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“But he was clipped in, right?”

“That’s right. But he was wearing a long line, because he’d been in charge and was running the length of the ship. When he slipped, he fell almost to the water line before the line caught.”

“But it held?”

The master chief nodded. “It held him. And it held him above the waterline. Worked just like it was supposed to. He didn’t drown.”

Jabo felt bad for making him dredge up the bad memory. But the master chief continued.

“He just hung there, right above the water. But the waves would hit him, and he kept slamming against the side of the ship. By then they’d called me up there, and you could hear him yelling. At first, it was just like, ‘Shit! Goddamn!’ stuff like that, each time he hit the hull. But after a few minutes, he started screaming, in pain, as his bones started breaking. It was getting rougher but now we couldn’t submerge, not with the chief hanging there. We were all on the line, trying to haul him up, but every time we got him moving, a big wave would come and knock us down, or we’d lose the grip. By the time we finally pulled him up, he hadn’t made a noise for ten minutes. I knew he was dead. The ocean had beaten the shit out of him—broken almost every bone in his body. We put him on a stretcher and then we practically had to pour him into a body bag.” There was a long silence as they stared at the brown plastic that hid Howard from view.

“What happened after?”

The master chief sighed. “We stuck him in the cooler until we got to Roda. And after that, the Navy limited those safety lines to three feet in length.” He paused, and then took three Polaroid photos from his small desk. “Here…you might need these. I took them before we moved the body so there’d be some record of it.”

“Thanks master chief,” said Jabo, taking the pictures. “I guess I better get down there.”

•   •   •

Machinery Two showed few signs of the casualty. It wasn’t like the fire, which left blackened walls and a smell of smoke that still clung to that part of the missile compartment. The hazards in this casualty had been invisible, and if there were any residual affects, they were invisible too. All the damage control equipment had been stowed, and the place had been restored well by the crew and the watchstanders who didn’t want to be reminded that there were a large number of ways a man might die onboard a submarine.

Machinist Mate Second Class Renfro was on watch, just hanging the oxygen generator logs back on their hook when Jabo walked up.

“You guys port and starboard now?”

Renfro nodded. “Yeah, for now. I guess Padua is getting close to qualifying, but for now it’s me and Schmidt, six on and six off.” While he’d just begun standing port and starboard, Jabo could see that the prospect of it exhausted him.

“I’m doing the investigation…can I take a look at the logs?”

Renfro nodded and took them off the hook.

The sheet was creased and dirty. Each sheet of logs held twenty-four hours worth of information, four full watches, so the sheet on the clipboard was the same one Howard had used. Jabo could tell they’d hit the deck when Howard did. Looking it over, nothing jumped out as unusual, other than the oxygen generator drifting out of spec. If anything, they were sharper than a normal set of logs, they were written more precisely, each number and word written cleanly in the center of its block, the notes on back more detailed and thoughtful than the norm. Based on the logs only, Howard didn’t seem like a guy getting ready to murder the entire crew…he looked like a petty officer trying to impress his chief.

“You notice anything weird?” he asked Renfro.

“Not really,” he said. “I can’t believe he tried to kill us all.”

“We don’t know that yet. We may never know. The whole thing is hard for me to understand too.”

“No sir, I mean I really don’t believe it. I knew Howard, he wasn’t a nut case.”

“I liked Howard too, but isn’t that what everybody says after somebody has gone off the deep end? That’s the nature of being crazy, I guess, it’s unpredictable.”

“You really think Howard was crazy, sir? Then I guess your investigation is pretty much over.”

Jabo was stung by that. “You’re right. We still don’t know exactly what happened, and I’ll try my best to find out.”

Renfro nodded skeptically. “No sir, it’s okay. It’s just…I mean, if Howard wanted to kill everyone from back here, there would have better ways to do it than with Freon, for fuck’s sake. I mean, did he even know about the nerve gas shit? I sure as fuck didn’t. I asked around…nobody else in the division did either.”

Jabo nodded…it was a good point. That message had just come out. He was startled to remember that even the captain hadn’t seen it.

