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“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.