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

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

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

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

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

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

Jantzen repeated his words into the phone.

•   •   •

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

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

•   •   •

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

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

“Thank you sir.”

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

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

“A book? In the fucking dryer?”

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

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

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

“That’s right.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And Howard fucked up too.”

“Yes sir, it looks that way.”

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

“Yes sir.”

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

“Good idea sir.”

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

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

“Just asking the question.”

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

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

“Relieve Hein at periscope depth, aye sir.”

•   •   •

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

“Howard. We were just talking about you.”

“I didn’t do anything!”

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

“But I didn’t!”

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

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

“And the book?

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

“So what do you think happened?”

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

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

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

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

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

•   •   •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•   •   •

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But the baby?” she was smiling.

Angi raised an eyebrow.

“Cindy Soldato told me.”

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

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