Ghost Sub

Part Two

Lieutenant Ray McCutcheon poured himself a cup of coffee in the wardroom of the USS Boise, SSN 764. The pot had cooked down throughout the day into a sour potency: just the way he liked it. He was savoring the first sip when the Maxon radio on his belt crackled to life. It was the Petty Officer of the Deck, topside.

“Dunham is back.”

“I’ll be right up,” he replied. The Engineering Duty Officer, his good friend, looked up from the pile of red safety tags he was reviewing as he snapped the radio back on to his belt clip.

“The prodigal son has returned.”

“Indeed.”

He walked to the ladder and climbed upward, into a gorgeous Hawaiian evening, the sun an orange ball just above the horizon. The Boise would soon depart: McCutcheon had a million things to do other than supervise the return of an AWOL sailor. Topside, as promised, Petty Officer Dunham awaited his fate, wearing a wrinkled uniform and a nervous grin.

“Petty Officer Dunham.”

He dropped his sea bag and saluted. “Sir.”

“Where’ve you been?” he asked as he returned the salute.

“With my girl.”

“Hm.” McCutcheon removed his Boise baseball cap, and ran his fingers through his hair. AWOLs were rare on submarines. In part this was because the men were screened so well, only the best of the best, hand-chosen by the submarine force even before they left for bootcamp. In addition, submarines were at sea so much, and in port so little, that it made desertion very difficult even for those few who might be inclined. It was a unique enough situation that they’d conducted wardroom training on the matter when Dunham flew the coop, and every duty officer had reviewed the protocols for what to do when he returned from his unauthorized vacation. Technically, they could have called shore patrol and had him dragged in cuffs to the brig. McCutcheon sensed that Dunham half expected this. But Captain Jefferies had been clear: he wanted to take care of it himself. Both because he was an inherently merciful man, and because they needed Dunham on the watchbill. He was the best of the four men on the boat qualified to operate the diesel.

“Do you know what’s next, Dunham?”

“No sir.”

“Well, we’ll do a piss test, make sure you haven’t been smoking any of that fine Maui weed during your sabbatical.”

“No sir, I have not.”

McCutcheon’s eyes dropped to the wayward petty officer’s hand. “Sailor, is that fingernail painted?”

“Yes sir,” he said sheepishly.

“That means in addition to everything else, you are out of uniform.”

He heard footsteps on the ladder; the corpsman appeared, plastic cup in hand, ready to take Dunham’s urine. He was followed by Dunham’s chief.

“Dunham, you little fuck,” he said, not completely without affection.

“Chief…” Just as Dunham started to respond, a bugle began playing, marking sunset.

They all turned to the flag and saluted as the colors were lowered. It provided a useful, thoughtful pause just as it was starting to get crowded topside. When the last notes echoed across Pearl Harbor, it left them all in a more contemplative mood.

“OK, Dunham, go below with the corpsman, fill that bottle.”

“Aye, aye sir.”

He left.

McCutcheon and the chief looked at each other after they departed. “Can he be saved, chief?”

“Yes sir. He’s a promising mechanic. And he’s certainly not the first young man to make a bad career decision based on a piece of ass.”

“Amen.”

“I’ll tell him to put on a clean uniform and shave before the captain gets back. To look contrite. He’s disqualified everything for now so we’ll put him to work in the galley.”

“Sounds good.”

They both lingered topside, enjoying the sunset, one of their last before a long journey under water.

“Did he look sick to you?” asked the lieutenant. “I thought he seemed a little pale.”

“Pussy withdrawal,” said the chief.

“In that case: good. He deserves it.”

On the pier, Seaman Luke Winn looked up from the empty paint cans he was stacking and tried not to stare. He’d been hearing about Dunham since he arrived two weeks before, the AWOL sailor with the hot Hawaiian girlfriend. Most of the conversations on the topic were some form of this question: would you? Would you accept all the consequences for a few days in the sack with Dunham’s girlfriend? Winn had not seen her, and had little knowledge of what terrible things the navy could do to an AWOL sailor, but he was strongly inclined to say: maybe. Although he’d never seen her, in the stories that were passed around the boat she was exotic and beautiful, and Winn didn’t think he’d be able to say no to whatever such a girl might ask.

The legend of Dunham had steadily grown during his absence. To some he was a hero, a martyr for the love of womankind. To others, he was a reprobate, a danger to the Boise, the submarine force, and Democracy. Winn had never actually seen him before, so he looked Dunham over good as he talked to the duty officer. It was a little bit of a letdown: he just looked like any other dumb squid, a little tired maybe, shorter than he had imagined. It was the same kind of vague disappointment he’d felt when he had first seen the captain. He’d expected, on some level, a guy with a peg leg or an eye patch, or at least some kind of battle scar. But instead Captain Jefferies had banker’s glasses and a quiet voice.

“You want to go up there so you can hear better?” Chief Zimmerman had snuck up on him.

“No, chief,” he said, startled. He got back to stacking the paint cans, every one of which he had helped empty with his brush, during his unending days of painting in Pearl Harbor. When he looked up again, Dunham was gone.

Dunham went to work immediately, assisting with the preparation of food for the entire crew. Only then did the magnitude of what he’d done begin to dawn on him: AWOL. People went to jail for it. During war time, men were shot for it. He’d managed to spend those blissful days with Ashley without thinking of the consequences once, so intoxicated was he by the pleasures of the flesh, the beautiful young girl who was in love with him, just like he was in love with her, willing to do anything for him. If scientists could create a girl specifically for him, it would be Ashley, three quarters Asian and one quarter American, all four quarters hot. Going back to the boat had been unthinkable. But now he was back and he couldn’t stop thinking.

So here he was, stacking Number 10 cans of navy coffee and awaiting his fate. It looked like they weren’t calling shore patrol for him at least, to his vast relief. He wasn’t going to the brig. He would have a long shitty patrol, for sure, an array of punishments and petty humiliations, but he would get through it. Missing Ashley would be the hardest part.

Chief Cassidy, chief of the cooks, came up behind him, laid his hand on his shoulder.

“You feel like scrubbing some pots?”

“Not really, chief.”

“Tough shit. And maybe it will help you rehabilitate.”

“Good point, chief.”

“Take a quick smoke break, change into some dungarees, come back in ten.”

“Aye, aye.”

Dunham didn’t smoke, but he did take breaks.

