading that terse message from the Alabama, Knight realized that they’d made a disastrous miscalculation.

He knew that there would be possibly career-ending consequences for his mistake, but decided quickly that, while he was still in a position to do something about it, he would make sure that no other boat suffered from his error. Rather than try to cover his ass by arguing that R-118 was still safe, or that the men of the Alabama must somehow be at fault for the casualty, Knight quickly drafted an emergency safety flash message, explained it to his chain of command, and had it approved and transmitted. By midnight, R-118 was banned from US submarines.

Knight then worked to prepare for a hastily scheduled 0800 meeting with Admiral Patrick Cheever, NAVSEA-08, the man charged with all the engineering on all the navy’s nuclear submarines, the heir to Rickover’s throne. Banning R-118 had been easy; the details would be hard, and the details were what Knight worked on all night. The meeting was convened precisely on time with Cheever at the head of a table crowded with officers, every one of whom outranked Knight. It was held in a spartan conference room dominated by a scarred table and mismatched chairs; all of Naval Reactors took pride in their no-frills environs. It was yet another vestige of the reign of Admiral Rickover, who bragged that he had designed the Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear submarine, from an office that was a converted women’s restroom.

Despite the array of heavy brass that stared back at him. Knight was so exhausted, and so determined to right any wrong that led to a tragedy, that he was beyond intimidation. He was also certain that however badly he might have fucked up, no one else in the world understood the refrigeration plants of US submarines better than he. He began his brief.

“There are three groups of submarines to consider,” he explained. “The first and largest group is those still using the old refrigerant, R-114. They are obviously fine, and just need to cancel any plans they had for switching to R-118.” He allowed his audience to view a large list of submarines on the screen, then clicked his mouse and called up the next slide.

“The second group consists of those boats currently at sea that have already switched to R-118. There are only two, both out of Bangor.”

“Coincidence?” asked the Admiral. It was the first word he’d spoken.

“No sir. We decided to achieve the modification one squadron at a time, and Trident submarines, with their large refrigeration capacity, were made the top priority. The two boats are the Alabama and the Florida. I recommend we recall them both immediately.”

“The Alabama will not be recalled,” said the admiral. Everyone waited for him to elaborate, but he did not. As an engineering duty officer, Knight was once again intrigued by the secretive missions of the boats that he devoted his life to, even though they stubbornly refused to allow him, as an engineering duty officer, to know their mysteries.

“Well sir, there’s probably very little R-118 left onboard the Alabama anyway.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he snapped. “She’s staying at sea. The Florida we can discuss.” With that the most spirited debate of the morning began. Some argued that that while the incident on Alabama had been a disaster, it was probably a fluke, and that Florida could safely complete her patrol and switch out refrigerants in a normal refit. Others argued that now that disaster had struck, they had no choice but to correct the situation immediately: the position Knight advocated. Florida had only been at sea three days, was not yet alert, and with a long patrol ahead of them why take that chance? After ten minutes of arguments and counter-arguments, all heads turned to the admiral.

“Bring her in,” he said. There was no uncertainty in his voice, and Knight watched the officers who had advocated leaving Florida at sea squirm a little in their seats.

It was an unusual step, recalling a boat like that, and would require logistical mountains to be moved, but suddenly everyone agreed with the admiral that it was necessary and the calls were made to squadron and the machinery began to move to get Florida back to Bangor and get its new refrigerant replaced with the old. It was settled. “There is one other boat to consider,” said Knight.

“Enlighten us, lieutenant.”

“Alaska, sir. Also in Bangor. Just completed the modification to R-118 in refit, but she’s sitting at the Delta Pier.” Knight himself had been on the phone with Alaska’s engineer just days before discussing the change and how smoothly the operation had gone.

“Well that’s easy,” said the admiral. “Tell them to switch back.”

A message was composed and hurriedly sent to Squadron 17.

Lieutenant Dean Hysong was preparing for his last patrol on Alaska. He had decided to stay in the Navy, and had orders to the ROTC unit at Creighton, where he hoped to get an MBA on the navy’s tab during his two-year shore tour. As the most experienced junior officer in the wardroom, he was the DCA, or Damage Control Assistant, in charge of A-Gang. The refit was in its final days, and he was eager to get home, eager to be with his wife as much as he could. Of course, every man longed to be with his wife in those final days, but Dee Dee was unusually hot, unusually energetic, and unusually demanding in bed. It had been six days since he’d touched her, which was torture. But even worse, he knew soon he’d be gone for one hundred days or more, and every minute he spent on the boat pierside, while his wife waited for him at home, passing the time with crunches and leg lifts, seemed a crime against nature.

But Dean was happy because that night it seemed he might actually get off the boat in time to shower at home, screw his wife, and eat dinner. In that order.

