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“Oh no, honey. . .”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•   •   •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Removes carbon dioxide,” said Duggan.

“What creates carbon dioxide?”

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

“Right,” said Jabo. Which is why non-qualified personnel on the boat like Duggan were sometimes called “scrubber loads.” Along with non-qual, nub, dink (short for “delinquent”), and host of other insults. “So how does it remove CO
₂
?”

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

“What catalyst?”

“MEA. It heats up the MEA…”

“How hot?”

Duggan stopped. “I don’t know.”

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

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

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

“A burner. Removes hydrogen.”

“And?”

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

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

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

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

“Danny? Can I ask a stupid question?”

Jabo stopped. “Sure.”

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

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

“What about everything else?”

“Everything else?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Get OOD permission.”

“Before that.”

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

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

Duggan nodded. Jabo pointed to the phone.

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

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

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

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

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

•   •   •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Six hundred and eighty feet?” he said.

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

“My answer.”

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

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

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

“Yes sir.”

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

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

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