As he walked to his berthing area, some men welcomed him back like a returning hero, shook his hand, asked him what it was like on the other side. Others avoided eye contact with him. For some, maybe, his absence from the watchbill had caused the resentment, but in truth the ship could suffer the loss of one man in port without too much trouble. Dunham thought it more likely that they were mad at him because he’d broken their deal, the deal all shipmates had with each other on every ship: we’re all in the same boat. As bad as it could get on a nuclear submarine, they were all supposed to be in it together, suffering equitably. That wasn’t supposed to change until you either got out of the navy or your sea tour ended, and they resented you for that, too. By taking off the way he did, he had violated the covenant.

Now that he knew he wasn’t going to the brig, he wasn’t too worried about the guys who were pissed at him. He would work hard, win them back, volunteer for every shitty duty. Despite going AWOL, he was good at his job, and his presence was valued. And when it got really rough, he had a few memories of Ashley he could replay, scenes of their love in vivid HD, viewable only in his mind. They were set mostly in or around her bed, but a few were on the beach and once hidden in the trees near Waimea Falls. He’d had to gently put his hand over her mouth then, she was yelling in pleasure, he was certain a park ranger would come arrest them both.

He knew that on his death bed, as his last breath escaped, that would be the last memory to cross his mind.

He had promised Ashley a letter. She had an old letter she treasured from her grandfather to her grandmother, written from the deck of a destroyer during World War II. (That grandfather was her one-quarter American.) She’d memorized every word of it, and made him read it with her, and he had to admit that it did appeal to him, the yearning, the straining for the right words, the fear that the war would keep them from ever reuniting. Ashley thought that letter was the essence of romance, and she lamented that no one got love letters to save, preserve, and hand down any more, just text messages and maybe emails that would evaporate with your next phone upgrade. She had made him promise to write her a real love letter, with paper, an envelope, and a stamp, and to send it in the last mail bag before the ship departed. They’d even bought a small stationery set together at the mall during one of their rare, brief excursions beyond Ashley’s bedroom.

In his berthing area, he pulled the letter out of his pocket and reviewed what he’d written so far.

He cursed himself for his lameness, and felt the pressure of his deadline, the even greater pressure to write something worthy of historic preservation. He was no writer, he knew that. But wasn’t true love supposed to inspire him, like it had her grandfather? It had to. And he had to get it done before they departed in two days. They would keep him hopping in the galley in the meantime. He vowed to think about the letter as he went about the mindless work of scrubbing pots and chopping vegetables, composing something completely great in his mind so when he got the chance he could just dash it off, get the letter in the mail bag, and fulfill his promise to her. Maybe he could do it at night, they’d still have to let him sleep no matter what kind of trouble he was in. He’d write the letter then, in the rack with the curtain drawn. He looked at his painted fingernail, another crazy thing love had made him do, and felt it sting a little where the nail had cracked.

Fuck, he missed her.

Twenty-four hours later, Dunham pulled a large tray of lasagna out of the galley stove. He walked two steps, coughed, and collapsed.

Captain Jefferies was in the wardroom, reviewing charts with the XO and the navigator, when he heard the news. He sighed and looked up at Lieutenant Dwyer, the Duty Officer.

“Get two men to take him to Tripler,” he said. “Take the van.”

“Aye, aye sir,”

“Drama just seems to follow some men around,” said the navigator as Dwyer left.

The captain frowned at him, even though a version of that thought had passed through his mind as well. “Let’s just hope he’s okay.”

Jefferies was that kind of captain, one who took his role as a guardian of all the men in his command seriously. He was a small, scholarly looking officer who acted with deliberation and a religious devotion to procedure. And he was smart: years before, on his first shore tour at the Pentagon, he’d won a military-wide chess tournament sponsored by Lockheed, defeating a Marine Corps General with a mustache like Stalin in the final match. An article and picture about the match from the Navy Times proudly hung on his stateroom wall. He ran his ship, and his career, the same way he played: deliberately, trying to see several moves ahead, and relying heavily on the movements and doctrine of those who had gone before. It was the time-honored strategy of the peace-time naval officer, to advance by avoiding mistakes rather than boldly jumping into the fray, and it had served him well.

Not all men believed in that philosophy, of course. Following procedure took discipline, and at times, restraint. Not everyone wanted to believe that the procedures had been vetted and proven over years. The old timers especially fought him: men like the XO. Those men believed in intuition and gut instinct. It was his mission, in large part, to break them of that. To make them give themselves over to the volumes and volumes of documents that could save their lives in any situation. With the younger men it was easier: they didn’t have bad habits to break. Young men like Lieutenant Dwyer, his duty officer and protégé, had absorbed his message of slavish devotion to The Word of doctrine, regulations, and standing orders. Dwyer was going to make a fine officer, and while the captain would retire soon, creating officers like Dwyer would be his legacy.

Chief Zimmerman knocked on the door. “Enter?”

“Enter,” said the captain.

“Sir, I’ve got a young man who’s going to be painting all night tonight, so we can get done before we pull out. Then he’s going right to the scullery tomorrow before lunch. I was wondering if we might let him sleep two hours during the maneuvering watch — it will be the only chance he gets.”

“Who is it?”

“Seaman Winn.”

“Which one is he?”

“Brand new kid, right out of boot camp. Freckles. Looks like he’s fifteen.”

“Sure,” said the captain. “Let the XO know I said it was okay.”

“Aye sir,” said the chief. “Thank you.”

The captain went back to reviewing the chart.

The Captain was on the bridge with Lieutenant McCutcheon, the Officer of the Deck, as they cast off all lines and sounded a prolonged blast from their horn, signaling to all that they were a ship underway. He always felt a visceral sense of relief at that point in any patrol, the moment when they separated from the pier and all the seductive hazards of land. An even deeper sense of calm would come over him when they submerged, as underwater was where the ship and crew were designed to operate the most efficiently.

The Boise was commissioned in 1992, six years after the Louisville, making her part of the “improved” group of 688 class submarines. The most visible difference was the removal of the fairwater planes on the sail, the tower that jutted up from the deck of the Boise: it was at the top of this tower, exposed to the gorgeous Hawaiian sky, that the captain and McCutcheon stood watch. Those control surfaces had been moved to the bow of the submarine, underwater and invisible. Clearing the sail of those planes allowed the ship to operate underneath the arctic ice, since it could surface and punch through with its unadorned sail. It had been a crucial Cold War capability since the Arctic Sea was the shortest path between the Godless Soviets and North America. A generation of American submarines went to sea with war fighting publications on not only how to identify ice patches thin enough to punch through, but how to deal with polar bears and rabid Arctic foxes. But since she was commissioned in 1992, the Boise not only missed the Cold War, she also missed the first Gulf War, when Louisville had made history launching cruise missiles. Like her commanding officer, the Boise had had a solid and successful, if unremarkable, career.