He checked in a final time with the engineer, not quite saying he was getting ready to leave, but verifying that there was nothing preventing him from going home, no urgent problems demanding his attention. He skulked by the XO’s stateroom, to control, and actually had one hand on the ladder to freedom when the radioman spotted him. “Lieutenant Hysong?”

“I’m going home.”

“You might want to see this,” he said, arm extended with a clipboard.

“No. I really don’t.”

The radioman nodded sympathetically, and Hysong took it from him. He read it with increasing disbelief.

“They can’t fucking be serious.”

“Priority one, it says. Supposed to start tomorrow. The Freon truck is already on the pier.”

Hysong’s head was spinning. The message called for a brief, but everyone, including his chief, had already gone home with roughly the same plans he had. But their wives weren’t freaking aerobics instructors. And they had just completed the incredibly tedious, time-consuming operation of switching out every ounce of refrigerant. Now the navy wanted them to switch back.

“I’m not doing it. Fuck’em. Retards.”

“Says safety issue,” said the radioman.

“Fuck safety.”

“Look at the bottom,” he said.

“Oh fuck, is there something else?” He flipped over to the second page. What he saw there was even weirder.

“Holy shit. They’re calling back the Florida?”

“That’s what it says. They’re going to tie up outboard of us and make the same switch.”

Dean dropped the message to his side and thought that over. Calling a boat back from patrol was extremely odd…he’d only seen it a couple of times in five years. The whole operation was odd, and reeked of bureaucratic panic. He tried to remember a message they’d gotten a few days earlier, some kind of warning they’d received about R-118. To achieve this kind of rapid motion, to actually turn a boat around at sea and bring it back to the pier, one had to overcome massive amounts of inertia, and it could usually only be achieved by disaster.

Suddenly he was certain that someone had been killed.

And he knew, from the pre-evolution briefs, that only three boats had made the change: Alaska, Florida, and Alabama. And since nothing had happened on Alaska, he knew the fatality had to have happened on one of the other two. His gut told him it was the Florida. They were bringing her back in, after all, no word about the Alabama. And, as much as he hated to admit it, the Alabama was the tightest ship in the squadron, always at the top of every ranking. He didn’t picture her at the center of this kind of fuck up.

He went topside and walked to the pier to call home, before he’d even shown the message to the engineer or the captain, because he knew that once the word was out he wouldn’t have a spare second.

“Hello?” she said. He could hear a lilt in her voice. She thought he was calling to say that he was on his way home.

“I’m stuck here,” he said.

“How long?” she said without trying to hide her disappointment or disgust. He sighed. “Probably all night. I’ll be lucky if I’m home for dinner tomorrow.” “Okay,” she said, knowing better than to ask why. “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Hysong worked all night preparing the work plan, and by the morning he was ready to brief all the players. As they scrambled to prepare, everyone was asking the same question: What the fuck? Hysong had his theory, that someone had been killed on either Florida or Alabama, but kept it to himself. After he completed his 0900 briefing in the wardroom, the squadron EDO told them that Florida would soon be tying up outboard of them, and would actually get to make the change first — the priority was to get her back to sea as quickly as possible. This gave Hysong a few minutes to catch his breath. He grabbed a cup of coffee and went topside to watch Florida pull in.

It was a beautiful, crisp morning, the type of morning that made the coffee taste better, and made him mourn the sunshine and fresh air that he was about to be locked away from for months. Florida pulled along their port side head to tail, and was nudged gently into place by the civilian tug the Mitchell Hebert. As soon as a gangplank was placed across, Hysong walked over and found Rick Curtis, their DCA. They looked at each other with grim, appraising smiles.

“Hey Rick.”

“How are you, Dean?”

“Did you guys kill somebody out there?”

Rick shook his head. “I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

The switch on Florida took longer than expected, which everyone expected. Then they moved all the hoses over to Alaska, where everyone was waiting, eager to get it over with. They were fairly well-practiced at the evolution by this point, and they efficiently evacuated the R-118. There was a moment of tension when they thought the truck might not contain enough R-114 to fill all their systems, and they would have to wait for the nearest truck….in Spokane…to make its way to the pier, probably well after 2200. Had that happened, Dean would have made sure that the Navy saw its second Freon-related death in a week. But they finally got a break and they were able to replace every ounce of the new Freon with the old with what was on the pier, and the entire evolution was complete and signed off by 1900. Dean grabbed his bag, went to the pier and got in his car without even considering asking anyone’s permission.

At home, Dee Dee was waiting, still grouchy from being stood up the night before. She looked achingly beautiful, her body toned perfectly from her many hours at the gym. They had two nights left before he went to sea again, and Dean desperately wanted to make things right with her, wanted to explain to her how fucked up the last twenty-four hours had been, how he really, truly, had had no choice. And, as he imagined pulling the thin sweatshirt over her head without even leaving the living room, he wanted to explain it all to her in the shortest possible period of time.