“And if I was going to try something crazy like that…I’d start right here,” he said, slapping the gray metal side of the oxygen generator. “You could flood this space with pure hydrogen in about five minutes. The alarm would be going off in control, but it would be over before anybody could get down here to do anything. Light your cigarette lighter and this thing would blow so hard it would crack the ship in half.”

Jabo nodded. It would be a much more efficient way of destroying the ship than dumping a few thousand pounds of Freon and hoping that it would mutate into a deadly gas like it was supposed to. And nothing and no one could prevent the watchstander in machinery two from doing it.

“Bring me a copy of those logs when your watch is over,” said Jabo, pointing. “I’ll be on the conn.”

“Aye, aye sir,” said Renfro, still a little surly. Clearly his loyalty to Howard as a shipmate and a member of the same division had trumped the suspicion that he may have tried to sabotage the ship. But even putting a shipmate’s loyalty to one of his peers aside…Renfro had made some valid points.

Jabo climbed the ladder down to lower level: the scene of the crime. He knew that none of the chemical compounds that had so alarmed them, Freon or phosgene, had any odor, but he still inhaled deeply, and smelled only the vague odor of diesel fuel and amine from the scrubbers above. He stepped across the space to the purple-handled Freon valve.

It was one of thousands of valve operators he’d seen thousands of times without ever touching, or even given much thought to. He had been involved in freeze seal maintenance in other areas of the boat. He wasn’t sure if that particular valve had ever been operated during his time on
Alabama
. A red DANGER tag hung from the operator now, hung there at the OOD’s order after the casualty had abated. It seemed superfluous now, since Jabo was fairly certain that there wasn’t an ounce of Freon left in the system.

He pulled the Polaroids that Master Chief Cote had given him from his pocket and looked them over.

He winced at the image of Howard’s dead body, rendered harshly in the electric flash. He was sprawled on the deck, his clipboard in front of him, the log sheet that Jabo had just reviewed on the deck behind him. There were three photos in all, of the same scene, taken from different angles. The quality was not great, and the light was poor, but overall the master chief had done an admirable job of preserving images of the scene. Howard seemed to be reaching for the valve handle; his whole body was oriented in that direction. But that didn’t make a lot of sense; it had taken a while for all the Freon to dump from the system, Howard wouldn’t have collapsed right after turning it. Maybe he’d turned the valve and then had second thoughts, but been overcome before he could save himself.

Jabo backed up and bumped into the treadmill. There was a red tag hanging from it, as well, this one signed by the corpsman. Apparently, the master chief wanted to keep people from exercising down there until they were absolutely positive that there was no atmospheric contamination to worry about….he would find out all the details when he read the captain’s night orders on his next watch. He breathed deeply and took in the whole scene. What had happened down there? What had Howard been thinking in those final moments? He took a look at the photos again, flipped through to the tightest close up that the master chief had taken.

In the photograph, Jabo noticed again the log sheet, that record that Howard had so carefully kept. It was lying on the deck beside him. And for the first time, he noticed that another sheet behind it, a piece of yellow notebook paper. Jabo was certain that it was not on the clipboard he had just reviewed with Renfro; he wondered what it might be. The resolution of the picture was too low to offer any clues.

He looked up, realized that he had been staring off into space a little, his mind a blank. It wasn’t Freon, he knew, or nerve gas. It was exhaustion. He felt a pang about the accusation in Renfro’s words, about how the verdict seemed already to have been made. He vowed to himself to conduct a real investigation, the best he could, but for now…he was tired beyond words. He hadn’t slept in a day, and would be on watch in a matter of hours. He checked his watch and verified that he had spent the two hours on the investigation that the XO had directed. He would go forward and get a couple of hours of sleep, and hope he could get through the watch without falling asleep on the conn.

He walked forward through lower level, both because he was too tired to climb a ladder, and to avoid the accusing eyes of MM2 Renfro.

•   •   •

He checked his watch as he neared his stateroom. The XO hadn’t been quite right. He would have about an hour and forty-five minutes to sleep before he took the watch. The exhaustion hit him in waves as he anticipated climbing in the rack. It wouldn’t be nearly enough, but it would be something, and his body longed for any rest.