Soon, the Boise cruised out of Pearl Harbor, and the ocean floor fell away drastically beneath them. The quartermaster took a sounding and confirmed that they had ample room to submerge.

“Ready?” said the captain to McCutcheon. “Shift the watch.”

“Shift the watch, aye sir.”

McCutcheon formally exchanged information with Lieutenant Dwyer, his counterpart in the control room: the ship’s course, speed, and readiness for diving. With that, Dwyer took the watch below, and McCutcheon finished preparing the bridge for submerging. As a final step, he began happily pounding away on everything in sight with a rubber mallet, ensuring that everything was tight, and that there would be no rattles or sound shorts in the sail that would give them away. Even among their peers, the Boise was known as a very quiet ship, in large part because of the discipline of the crew.

“We’re almost there,” said the captain.

“Twenty minutes to the dive point,” said McCutcheon, pausing from his hammering, a little breathless.

“How beautiful is that?” said the captain. “An hour from casting off lines until the dive point. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to come back.”

“Not like that in Bangor, sir?”

“Takes almost a day to get through Puget Sound,” he said. “In rough weather, usually, dodging Washington State Ferries and salmon fisherman the whole way.”

“Captain, I believe we’re ready to go below now. The bridge is rigged for dive.”

“You sure? You look like you’re having fun with that mallet.”

McCutcheon smiled. “It’s one of the few times they let an officer get his hands on a tool.”

“Let’s go then,” said the captain. He turned to climb down the ladder. Behind them, he caught a glimpse of Tripler on the hill. He hoped Dunham was doing alright.

When McCutcheon climbed into control, he announced, “last man down from the bridge.” He closed the watertight hatch behind him and sealed it tight. A light illuminated on the Chief of the Watch’s panel, and He announced it.

“Captain, the ship is rigged for dive,” said Dwyer.

“Very well,” said the captain. “Submerge the ship.”

He noticed that Dwyer still wore a .45 pistol on his belt, a vestige of their time in port. They’d gotten to sea so fast that he hadn’t time to check it back in to the small arms locker. This pleased the captain, in part because the bookishDwyer looked so odd with the big gun at his side.

With the shutting of that hatch, the ship became completely sealed. Air re-circulated from compartment to compartment, and from man to man. The ship’s atmosphere control equipment only removed three things from the air. One, carbon monoxide, was produced by combustion. In normal times the only combustion on the boat was that of cigarettes. Secondly, the ship monitored and removed carbon dioxide, a product of respiration produced every second of every day by living men. Thirdly there was hydrogen, given off by the ship’s gigantic acid-filled battery as it stored and released electric power.

The ship only added one thing to the air: oxygen, which they created themselves by using high voltage electricity to tear molecules of sea water into their constituent parts. On a submarine men shared everything, including the air they breathed.

The ship soon descended to periscope depth, then deeper still. Dwyer lowered the periscope.

“Ahead one-third,” he ordered.

“Ahead one-third, aye sir.” The helmsman rang it up, and the engine order telegraph dinged as the engine room acknowledged the order. The ship slowed.

Chief Crosby, the diving officer, leaned forward to concentrate as the two planesmen in front of him allowed themselves to relax. It was his show now.

Those two young men were Petty Officers Diaz and Lacroix. Between them they operated the three control surfaces that actually made the ship move: the rudder that turned the ship right or left, the stern planes at the back of the ship and the bow planes at the front, both of which drove the ship up and down. Diaz found that sometimes his friends and family back in Colorado didn’t believe him when he explained that he, a mere nineteen year old, actually controlled the movements of a billion dollar submarine. He didn’t even attempt to explain that as a member of the maneuvering watch ship control party, he was judged to be one of the best at that job on the boat. Diaz and Lacroix had developed instincts and a god-given ability to react instantly and accurately to officer of the deck’s orders, to the point that when they were on watch, they became an extension of his will.

One of the reasons they were good at it was because they enjoyed it. The rudder and engine orders came quickly and rapidly while the ship maneuvered itself out to sea, backing bells and reverses of the rudder in rapid succession. The orders were a language of their own: steady as she goes… rudder amidships… meet her… check your swing. All had very specific actions associated with them that could mean the difference between reaching the dive point safely and running aground on a sand bar, or colliding with another ship. And of course in the control room, they couldn’t see any of the objects they might be trying to avoid: it was like driving a sports car down the interstate with a blindfold on, while somebody else stuck their head out the sunroof and told you how to steer, and whether to press the brake or the gas. Steering the ship precisely, actually controlling it, was a rush to them, and responding to the rapid orders of the maneuvering watch was more exciting and challenging than just about anything else on the boat. Diaz had noticed when he had last looked back on the control room that the quartermaster had his head down on the chart, exhausted from the night of preparations, and already bored with their patrol. It made him grateful for his job, and the adrenalin rush it provided.

Once the boat submerged and slowed, he too could relax slightly as the diving officer took control. The dive’s mission, immediately after submerging, was to get a “good one-third trim,” meaning that at a given depth, at five knots, and with zero degrees on all the control surfaces, the ship would maintain a constant depth. It was crucial to ship control, establishing a baseline of buoyancy, and ensuring that the ship was in good trim as it began its deployment. While he worked on it, the ship would stay on a steady, slow course, giving Lacroix and Diaz a breather.

“Pump from aft trim,” Crosby ordered the Chief of the Watch.

“Pump aft trim, aye,” he said. The Chief of the Watch, or COW, controlled all the ship’s tanks and pumps, moving water from tank to tank, and on and off the ship as necessary. As he pumped, the planesmen could reduce their angles little by little until the ship was neutral. There were complex calculations one could run to determine how much water needed to be pumped from where and how long to reduce an angle, but like all the good diving officers, Crosby did it by feel.

Diaz could feel it too… he lowered the angle of his planes to maintain the zero angle on the ship as the dive’s changes took effect. It felt almost like weight coming off, like he was holding the ship down with his planes, and as the dive corrected the trim he could release it, bit by bit, until ship rode flat on its own, with no effort by the giant control surfaces that were an extension of his hands on the wheel. He looked over at Lacroix, and saw that he was getting there too. It felt good.

Suddenly, just outside control: loud coughing.

“Jesus,” he said.

“Sounds almost like he’s puking,” said Lacroix.

“Mind your helm,” said Crosby, unhappy with the distraction.

Then: a clatter, and a crash. A thud to the deck, then the sound of running footsteps and shouting.

“What the hell?” said Diaz.

“Mind your helm,” said Chief Crosby again, but he was leaning over too, trying to get a look.