“Hey,” she said, hands on her hips, awaiting his justification.

He hesitated for just a moment. “Somebody got killed on the Alabama.”

The next day was Thursday. A happy and satisfied Dee Dee Hysong told most of the class at the gym what she’d learned before Angi and Molly even showed up, their customary ten minutes late. By the time they took their positions, the entire group was chattering about death aboard the USS Alabama.

Jabo checked the position no the chart again, to verify they were making up track. The position was all DR, of course, just an estimate based on speed and heading. They would only be able to get a GPS fix every eight hours or so, during their furtive trips to PD. Any estimate of position between fixes was just a math problem, an educated guess represented by an X on a thin pencil line on a virtually unmarked chart based on course and speed. Whatever errors existed in those measurements were magnified by their high bell. Their location on the planet had become very abstract.

And they were behind. At Ahead Flank, stopping the bare minimum number of times they had to in order to catch a broadcast and a GPS fix, they would arrive at Papa Zulu precisely on time, without a minute to spare. But they would be playing catch up the entire time.

No one on the boat could remember running Ahead Flank for so long. The most strained part of the boat was the engine room, where everything was running at high speed, every back up seawater and coolant pump was on, and nothing could break, or even be secured for routine maintenance. The engineer and his team were managing to keep it together but the strain was showing on both the men and the machinery. Hot bearings alarmed, high pressures caused reliefs to lift, and water levels had to be watched and adjusted continuously.

The pressures in the control room were different and scarier in some ways — they were going fast and deep in an unknown ocean. But other than check course and speed, there was little else the officer of the deck could do except worry about it.

Flather walked into control from radio, a stack of messages in his hand.

“More updates?” said Jabo.

He nodded. He looked exhausted. “All for the chart we’re on: JO91747. I’m just barely keeping up with track.”

“None for the next chart? It looks like we’ll be there in an hour or so.”

Flather flipped up the corner of JO91747 to reveal the number of the next chart beneath it: JO90888. He then flipped through the messages in his hand. “Nothing for 0888. Good for us. All on 1747.”

“Anything to worry about?”

He shook his head. “Not yet. I won’t lie, though — this kind of navigation keeps me awake at night.”

Jabo pointed to a faded line that had marked their track…it had been altered slightly, you could see the ghost of the line left by the eraser. “What’s this change?”

Flather nodded. “I don’t know. The navigator did it last night. Steering us a few degrees south, it looks like.”

“But it sounds like there’s nothing on the next chart to worry about, right? Was our original track wrong?”

“There must be some reason. Who knows?”

“Shouldn’t you know?”

Flather bristled a little at that. “I’m trying to keep these charts up, sir. We’re going as fast as we can into an area we’ve never been. I haven’t had time to take a shit, much less ask the navigator to explain everything he’s done. I came up here after two hours of sleep and he’d made these changes. If you’ve got a question, why don’t you ask him? I’d like to know the answer too.”

“Okay,” said Jabo. “Relax. I will ask him.” Flather walked over to the table, sat heavily down on the stool, and began marking up the chart.

Jabo took the sound powered phone off the latch and growled the navigator’s stateroom; no one answered. He tried the wardroom and officers’ study…again no answer. He considered sending the messenger. He had every right to, as officer of the deck, but still there was something mildly untoward about a junior officer summoning the navigator to the conn. He would wait a few minutes; hopefully the navigator would find his way to the control room during the watch.

Jabo turned to the stack of papers on his clipboard, the start of his investigation into Howard’s death. He scanned the yellow sheet of notebook paper that Howard had written.

It was wrinkled, and smudged in some places by moisture. But it was by and large readable, thanks to Hallorann, who’d apparently saved it.

It contained a column of information about the day of the laundry fire in boyish yet earnest handwriting. Each entry was dated, Jabo could see, in a way that mimicked the log sheets. There were lots question marks. Book in Dryer?? Paper towels in dryer??? The document reflected Howard’s youth in a way that would have brought a smile to Jabo’s face, had Howard not been dead, and had he not been accused of sabotage.

Jabo turned to the Machinery Two logs, the last Howard had kept. These too were neat…extraordinarily neat. Each number was centered in its square, everything was legible, everything was perfect. Jabo turned it over to read the comments section.

These too were neat and squared away, the only unusual thing being perhaps the number of comments — Howard was clearly trying hard to be diligent. Jabo scanned the comments. Oxygen Generator #2 drifting to high voltage. Navigator Running on treadmill. Jabo did smile at that. He could review a year’s worth of Machinery Two logs and no one would ever have recorded who was working out on what. Howard was trying to take the most complete set of logs ever taken in Machinery Two.

