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

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

•   •   •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•   •   •

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

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

The JOs nodded and muttered affirmatively.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Faster, sir.”

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

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

Again the assembled officers mumbled in agreement.

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

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

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

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

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

“Sit down, Danny.”

He did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes sir.”

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

“Not at all, sir.”

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

“Understood, sir.”

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

“Yes sir.”

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

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

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

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

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

“No burial at sea?”

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

“Yes sir.”

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

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

“Yes sir.”

Jabo stood, and began to walk to the door.

“Danny?” said the captain.

“Yes sir?”

“Don’t fuck this up.”

“Aye aye sir.”

•   •   •

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

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

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

“Are you doing the investigation, Lieutenant?”

Jabo nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The second time?”

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

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

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

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