The OOD stepped up behind them… unlike them he was free to roam the control room. They could only see the shocked expression on his face, then he rushed back to the conn and grabbed the 1MC mike:

“Injured man in the forward compartment!”

“What happened?” said Crosby.

“Somebody passed out,” said Lieutenant Dwyer. “Looks like he smashed his head on the way down… blood everywhere. I don’t know… there might be two of them.”

“Two of them? Who is it?” asked Diaz.

“I can’t see,” replied Lacroix. He was leaning way over in his seat to get a look. The dive was looking too, everyone wanted to know what was going on. Diaz was irritated that from where he sat, the outboard station, he couldn’t see a thing. Everyone in control was trying to look, and everyone had a better view than him.

“What do you see?” he was frustrated that his friend wasn’t sharing any information, just leaning over. Way over.

“What do you see?” he asked Lacroix again. “Tell me.” He nudged him.

Lacroix’s glasses fell off his head, and onto the deck. He didn’t react.

He had passed out too.

Diaz stood up out of his chair then, and turned around to face the control room. All eyes were fixed on the passageway, where at least two men had passed out. He saw the quartermaster still face down on his chart. And now the helm was unconscious. He didn’t think anyone else had realized it yet: people were passing out all over the boat. There was something wrong with their air.

For the first time in his life, real panic began to well up inside him.

“Chief…” he said.

Crosby looked at him, startled to see him standing. Diaz pointed at Lacroix.

“He’s out too.”

“What the fuck?”

The OOD began coughing hard behind them. The COW coughed into his hand.

Without Lacroix’s hands on the rudder, they were drifting off course. Inexplicably, they were also speeding up. Without an order, Crosby reached to the console to his right and engaged the ship’s autopilot. He did it without saying a word… he knew that uptight prick Lieutenant Dwyer might stop him without an order from the captain.

Maneuvering was a confined space, even by submarine standards. It was the control room of the ship’s nuclear engine room, and held three watchstanders supervised by a single officer, the Engineering Officer of the Watch, or EOOW, pronounced to rhyme with the sound a cat makes. The EOOW sat a few feet behind the three enlisted men: the throttleman, the reactor operator, and the electrical operator. The room itself was almost a perfect cube, and the EOOW had made the decision to seal it off, closing the airtight doors. The ship’s high pressure air compressors were all running, and the EOOW shut the doors so he and his watchstanders could hear each other better over the noise.

“How’s that?” said the EOOW. “Quieter?”

“Better,” the Reactor Operator and the Electrical Operator mumbled. The throttleman coughed into his hand.

“You better not make us fucking sick,” said the RO.

“Fuck you,” he said back. He coughed again.

The announcement came over the 1MC: injured man in the forward compartment.

“Wonder who that is?”

“Probably some sonarman got a paper cut,” said the RO.

“Pussies,” said the throttleman, coughing again.

The EOOW looked him over. “You don’t look good,” he said. “Hungover?”

“I wish,” he said. “I’ve been here all night, doing the pre-critical check list. I can’t stroll onboard ten minutes before an underway like… a sonarman.”

The electrical operator chimed in. “Hey man you volunteered to be a nuke. You could’ve been a sonarman. Choose your rate, choose your fate.”

“Ok,” said the throttleman. “I can’t stroll in ten minutes before… like an officer.”

“Hey,” said the EOOW. “You feel like becoming an officer, I’ll give you the brochure. I’m sure you’ll love it.”

The throttleman coughed again in response.

The EOOW hoped it was a hangover, because if it was a cold or something else contagious, surely they would all have it soon enough. The EOOW pulled at his collar; he didn’t feel all that great himself.

The throttleman coughed again, and then maneuvering grew silent.

“Well, here we are again,” said the Electrical Operator. “Under water.”

“Love it,” said the EOOW. “Underway on nuclear power.”

“What are they going to do with Dunham?” said the Reactor Operator.

“I have no idea,” said the EOOW. “But they’ll probably bust him. Fine him.”

“But no brig? Shit that’s a good deal. I’d lose a stripe and a few bucks for a three day fuckfest off the boat.”

“In your case it would be a three day jacking off fest,” said the electrical operator. “So think it over carefully.”

They all laughed at that, even their grumpy throttleman, but his laughter soon turned to violent coughs.

“My God,” said the EOOW. “Do you need a relief?”

The throttleman looked at him with real fear in his eyes, unable to stop. Suddenly he convulsed, arching his back, and collapsed to the deck. His head hit the steel wheel of the throttle on the way down, opening it incrementally. They began to speed up.

The Engineering Officer of the Watch, the only officer in the engine room, grabbed the 7MC microphone, wanting to announce to control that there was also an injured man in maneuvering. But then he began coughing too hard to speak.

The engineering duty officer came to maneuvering a few minutes later, wanting to know why the main engines were speeding up when no new bell had been announced. When he looked through the window of maneuvering, three men were unconscious and one was dead.

Panic began to sweep the boat.

Some men hid in their berthing compartments, instinctively knowing that their shipmates were a danger to them now, and these men did in fact survive a little longer. But the submerged ship’s atmosphere was a completely closed system and there was nowhere to hide.

Some men were led by nobler instincts to try to protect the boat and each other. A machinist secured the boat’s oxygen generators, just as he would during a rig for general emergency even though one had not yet been officially declared. He did it after watching his chief drop dead about ten feet away from him, deciding they were in an emergency even if an alarm had not yet made it official.

The captain, XO, and corpsman crowded into the captain’s stateroom, a medical book in front of them. The corpsman had given them all light blue surgical masks to wear.

The book was a large, dusty medical reference that the corpsman had brought with him. Captain Jefferies paged through it, looking for something, any kind of procedure that might help them. His job, as he saw it, was to identify the correct procedure and enforce its actions.

The XO saw that the captain’s lack of imagination might kill them.

“We have to blow to the surface,” said the XO. “Now.”

“I’m not sure that will save us,” said the corpsman.

“Well it will make us easier to find at least.”

The captain looked up at him, his eyes wide with as much confusion as fear. He’d made a career out of diligently following procedures, but now, when he needed one the most, there did not appear to be any doctrine to help them. He went back down to the list of pandemics and resumed reading.

The XO turned and started walking to control; somebody had to do it. He would throw the emergency blow actuators himself. They could court martial him if they wanted. As he turned, though, the captain began coughing.

The corpsman had his hand on his back as the coughs turned into spasms. The captain’s head fell on an unhelpful description on Ebola as he passed out.

Well now I’m in charge, thought the XO, as he started to sprint to the control room. He was half way up the ladder when the coughing began. He tried to pull himself up but the coughing was debilitating, consuming him. He fell face first onto the ladder as he passed out, knocking out two teeth.