Gurno appeared in front of him with a concerned look on his face.

“What could be wrong? We’re not getting any traffic at this speed. You guys should be napping.”

“You remember that Freon message you asked me about?” asked Gurno.

“Sure. I wanted you to pull it again for the captain. And for my investigation.”

“I can’t find it.”

“What do you mean?”

Gurno shrugged. “It’s not anywhere, not even on any of the hard drives. And I can’t find a printed copy anywhere. It’s like we never got it.”

“I don’t get it…I read it. I know we printed it out.”

“I know. I don’t know what to tell you sir. It’s fucked up.”

The captain hadn’t asked for it since the night of the casualty, it’s not like he was being hounded for it. But it did relate directly to what had befallen them…and they just shouldn’t be losing fucking messages like that.

“Alright. Go take another look.”

“Aye, aye sir,” said Gurno. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on.”

Kincaid appeared to relieve him just as the fatigue was settling in solidly. Jabo was trying to think about the cryptic notes left behind by Howard, the missing message, and their position on the chart, how much time they’d made up during his watch. It was all jumbled together in his mind inside a thick weary fog.

“Duggan qualified EOOW while you were up here,” said Kincaid.

“Really? Man, that’s pretty fast.”

“Yep, I sat on his board. He’s smarter than he looks. Going back there to take the watch right now.”

“So Morrissey gets the watch off? Is he qualified OOD yet?” He ran through the watchbill in his mind, calculating how an additional watchstander in the wardroom might somehow add a few hours of sleep to his week.

“Not yet.”

“But if Morrissey gets his OOD board scheduled…”

“That’s right. Then it helps us,” said Kincaid. “So go down there and sign whatever’s left on his card.”

“Not right now,” said Jabo. “I’m fucking exhausted.”

Kincaid stepped up to the conn and scanned the night orders. He scowled.

“What’s the matter?” asked Jabo.

“Why can’t we untag the fucking treadmill yet?”

Jabo laughed. “I think you’re the only one that still gives a shit.”

“Must be,” said Kincaid. “My own private gym. Boats gonna be full of fat fucks when we pull in.”

Jabo took lanyard heavy with keys from around his neck and handed it to Kincaid.

“I relieve you,” said Kincaid.

“I stand relieved,” said Jabo.

“This is Lieutenant Kincaid; I have the deck and the conn.”

The control room watchstanders acknowledged in turn.

Jabo intended on going directly to his rack; he dreaded even taking the time to undress. At his stateroom door, however, still bothered vaguely by the events of his last watch, he walked down the narrow passageway to the navigator’s stateroom.

He got to the stateroom and the sliding door was shut…odd.

He knocked, and knocked again. “Nav?’ He pulled the unlocked door open.

The lights were on and the stateroom was, as always, neat and organized. His desktop was closed as were all his cabinets. The bed was made with the kind of anxious rigor that was the mark of most Academy-trained officers. The only thing out of order on it was the old book in the center of the rack: Rig for Dive, by Crush Martin. He stepped in and flipped it over; saw the black and white photo of Martin, a stern looking man with scars on his face and neck not completely hidden by the old-fashioned khaki dress uniform. He had commander’s shoulder boards, but other than that the only insignia on his uniform were his gold dolphins and a war patrol pin. Jabo flipped through it and saw, to his surprise, that the pages and margins were filled with dense notes in the nav’s tiny handwriting. Every page had passages highlighted, and on some pages every word had been highlighted. The notes seemed to bear little relation to the page, or to Martin’s story at all. On an early page detailing Martin’s childhood in rural Florida, Jabo saw where the nav had written the formula for the reactor average temperature calculation in three different colors of ink. It bothered Jabo: the formula was classified. Not exactly a state secret, but an odd lapse in discipline from a man as buttoned-up as the navigator.

He hesitated, then opened the top cabinet above the nav’s desk, where he knew he kept hardcopies of every broadcast. And there they were, neatly organized in white, three-inch binders across the shelf, each with a range of dates printed in the navigator’s neat script across the spine. Jabo pulled the most recent one down, paged through it looking for the Freon message. He remembered the approximate date, remembered some of the other things in the broadcast, but couldn’t be certain where it would be exactly. It would take hours to page through them all to find it, if it was even in there. Jabo hoped that the navigator had pulled it for some reason, maybe because of the incident. Otherwise…it would be yet another set of hours Jabo would have to find, to pour through the binders one page at a time to look for the misplaced message.

Jabo saw, as he removed the binder, a metal clipboard flat against the back of the cabinet: hidden? It was one of the thin clipboards used to move a single classified message around the boat, two thin sheets of metal joined by a hinge. He pulled it down.