He stepped through the door. The overhead lights were off but Kincaid was stepping into his Nikes, ready to go workout.

“Where the fuck you been?” he said. “You need to be getting some sleep, shipmate.”

“Investigating. And all the workout gear is secured.” He was already out of his poopie suit, down to his plaid boxers and T-shirt. He hung it on the door on the middle hook, his hook, and climbed into the middle rack and pulled the blanket over him. The entire process had taken him about ten seconds.

“Secured? What the fuck! Why is it secured?”

But Jabo was already in his rack with the curtain closed. His thoughts about the tragedy, plus the image of Howard’s dead, gray face charged through his mind, fueled by three cups of strong coffee and the residual adrenaline from combating the casualty. As his head hit the pillow, he allowed himself to think about Angi, and felt the sharp pang of how much he missed her, how much he loved her. He thought about their first date, the first time he kissed her, on the steps of McTyeire Hall. He remembered the sound the wind made in the dried leaves of the live oaks that surrounded them, the taste of her lipstick, the surprised way she inhaled a little when he made his move. And then he was asleep.

•   •   •

He never would have awoken from the noise alone when Hallorann entered; the young sailor was deliberately, theatrically quiet as he crept in. Hallorann considered leaving the document without a word, but the significance of it gnawed at him, even if he couldn’t attach words to its importance, and it had almost been lost once already. He wanted to convey it personally. And he felt like, for some reason, he should lose no time. He cautiously pulled back the thick red curtain to the middle rack to look at the back of Lieutenant Jabo’s sleeping head.

“Sir?” he whispered. He said it again, slightly louder. The only response was slow, even breathing. He reached his hand out, hesitated, and then pushed his shoulder.

The breathing changed rhythm slightly, but it took another sharp push before the lieutenant finally rolled over, and his heavy eyes fluttered awake.

“Sir?”

Jabo licked his lips. “What?”

“I talked to the OOD, Lieutenant Hein…he said you were conducting the investigation. I found this in machinery two…I was on one of the fan teams.” He held up the yellow sheet of paper. Jabo raised an eyebrow; even in his sleep he remembered the paper in the photograph.

“What’s on it?”

“Not much…I mean I’m not sure. But I thought you should have it.”

Jabo stared at him for a moment, and Hallorann was afraid maybe he was still really asleep, talking with his eyes open while his mind slept on. It was a phenomenon he’d become familiar with since his time at sea, where exhaustion and sleep deprivation were taken to levels he’d never known. But then Lieutenant Jabo cleared his throat, and said, “Put it there. On my desk.”

Hallorann hesitated, wanted to explain why he thought it was important, how the neat entries made over several days and dated carefully must mean that it was an important document. He was afraid it might get lost, as it nearly had been before, or forgotten, sitting among several piles of documents and books that crowded the lieutenant’s desk. He started to say something about the evident importance of the page, but when he turned back from the desk, the lieutenant was already asleep again.

He placed it on the desk as he’d been directed, then pulled the curtain back across Jabo’s rack and left. He was due down in the galley in an hour, it was the second day of his two-week long stint in the scullery washing dishes. Must be nice being an officer, he thought as he left: sleeping until nearly eleven o’clock in the morning like that.

•   •   •

The navigator was alone in the stateroom he shared with Ensign Duggan. Normally just a red curtain was pulled across his doorway, as department heads were expected to always be available. But he had closed the seldom-operated sliding door.

Not that he could sleep. He was too conscious of the ship’s speed and depth as they raced ahead, almost blind, through the dark ocean. The ship would shudder and groan occasionally, vibrating in resonant frequencies with the massive equipment in the engine room that was operating at its limits. He extended his hand to the hull, just inches from his pillow, and felt the cold steel, the sole barrier between him and the sea. He fought off the panic that always arose when he thought about it.

He wasn’t afraid to fall asleep, he just couldn’t, his body wouldn’t let him. He wasn’t afraid of nightmares, he knew the nightmares would come whether he was asleep or awake.