By the time the XO died, there were just a dozen men left alive on the boat. The only surviving chief, Chief Cassidy, secured all the cooking equipment in the galley as he fought to hang on. He died turning off a deep fryer.

By then there were four men left. Two were in the engine room.

Lehane grew up poor in a decaying steel mill town in the hills of western Pennsylvania. His mom had a fondness for abusive boyfriends and he’d honed an instinct for survival that would have served him well in an infantry battalion, fighting from building to building or cave to cave. The military had been impressed by his sky-high ASVAB scores in high school, however, and had sent him into the nuclear navy instead, where he had excelled. He was one of those kids common in the military a generation or two earlier, a kid for whom barracks life was a distinct improvement in lifestyle: three guaranteed meals a day, occasional hot showers, and most of all some predictability about what each day would bring. The military of the United States had always been the surest path into the middle class for kids like Lehane, and while he shared in the communal bitching about the navy that they all did, to his core he was grateful for what the navy had done for him.

But his love of the navy had not erased his intuition for self-preservation, and from his watchstation deep inside the engine room, he could tell something was seriously wrong.

It started with the 1MC announcements about injured men, all over the ship. The voices in the announcements were tinged with confusion; he could tell things were unfolding that were frightening even to the most experienced men on the boat. Between announcements he could hear coughing from the other watchstanders in the engine room, violent, painful coughing that he could hear even over the chugging of the nearby air compressors.

Then it all stopped. The announcements, the coughing: it all stopped.

Quietly, he drifted aft, to the most remote part of the ship: shaft alley.

While in port, he’d read an incident report about a Freon casualty onboard a Trident submarine. Some dumbass had dumped the entire contents of one of the big refrigeration units. Because of the actions of some other dumbass ashore, that Freon had recently been replaced by a variant that, when it came in contact with the ship’s high-temperature atmosphere control equipment, actually mutated into Phosgene gas: nerve gas. One man had died and the whole ship had been in danger.

It had been a pretty spectacular incident.

He hadn’t been required to read it but he did anyway, fascinated by the chain of errors made, and by the improvised actions of the crew that had saved the day. Equally fascinating, as always in these incident reports, was what was unsaid. Who lost their job? Who went to jail? What did they do with the dead body? He’d asked around and had it on good authority that the boat was the Alabama: he’d vowed to find a veteran of the Alabama someday and fill in all the blanks.

At the end of that report, the Navy reported the results of some extensive tests they’d run to determine the path of airborne contaminants across a submarine. They’d run the experiments on both a Trident and a 688 boat, like the Boise, and the results had been similar. Given enough time, the boat’s ventilation systems would achieve what the chemists called “perfect mixing,” making the atmosphere perfectly homogenous everywhere in the boat. But that didn’t happen instantly. Depending on where the source of the contaminants was, it could sometimes take hours before it reached the entire boat. And in almost every scenario, and on both classes of submarines, shaft alley was where the air stayed untouched the longest. There’d been a color illustration of it in the book, a heat map with red and orange blobs representing the areas quickest to be contaminated (Crew’s Mess and Control) and a soothing blue area for the area that remained safe the longest: shaft alley.

It was not a surprise to anyone who had ever spent time in shaft alley, the aft-most end of the engine room where the shaft that connected the ship’s propeller to the main engines actually penetrated the hull. It always smelled damp back there, the heaviness of unmoving air. And Lehane thought that unmoving air might be just what he needed.

As he walked aft he secured all the engine room fans he passed.

By the time he got to shaft alley, the ship had become ominously quiet. In shaft alley he could see, however, that the screw was still turning, which was mildly comforting. He counted the turns against his watch and saw they were still just going five knots. Suddenly the speed of the shaft increased, and that gave him hope, even though it had occurred without the announcement of a new bell. The change in speed made it appear that someone was still in control, perhaps clearing baffles at a higher speed in order to go to periscope depth. The acceleration stopped, however, and the speed smoothly reduced back to five knots.

From shaft alley he could also see the hydraulics that controlled the stern planes and the rudder; these also moved slowly, small iterative motions that showed the ship was just maintaining course. You could take manual control from back there, steering the ship from shaft alley in the event of a problem with the ship control in the control room. Which was why there was a sound powered phone back there.

Lehane picked up the phone and began speaking.

“Shaft alley here… shaft alley on the line.”

There was no response.

He was just getting ready to hang up when he heard a voice. “Shaft alley?”

“Shaft alley on the line!”

“This is Baer… I’m forward of maneuvering. I just looked, they are all unconscious in there. What the fuck is going on?”

“Get back to shaft alley,” said Lehane. “Turn off every fan you pass on the way back.”

Baer showed up a few minutes later, his eyes wide with fright.

“You see anybody else?”

“Nobody on their feet,” said Baer. “How about you?”

“Nobody. And nobody is on the line.”

“Jesus Christ, what do you think it is?”

“No idea,” said Lehane. “Something in the air I guess. Poison.”

“They need to blow to the surface!” said Baer. “What are they waiting for?”

“Maybe there’s nobody left to do it.”

Baer slumped at that, and went pale. “Oh fuck.”

They both looked down at the smooth shiny steel of the hydraulics for the stern planes. “Somebody is still driving, it looks like,” said Baer, trying to make himself feel better.

“It’s the autopilot,” said Lehane. “I’m pretty sure. You can tell by how smoothly it’s working… super small adjustments.”

They watched and confirmed what Lehane was saying.

“What about manual control?” said Baer suddenly. “We can control it from back here! We could just jack those stern planes, drive right up to the surface! We could go right up through the engine room hatch!”

Hope shot through Lehane for just a moment at that… it was a good idea. He looked down at the controls and ran through the procedure in his mind.

“Fuck,” he said. “We can’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“They have to enable remote operation in control.”

“Goddamit!” said Baer.

They ruminated, again their eyes drawn to the robotically efficient movements of the stern planes and rudder.

“I’ll do it,” said Baer.

“Do what?” said Lehane.

“I’ll go forwardand shift control to shaft alley.”

“No,” said Lehane. “Don’t do it. We don’t know what’s going on up there.”

“I’ll wear an EAB,” he said. EABs were air tight rubber masks that could connect via their hose to manifolds throughout the ship, designed to provide an emergency supply of air.

Lehane thought it a bad idea but in truth… he didn’t have a better one. But looking at Baer — he looked a little pale. Maybe it was just fear, and he hadn’t coughed once. But if one of them was to go forward, he wanted to make sure they made it all the way. And Lehane still felt strong.

“You ever do this?” he asked. “You ever take local control?”

“Shit yes. Dozens of times.”