No classification page marked the front of it. Which would normally mean it was empty. But when Jabo opened it, there were several sheets of paper. He knew in an instant it was the Freon message.

“Having a look around, Lieutenant?”

Jabo almost dropped the board; it was the navigator, standing at the door to his stateroom. “Jesus, Nav, you scared the shit out of me.”

“Guilty conscience?” He had a weird look on his face, twitchy and uncomfortable.

“No, Nav, not at all. Just looking for this message…” Jabo realized suddenly that he was in the wrong, that he had no business digging through the nav’s stateroom like that. He saw the navigator glance toward his other hand, which held Rig for Dive. He tossed it back on the rack.

“You’re the communicator, shouldn’t you have access to all this in radio?”

“There’s a message missing…”

“How come no one’s told me about it?”

“I guess I’m telling you now. And it’s not missing anymore.” He held up the clipboard.

There was a sudden shift between them. Jabo realized how small a man the navigator was. Jabo had been defensive at first, caught doing something he shouldn’t. But the nav, who’d looked absolutely haunted for days, suddenly looked off balance, almost frightened.

The navigator gathered himself, trying to recapture the initiative. “Lieutenant Jabo, I really don’t appreciate you tearing through my stateroom. And I don’t appreciate the way you’ve decided to tell me about this lapse in radio. I think I’d like you to meet me in the captain’s stateroom in about ten minutes, after I’ve had chance to brief him about your work. Your attitude.”

“Fine,” said Jabo. He welcomed the chance; wanted to put all the pieces of the puzzle in front of the captain and see what he could make out of it. The navigator’s face twitched again, and then he turned around, walking toward the captain’s stateroom.

Jabo stood there, the thin clipboard still in his hand. He checked his watch, intending to the give the nav exactly his requested ten minutes. He tried to think of a legitimate reason the nav might have that message, by itself, hidden in his stateroom, while no one else in communications could find a copy. There were possibilities; perhaps the he had been tasked with his own investigation. Perhaps the Nav had pulled the message on the night of the incident, and just never returned it.

But that kind of fuck up seemed unlikely in the nav’s ruthlessly ordered, organized world. Jabo had heard that at the academy, visitors weren’t allowed to see a midshipman’s dormitory room. Instead, they had a “model” room complete with neatly made racks and ownerless uniforms hung in the wardrobe. That’s what the nav’s stateroom seemed like, right down to his polished oxfords awaiting the return to port sticking out from his bed, right next to a pair of unblemished Nike running shoes that looked right out of the box.

A slight buzz went through Jabo’s mind. He checked his watch; he still had eight minutes before he was supposed to meet with the navigator and the captain. He left the stateroom, clipboard still in his hand, and began walking aft.

The navigator stormed out of his stateroom, disappointed that he couldn’t actually drag Jabo before the captain. Jabo was long overdue for a humbling, and the nav was more than willing to deliver it. He knew the captain and the XO loved the guy, but there’s no way even they would abide him digging through his stateroom, looking at his personal belongings. Jabo should be disciplined; he could have insisted upon it. It was flagrant disrespect, insubordination. But there was no time.

As he rounded the corner from the staterooms, he saw a flash of khaki going down into Machinery One. It was something that got your attention at this point in patrol; everyone, officer, chief, and enlisted, were all wearing identical blue poopies. It didn’t surprise him; he was overdue for a briefing with the dark commander. He glanced around to see if anyone else had seen him. The only other person around was a young sailor reading the plan of the day, trying to avoid eye contact. The nav hurried down the ladder.

The commander was waiting for him in machinery one, sitting on a stool at the foot of the diesel engine. He had his legs crossed in a strange way; the nav thought maybe his posture was the result of an injury, some earlier encounter with the enemy. He was smoking an odd, wrinkled looking cigarette, one the nav thought was perhaps hand-rolled, or a product of wartime austerity.

“Is your plan in motion?” he asked.

“Yes sir,” said the navigator. “It’s too late to do anything now.”

“You seem upset by that. Are you having second thoughts?”

“No,” said the nav. “This has to be done.”

“That’s right. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do. Things other people may condemn. But they still have to be done.”

“Yes sir.”

“So, your plan is adequate this time? No more half-ass measures?”

“No sir. It’s adequate. The ship won’t survive.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive,” said the navigator. “It will all be over soon. In minutes.”

The commander nodded and smiled at that. He shut his eyes and took a deep drag from his cheap-looking cigarette, the tip glowing bright red. “No one knows?” he asked without opening his eyes.

“It’s too late to do anything about it anyway,” said the Nav.

The commander eyes flew open and he looked at him sharply. “Does anyone know?”

“No one knows.”

“I think you’re mistaken.”

“No one knows!”

“One person knows. And we know from past experience that he is weak. You need to get rid of him before that weakness betrays us, and ruins the plan.”