“Then you should stay here. I haven’t done it that much. I’ll go forward and shift control. Wear the phones, but don’t wait for an order. As soon as you hear control shift, pull in, start driving us up. I’ll get back here as soon as I can.”

“You sure?”

Lehane nodded and pulled an EAB out of a locker at their feet.

“Don’t unplug that thing,” said Baer.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said.

Lehane pulled the mask over his head and sucked in before he plugged it in, pulling the mask against his face, verifying it was airtight. He plugged in and with a hiss the ship’s compressed air banks began supplying him air.

“You ready?”

Lehane nodded. “This will be the fastest trip forward ever,” he said, his voice distorted through the plastic voice box of the mask. “I bet I can do it in one breath.”

“Go,” said Baer. “And good luck.”

Lehane was terrified at a deep level as he walked briskly forward: the silence of the ship weighed on him, and he felt the eyes of the dead upon him as he moved. But his fear was tempered by a strength he felt as he walked forward; the EAB would save him. That slightly pressurized, slightly oily-smelling supply of air from ship’s pressurized air banks would protect him from whatever had befallen his shipmates.

He made it all the way to the engine room hatch before he had to stop and take a breath. He was in the “tunnel” the shielded passageway that led from the forward part of the ship, through the reactor compartment, and into the engine room. You weren’t supposed to loiter in the reactor compartment because even with its shielding it was still one of the higher radiation areas of the boat. But, thought Lehane as he caught his breath: that’s the least of my worries now. He took one more deep breath, unplugged, and moved forward.

He stepped over a man in the forward compartment; his face was down so Lehane couldn’t see who it was. Crew’s Mess was filled with men, and he couldn’t avoid looking into their dead eyes. None of them wore EAB’s which, in a strange way, gave Lehane hope. Maybe they hadn’t had time in the forward compartment, where the poison, whatever it was, was strongest. And maybe the EAB would save him.

He made it almost to the control room before he had to stop again, he was seeing stars from needing air so badly. The final few steps into control were blocked by the dead body of the XO. That was bad; the XO was the officer on the boat he trusted the most, and he wished the man would have made it to control.

He plugged in and exhaled, and then sucked in a deep breath as fast as the EAB would supply it to him. He coughed a little then. It occurred to him as he breathed the compressed air that it was just that: compressed air. The same air that surrounded him was jammed into the ship’s air banks by the High Pressure Air Compressors, or “Hipacs,” and redistributed to them throughout the ship by the EAB system of manifolds. If the hipacs took in the ship’s damaged air, then he was breathing that same air now. It all depended on which bank was online and when the air had been compressed. But he remembered the unmistakable sound of those hipacs running in the engine room. He inhaled deeply again, and was interrupted by a cough.

Well shit, he thought. But he was just feet away from control now. He took a final deep breath, slowly, trying to control the coughing welling up inside him. Then he unplugged and dashed into control.

The diving officer had fallen over in his chair, and was hanging across his seat belt. The COW was sprawled on the floor. Both planesmen were dead. Their controls had been usurped by the autopilot. And now it would be usurped again, as he shifted control to shaft alley and Baer to drive them to the surface. Lehane was wracked by a violent cough, but as it let up briefly, he lunged for the space between the two planesmen where he could activate the hydraulic valve that would give Baer control. They were just 150 feet beneath the surface. With the stern planes all the way up, they would be on the surface in seconds.

He had his hands on the valve handle when he got slammed in the head. He fell to the ground, struck hard. Barely conscious, he instinctively rolled away, trying to evade his attacker, but the EAB hose constrained him.

Fuck it, he thought, I’m sick anyway. He stripped the mask from his head. As he rolled away from it, his attacker struck again, bringing a heavy book down upon his now empty mask, crushing it.

Jumping to his feet, his ears still ringing from the blow, he could see it was Lieutenant Dwyer, the Officer of the Deck, who had attacked him. He was wearing an EAB that did not obscure the deranged look in his eyes.

“Sir, we need to shift control to shaft alley!”

“Not without the Captain’s order.” He was brandishing a heavy binder of procedures as if it was holy scripture.

“Fuck that,” said Lehane. He lunged again for the valve and the OOD came at him again with the binder. Lehane dodged it and it crashed into the console.

Jesus Christ, he thought, he’s literally trying to kill me with a procedure.

He moved for the valve again now, when behind him he heard the familiar sound of a .45 ratcheting.

“Don’t move, Petty Officer Lehane.”

He turned to see Dwyer pointing a service .45 right at his head.

“Sir, we have to shift control… Baer is in shaft alley, he’s ready to drive us up.”

“Not without an order from the captain.”

“Sir…”

“Move toward that valve again and I’ll kill you.”

Lehane felt himself growing weak, he didn’t know how much longer he could stand. He needed to cough but was afraid the movement might cause Dwyer to shoot. Dwyer still had his EAB on, it was hissing at him as he breathed hard. Even sick and weak, Dwyer couldn’t miss if he shot him: the control room was too small.

Suddenly the OOD coughed hard, and the inside of his EAB mask was covered in a thick coating of blood.

Lehane seized the opportunity, lunging sideways as the OOD squeezed off a blind shot; it hit the dead diving officer squarely between his shoulder blades with a thump. Lehane jumped on Dwyer as he stumbled backward from the recoil. The gun flew out of his hand.

Lehane punched him once, fought the urge to do more damage to the officer who had just moments before tried to kill him. But the OOD was weak; that shot was clearly one of his last acts. Dwyer laid flat on his back, gurgling on his own blood, and Lehane didn’t think he could hurt him anymore.

He turned back toward the ship control station and lurched toward the valve again. He was wracked by coughing as he went. He found the valve, and between coughs, he pushed in the safety lever, and turned the valve ninety degrees. He slumped to his knees and watched the stern planes indicator.

Nothing happened. They remained at zero degrees as the ship, oblivious to all the chaos inside her, steamed steadily onward.

He waited a few seconds, realized that his friend Baer was dead now too. He started coughing again, knew he was very near the end. He took the valve in his hand again, shifted control back to the control room. He would drive the ship up himself. He pushed Diaz aside and started to get in his seat, but he could no longer maneuver at all. Violent coughs consumed what was left of his energy.

He put both hands on the stern planes, remembered that the autopilot was still engaged. He turned to deactivate it. Lehane passed out as he reached for the control panel. He died ten minutes later.

There was one man left.

Seaman Luke Winn was sound asleep in his rack, that small rectangle of private space the ship had allotted him. He’d gone to bed with the permission of the benevolent Chief Zimmerman, between the jobs of painting and washing dishes in the scullery. He was deeply exhausted, and that fatigue, combined with the gentle motion of the ship as it went to sea, sent him into a deep, dreamless sleep.