The navigator was at first confused. But then he realized that the commander was

talking about him.

Hallorann sat on the edge of his rack and looked through his qualification book for the millionth time. Like most new men, when a page was full, with every signature block signed, he laminated it with a sheet of plastic, a necessity for a book that was carried next to your body for hour after sweaty hour. It was also a measure of progress, and Hallorann’s book only had two un-laminated pages remaining. He had everything about the book memorized, every signature, every question he’d answered to get the signature. He knew which signatures he’d really earned, the areas and systems on the boat that he really understood: sonar and the main ballast system were his best. And he knew which ones were harder for him to understand: the reactor, which still seemed like some kind of black magic to him, a perpetual motion machine that really worked.

But most of all, he knew which signatures he had left to get. He’d made amazing, rapid progress, and it had been noticed. But that also meant that his questioners were less apt to give him a pass on anything. He was supposed to be hot shit, and they all wanted to see it for themselves. And one of the biggest blocks that was left was the diesel.

His confidence was high as he approached the ladder that would take him down into the torpedo room and Machinery One, home of both the diesel and the battery. As he rounded the corner, however, the navigator was hustling toward the same ladder, a grim look on his face. Hallorann hesitated and let the navigator pass, turning to pretend to read the posted Plan of the Day.

He’d hoped to wander down there and find some beneficent A Ganger, bored and looking for something to do, like perhaps spending twenty or thirty minutes talking to Hallorann and signing his qualification book. He knew it was a long shot, especially with A Gang being short handed and always busy. His second choice, if there was no one down there, would be to spend a few minutes alone with the machine, walking through the procedures, getting that much more prepared for his qualification.

But he had no desire to be down there alone with the navigator. The crew liked to make fun of the eccentricities of the other officers, like Hein’s dweebishness, Jabo’s goofy country charm, and Kincaid’s constant reminders to everyone that he had been enlisted once, too. But the feelings about the nav were different, an almost superstitious kind of discomfort. He was weird, and nobody wanted even to talk about him, other than an occasional word of pity for those enlisted men like Flather who worked directly for him. Which is why Hallorann hesitated, deciding to wait a few minutes to see if the nav might come back up quickly before he descended into Machinery One.

After a few minutes he began to feel uncomfortable loitering in the heart of Officers’ Country. He was standing near the CO’s and XO’s staterooms, the Officers’ Study, and the wardroom. Plus, he was ready, eager to get down the ladder, to the diesel and that much closer to his dolphins. He had no reason to be afraid of the nav…did he? He hesitated one more moment in front of the officer’s bulletin board, pretending again to read the plan of the day and the watchbill. Then he turned and climbed down the ladder.

There was a watchstander in the torpedo room, laughing at something on his computer screen, waiting for his watch to end. Hallorann took a few steps forward into Machinery One.

He saw the nav’s feet first. The soles of his back oxfords dangled a few inches off the deck. Hallorann’s eyes went up. The navigator had hung himself from an overhead pipe with his khaki belt. The navigator seemed to have oriented the belt with deliberate precision, centering the Alabama belt buckle right below his Adam’s apple. His face was turning bright purple and his eyes were bulging, looking directly at him. Then the nav blinked and emitted a small croak, and Hallorann knew that, for the moment, he was still alive.

Duggan got permission from Lieutenant (jg) Brian Morgan, his best friend on board, to enter maneuvering. He’d just completed perhaps the most thorough pre-watch tour in submarine history. He lifted the chain and went inside, aware that for the first time, he was doing so alone, without Morrissey watching over him.

“Gosh!” said Morgan. “I can’t believe it! You’re actually going to start contributing around here.” Morgan was a Mormon, and the fact that he could get through a submarine patrol avoiding both caffeine and profanity was one of the most impressive displays of religious devotion Duggan had ever witnessed.

Duggan nodded and smiled. “I guess so.” He’d spent hundreds of hours in maneuvering on the boat. He’d stood every enlisted watchstation and performed every job in the engine room, from turbidity tests in lower level to analyzing samples of radioactive reactor coolant in the small chemistry lab. And before that, he’d done the exact same thing on a working, land-based reactor in Charleston, South Carolina, as part of his training. And before that…the meat grinder of nuclear power school. But it felt undeniably different, getting ready to take the watch over an operating nuclear reactor on a warship at sea. Nothing could match the terror of actually being the man in charge.

He took note of the maneuvering watchsection, all three men with their backs to him as they dutifully concentrated on their indications: EM1 Patterson at his far right on the electrical plant, ET1 Barnes in the center as reactor operator, and MM2 Tremain on the left, the throttleman. Out in the spaces, he’d seen during his tour, MMC Fissel was the Engineering Watch Supervisor. It was a very experienced, senior group of enlisted men that he was ostensibly supervising on his first watch — Duggan was sure that was not an accident. The XO had probably orchestrated it that way when he scheduled his board, putting the newest EOOW with the saltiest enlisted team. Duggan wasn’t insulted; he was deeply grateful. He started scanning the logs from the previous six, uneventful hours.

“How was your board?” Morgan asked. “Who sat it?”

“The eng, the XO, and Lieutenant Kincaid.”

The reactor operator, Barnes, turned around slightly. “I heard he used to be enlisted, is that true?” They all laughed.

“Kincaid was the hardest,” he said. “He made me go through the complete electrical system, one bus at a time.”

“Every bus?”

“Everything…even the 400 hertz stuff. Really drilled me on it, made me draw it all out. I think that’s when they decided to qualify me, because I actually knew all that shit.”

“Now you can start working on OOD,” said Morgan. “And then…your dolphins. You are definitely on track. Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” said Duggan, a little embarrassed at the praise.

He looked up at the three panels, a final check before taking the watch from Morgan. Everything was pegged…they were still at ahead flank and you could almost sense the engine room, and the reactor, begging for mercy. There were a few yellow warning lights scattered across the panels, bearings that were hot, water levels that were low. One red light caught his attention. “The alarm?”

“Engine room upper level ambient. It’s a hundred and ten degrees up there, hotter than heck.”

“From the main engines?”

“The main engines and those high pressure drains. All that steam is really heating things up, the refrigeration units can’t keep up. Especially since we’re down to two, with all that Freon we lost.”

“And water?”

“Everything is going into the reserve feed tanks. We’re probably going to have to suspend showers on your watch. Hope you took one.”

“I didn’t.”

“Well let me get mine in before you shut the valve.”

Duggan looked behind Morgan, at the primary system status board, wondering if there was anything else he should ask.

“You’re ready,” said Morgan. He said it as a friend, not as someone just trying to get out of the box and to dinner.

“You think so?” Duggan laughed. “The watch qual book says I am, so I guess I am.”

“You know something is going to happen right?”

“I’ve heard.” It was an old superstition, one he’d heard many times in the days leading up to his board.

“It always does. Something always happens on your first qualified watch.”

“What happened on yours?”

“I remember,” said Barnes, without turning around. “That was my first watch too. Thought we had carry over. Almost shut the whole thing down.”

“That’s right!” said Morgan. “I forgot you were in here with me. They’d done SGWL maintenance on the previous watch.” He referred to the system that controlled steam generator water levels, pronouncing it as ‘squiggle.’

“They fried one of the flip flops,” said Barnett. “But we didn’t know because it was high range. Didn’t pick up till we increased power on our watch.”

“That’s right. So we get over fifty-percent reactor power, and in here, it just looks like level is going up. In both generators.”

“Doesn’t shoot up…just creeps up,” said Barnett. “Just like it really would in a casualty.”

“But we didn’t have any of the collateral indications,” said Morgan. “No noise in the engine room, nothing. But all I know is what I’m seeing here. I’m afraid water is getting ready to carry over, go right out there and shred both main engines, both turbine generators.” It was a frightening prospect — any moisture travelling into the thin, precisely engineered turbine blades at their high speeds would destroy them, obliterating both propulsion and electricity. Morgan continued.

“Tremain was the throttleman…he had his hands on the cutouts.” He pointed to the big hydraulic valve handles that should shut off all steam to the engine room. “We’d still lose power, still lose propulsion, but we’d save the turbines.”

“Jesus,” said Duggan.

“Right, I know…it would cause a scram, too, don’t forget, automatically. And we were ready to do it. I was ready to give the order. I was two hours into my first watch.”

“Then Chief Flora comes haulin’ ass in here from instrument alley,” says Barnett. “Saying, ‘don’t do it! Don’t do it! We fried the flip flop!’”

“He’d been reviewing the maintenance records and noticed a discrepancy…ran back to the engine room just as we were calling it away, put it all together and stopped us just in time,” said Morgan.

“I still think you should have called it away,” says Barnes. “If you’d been following the procedure…you had the indications. You had no way of knowing. What if Flora had just lost his mind? What if he’d decided to try to kill us all?”

“I guess Flora was right,” said Morgan, grinning. “And so was I. So…I wonder what will happen on your watch?”

“We’ll see,” said Duggan. “Hopefully nothing.” He took a deep breath. “Lieutenant Morgan, I am ready to relieve you.”

“I’m ready to be relieved. Reactor is at 100 % power, normal full power line up, reactor plant is in forced circulation, all main coolant pumps on fast. Keep an eye on the main engine bearings, and make sure someone takes McCormick some ice water in upper level, so he doesn’t pass out or puke.”

“Will do. I relieve you.”