When he awoke, he felt more rested than he had in days, happy to his core, deeply grateful to his chief, his chain of command, and to the United States Navy for taking mercy on him and granting him a few hours of much-needed sleep. He thought for a moment how odd it was to be at sea. It was something he’d anticipated, wondered and worried about, for months. At bootcamp he’d imagined his first departure as a dramatic moment, with brass bands playing and waves crashing. Instead he’d slept through the whole thing — and that didn’t bother him at all. Instead, a bolt of optimism shot through him about the adventure he’d just begun, a feeling that had been hard to get in touch with while he was covered in paint in the torpedo room bilge. He was underway on a nuclear submarine! It was weird and cool and something no one else in his high school class could say.

He looked at his watch, pushing the button to light up the blue digital numbers in his tiny pocket of dark space. Panic shot through him: he’d slept for four hours! He was two hours overdue in the scullery. Why had no one come to wake him? How much trouble was he in?

He jumped out of his rack, quickly stepped into his uniform and jammed his feet into his boots, furious at himself. He jumped through the curtain of the berthing compartment and into the fluorescent passageway, half expecting to see Chief Zimmerman charging toward him.

He nearly tripped over a dead body at his feet.

Further up the passage way, he saw another.

The ship’s machinery around him hummed with electricity and purpose, but he couldn’t hear a human sound of any kind.

“Hey!” he yelled, hoarse from sleep. He cleared his throat and yelled again. “Injured man!”

No one responded.

He walked carefully forward, stepping over each body in turn. He passed another berthing area where he saw a man hanging halfway out of his bunk, his face contorted in pain.

He reached Crew’s Mess and saw more dead men than he could count. Chief Zimmerman was in the center of the space, sprawled in a chair, a coffee cup spilled in front him, a brown puddle at his feet. His eyes were wide open, and looking right at him, as if angry at him for missing his stint in the scullery.

He fought off a growing tide of panic. Was it a nightmare? He only wished he was still sleeping. He fought the urge to return to his rack, the last place he’d felt safe. Was it radiation? He remembered guys at bootcamp who had exchanged stories about the hazards of nuclear power, how it would make your testicles shriveled and their hair fall out. At sub school, these had been countered by bland praise by engineering officers on behalf of nuclear power, stories of its harmlessness that were only slightly more convincing. Had the ship run out of air? Had they been attacked by some exotic weapon? None of these made sense, none explained why he was still on his feet.

Staring at the dead bodies of his shipmates, he tried to figure out what to do. Like most of the new men, he was supposed to report to the Crew’s Mess for all manner of alarms and battle stations; the space was now filled with their bodies. Should he now go to control? If there were men alive anywhere, he thought, that’s where they might be. Could they radio for help? Is that something they can do underwater? It occurred to him that he didn’t even know for certain that the ship was underway.

That seemed like a vital piece of information. Maybe this disaster had befallen them pierside, and he could just climb out of the boat, into safety. He pictured a team of scientists topside, men in spacesuits with Geiger counters, trying to determine if anyone was alive on the Boise. He’d open the hatch, or at least bang on it until a rescuer heard him. He wondered: would he be a hero? Would they make him go to sea on another boat? He closed his eyes to try to sense if they were moving. Encouragingly, the ship seemed completely motionless.

He ran forward to control, trying to avoid looking any more dead men in the eyes as he went. On the ladder to control the XO was blocking him, his gaping mouth showing missing teeth. Is that a symptom of something? Didn’t high radiation make your teeth fall out? Winn fought the urge to reach into his mouth and feel.

Up the ladder and into control.

Bodies were everywhere in the cramped space. Two dead men in their seats, the helm and lee helm. The Diving Officer was strapped into his chair with a large hole between his shoulder blades. On the floor near him was an enlisted man Winn knew: Diaz. In Diaz’s seat was someone Winn didn’t recognize. He must be a nuke, he thought, those guys kept to themselves in those rare times they weren’t in the engine room. But why would a nuke be on the helm? Control had the look of a fierce struggle that had been frozen in time. Winn smelled the tang of cordite in the air, a recent gunshot.

“Hello?” He shouted to no one.

He turned to see the Officer of the Deck, sprawled on the ground, masked in an EAB; Winn walked over to get a better look. The mask was half filled with thick, congealing blood. The OOD’s hand was extended and Winn followed it with his eyes; he saw the .45 lying on the deck.

He picked it up. It gave him an odd sense of comfort, even though he couldn’t imagine what good the weapon would do him now. But the pistol was, after all, one of the few pieces of equipment on the boat that he’d been trained to operate, in two sweaty days at the range at Great Lakes Naval Training Center. He stuck it in his belt.

When he stood, his eyes caught the red digital numbers of the bearing repeater. One hundred and fifty feet, five knots.

He sighed with despair at the confirmation. At some level he’d so vividly pictured himself along the pier, climbing to his salvation, that it took him a disorienting, crushing minute to comprehend again that they were in fact underwater. He pictured 150 feet of ocean above him, an infinity of water in every other direction.

He would have blown to the surface right then, on his own, had he known how. He’d heard of the “chicken switches” that would fill the main ballast tanks with air and bring them to the surface so fast that the ship would actually broach, and leap out of the ocean. He’d been promised that they would do it early in their patrol as a training evolution, and that it was one of the more thrilling things that could happen on a submarine.

But control was covered in valves, and switches, and buttons, and he had no idea which would bring them to the surface. He realized that he might just as easily, in his ignorance, throw open valves that would sink them to the bottom of the ocean.

As he searched the control room, methodically looking for the fabled chicken switches, he wondered for the first time why he had been spared. Maybe he was just genetically fortunate, immune to whatever it was, like one of those lone survivors in any of the many zombie movies he’d watched back in the real world. More likely, he thought, it had something to do with him being asleep during those first few hours. He was the only man on the entire crew asleep then, it had taken the direct permission of the captain to make that happen. Perhaps asleep, breathing slowly in the confines of his rack, he had somehow escaped the most dangerous phase of whatever the hazard was.

He was starting to despair at the number of valve handles and switches in control, all labeled indecipherably, when he stood between the two fallen planesmen.

Fuck it, he thought. I’ll drive us up.

Like shooting the .45, it was something he’d actually been taught, in the ship control trainers at Sub School in Connecticut. He pushed the dead nuke, gently at first, and then harder, as he made room for himself. He cringed when the man’s head hit the deck with a harsh thud. He sat down, put both hands on the wheel, and said a silent prayer before he slowly pulled the wheel toward his chest.