“I stand relieved!” Morgan slapped him on the back and started to walk out.

“Ensign Duggan is the Engineering Officer of the watch,” he said. He wrote the time and same words on the EOOW’s log, his first entry as a qualified watch officer.

“Throttleman, aye.”

“Reactor operator, aye.”

“Electrical operator, aye.”

Morgan spoke from the other side of the chain. “Good luck, pal.”

“Thanks,” said Duggan. He watched him walk away, and a few seconds later heard the clank of the engine room watertight door. Morgan was gone, and Duggan felt the full weight and loneliness of being the sole officer in the engine room of a United States nuclear submarine. He reached below his small desk, where copies of all the reactor plant manuals and casualty procedures, thousands of pages of documentation, were kept. He pulled out one of the thicker books, opened it, and began to review the procedures for steam generator water level casualties.

As Jabo walked aft he was aware of the throbbing in the deck plates beneath his feet — it was the feeling of the boat moving very fast, a harmonic that ran through the very hull caused by both the friction of the cold sea against the ship and by every piece of machinery on the boat running at maximum speed. He’d never been on the boat when they ran so fast for so long. Or, for that matter, so deep for so long, the depth dictated by the submerged operating envelope. The boat was designed to operate at that speed indefinitely, of course, but it was just so unusual, after a few days it was unnerving, a feeling that the boat was frothing like an overworked horse, begging to catch her breath.

As he walked, he thought again about the nav, and all that had happened that patrol. That business about him stabbing himself in the leg; the talking to himself in the officer’s study, all the general weirdness. And now…a missing message hidden in his desk.

Jabo was glad he’d kept the folder with him, lest the message disappear again before he got a chance to talk to the captain. The word ‘evidence’ floated through his mind, and he thought again about another odd place the nav’s name had come up: on Howard’s yellow sheet of paper, where the sailor had been trying to compile evidence (that word again) to exonerate himself.

Jabo arrived in Machinery Two, nodded at Renfro, who was exhausted and trying to stay awake by the oxygen generators.

“You doin’ alright, Renfro?”

“Fuck no, sir. You ever been port and starboard this long? It kinda sucks.”

He pointed to the deck. “Anybody down there?”

Renfro nodded. “No, all that exercise shit is still tagged out. Not that anybody has the energy or the time to work out right now anyway.”

Jabo climbed down the ladder into the lower level.

The treadmill was silent, a red DANGER tag hanging from its switch. Jabo walked over to it, read the tag. Signed by the corpsman, which was unusual, within hours of Howard’s death and the Freon casualty. He checked his watch; the navigator wanted to meet him in the captain’s stateroom in about two minutes. Jabo’s confidence was building, and he didn’t want to get their meeting started by arriving late.

He hesitated at the treadmill, and then on impulse flipped the switch to ON, in violation of the danger tag. All the lights on the console came on, and then the readout began to scroll. WORKOUT COMPLETE….10.0 MILES….WORKOUT COMPLETE…

He stepped off the treadmill and thought it over. Kincaid was right…he was the only person on the boat that would put those kind of miles on the treadmill in one workout. Certainly the navigator hadn’t devoted that kind of time to running in his pristine running shoes. So Kincaid had been the last person to run before the Freon casualty and the treadmill got tagged out. And yet…the navigator had been down there, in his workout gear, right before the Freon casualty. His presence down there had seemed notable enough for Howard to write down in the logs. And now it seemed the navigator hadn’t even exercised while he was there. Which begged the question…what had he been doing in Machinery Two?

Jabo suddenly felt the clipboard in his hands again, and he opened it up to the Freon message. He noticed for the first time that there was another message on the page behind it. He read the subject line: NOTICE TO MARINERS, and got about halfway though the body where a chart number was highlighted: JO90888. Jabo remembered the faded pencil line of their track on the chart, and the slight adjustment the navigator had made for no apparent reason.

He lunged toward the 4MC against the starboard bulkhead, lifted the handset and shouted into it.

“Rig for collision!” he shouted. “Kincaid, get shallow now!”

He ran forward, as fast as he could, his feet pounding heavily on the lower level deck plates. He now understood why the navigator had wanted him to wait ten minutes.

Duggan was stooped over, returning the casualty procedures to their place beneath his desk, when the amplified voice of Jabo came across the 4MC speaker behind him.

“RIG FOR COLLISION! KINCAID, GET SHALLOW NOW!”

Duggan jumped to his feet, all the watchstanders sat straight in their chairs, their eyes alert, scanning their panels. He turned slightly to his right, to an analog depth gage. He felt a slight up angle in his feet, and the ship’s depth, at that speed, responded quickly. The needle began to move counter-clockwise as the ship drove upwards. Duggan waited for something to happen.

The ship collided with an underwater mountain, and everything went dark.