The stern planes indicator immediately showed the motion, a red arrow on a dial that moved up. Soon after, the ship responded, and began to move upward. Winn whooped for joy as he watched the numbers of the ship’s depth indicator decrease as he drove the ship toward the surface.

They accelerated as they got shallower, then the boat leveled off. Winn actually heard waves against the side of the ship; they were on the surface! He’d done it. He jumped out the chair and ran toward the hatch that led to the bridge.

He climbed the ladder and studied the hatch, eager to figure out how to open it. As he was looking, he felt the ship take a down angle.

Without his hands on the stern planes to override it, the ship’s autopilot and reasserted itself, and drove them downward.

“Fuck!” said Winn. He jumped down the ladder and back to the stern planes. He grabbed the wheel without sitting down and pulled it forward again. Again the planes and ship responded. But as soon as he let go, the ship wanted to drive itself deep again. Winn had no idea what the autopilot was, or that the button to disable it was just inches away from him.

Winn pulled off his belt, and tied it to the wheel, pulled it toward him, and then secured the other end of the belt to Diaz’s seat. It took him a few tries to get the knot right; knots were not something he’d learned at boot camp. The planes weren’t completely pulled forward, and the knot wasn’t pretty, but it was working. The ship rose once again.

Winn was sweating now, nervous at how close he was to success. Once again the numbers on the depth indicator decreased until he felt the moment they surfaced, when the ship rolled and he could hear the waterline against the hull. Now only the hatch separated him from blue sky and fresh air. He looked at the hatch with its steel wheel and heavy construction; it was one of the more primitive looking pieces of equipment on the boat. Winn had never operated it before but he knew he would figure it out. He had to.

It had an arm, a latch, just like on the watertight hatches inside the ship. He tried to use the latch, but the hatch was motionless as he tried to move it, as if it were welded shut. There had to be something else.

The other major mechanical feature of the hatch was a shiny steel wheel. Winn thought that must be the locking mechanism, and he would need to turn it. Another piece of timeless wisdom the Navy had communicated to him: lefty loosey, righty tighty. He began turning the wheel counter-clockwise. What would he do once on the surface? He wondered as he worked. Signal his rescuers somehow, maybe with the pistol. He would shoot it into the air until someone heard him, if the sight of a surfaced submarine wasn’t enough to get someone’s attention.

After a few hard turns, it spun freely, and he spun it all the way open. Then he put his shoulder against the hatch again, and pushed up with all his strength.

It didn’t budge.

He banged against it, until his shoulder was sore, but still it didn’t move.

He jumped down from the ladder and stared up at it. The ship was still on the surface, although he could see the knot on his belt was slipping and the angle of the stern planes was drifting down. In frustration, he pulled the .45 from his belt, released the safety, and fired at the hatch.

The concavity of the hatch focused the bullet like a lens and fired it right back at him. The ricochet went through his left bicep and buried itself in the deck by his feet. For the first instant, the noise inside the tight confines of control was almost as painful as the pain in his arm. He cursed himself for being so stupid, the hatch looked like the single most solid piece of steel on the boat, a primitive, almost medieval holdover from another age. And he thought he could shoot it open? Just like he thought he could shoot the gun into the sky until someone came out to rescue him. What was the expression his dad had used? When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And the only tool he had at the moment was a standard issue .45 caliber pistol. He gripped his arm and watched the blood seep through his fingers.

He climbed the ladder and looked at the shiny spot where his bullet had struck. A mark in the paint was the only visible sign of damage. He pushed his shoulder into that spot, and pushed with all his strength. As he faced downward he watched his blood pool on the deck.

What Winn didn’t realize was that a slight pressure difference had developed between the interior of the Boise and the rest of the world. This was a result of the air compressors running during their voyage out to sea. As the machines inhaled on the interior of the ship and pressed that air into tanks, the pressure of the boat decreased. It was a slight difference, in terms of pounds per square inch, but that pressure difference now acted against the entire surface of the watertight hatch, meaning it would take nearly one thousand pounds of force to open.

This was an entirely normal circumstance, and the ship was designed for it. Just to the right of the ladder where Winn stood, pushing himself against the hatch, was a small valve that led to the interior of the bridge trunk. Opening this valve allowed pressure in the ship to equalize, as air hissed through it, until the pressure difference decreased enough that the hatch could be opened.

But as with the autopilot, Winn had no idea.

So he spent hours pushing the hatch that three men could not have lifted. Finally exhausted, he slumped to the deck and sat down, tears running down his cheeks and mingling with the pool of his own blood that he sat in. He watched as the knot on his belt slowly came undone and slipped off. The ship patiently drove itself back to 150 feet. He did nothing to stop it. It was as if some invisible, malevolent force, too powerful to fight, wanted the ship to continue its journey, and that force was controlling the sternplanes, keeping the hatch shut, and untying his belt. He felt the gun in the small of his back and was again comforted by the fact that there was at least one piece of machinery on the boat he knew how to operate.

He put the gun in his mouth and shot it.

Every man on the Boise was dead.

Later that day, the BST buoys began to alarm, announcing to the dead crew that they had forgotten to reset the timer. After twenty minutes, they both launched with a thud, sending radio beacons to the surface. It was the machinery's only acknowledgement of trouble aboard.

Days passed. When the Chief of the Boat’s alarm clock began bleating at 0600 each morning, the sound echoed through a boat that was beginning to deteriorate from lack of care. While the oxygen generators had been shut down by a diligent watchstander, the oxygen bleed was still in progress: a small valve led to the boat’s pressurized flasks of oxygen, releasing it at a controlled rate to supply air to the crew. But with no one breathing the air, the oxygen level crept slowly upward, in excess of 25 %. This was hazardous because an oxygen-rich atmosphere increased the chances of a fire, and made any fire more intense.

The air conditioners were among the boat’s most fickle machines, and the most critical. They were equipped with numerous automatic shut downs and safety features. An air filter was due to be changed but with no one to change it became dirty and blocked. Air flow through the unit was hampered and eventually the condenser froze up, because of the lack of warm air flowing across it. The unit sensed the low temperature of the Freon and shut itself down.

With a large amount of machinery still running, especially in the engine room, the temperature of the boat began to rise. And it was not just ambient temperatures. Numerous electronic devices, including the computers in control, actually had chilled water flow through them, water that needed to be cooled in return by the air conditioners. These computers, while not in use, remained on, and their temperatures went up rapidly. There were two in control, and one shut itself off as its temperature soared. The breaker on the other computer failed to trip, and it started to get hot.

Temperatures and oxygen levels steadily rose as the Boise cruised westward.