“Whatever happened between White and his XO, it’s clear he showed extraordinary courage, selflessness, and initiative in saving Philadelphia. That’s ultimately why I accepted his transfer for Roanoke. But I share some of the COB’s concerns about who PO2 White is when there isn’t a fire. I need someone to keep an eye on him, and let Farrington or me know if there are any problems. I believe that you, Spicer, are the man for the job.”
Tim gulped. “Me, sir?”
Captain Weber arched an eyebrow. “Is that going to be a problem, Spicer?”
“No sir. Sorry, sir,” Tim said quickly.
He knew why the captain had chosen him. He had saved one man’s life, and only by being in the right place at the right time, but apparently now he was the go-to guy for keeping an eye on potentially difficult sailors. He supposed he should feel flattered, but he couldn’t help wondering whether this was a good idea. What did he know about keeping White—or anyone, for that matter—on the right path? He was a sonar tech, not a shrink.
“See to it I didn’t make a mistake accepting White’s transfer to Roanoke,” Captain Weber said. “Dismissed.”
“Aye-aye, sir,” Tim said.
He turned and started out of the stateroom.
“Actually, Spicer, hold on a moment.”
Tim turned back to him. “Yes, Captain?”
Captain Weber stood up from the desk. “Meet me on the bridge when we launch this afternoon.”
Tim blinked, unsure he had heard properly. The captain usually had officers and essential personnel with him on the bridge when Roanoke pulled out of port, but a petty officer? That would be a first.
“Aye-aye, sir,” Tim said, barely able to contain his smile.
The captain nodded. “Be there at fifteen hundred hours sharp, or you’ll miss your last chance to say goodbye to the sun.”
***
When Tim was in high school, he had a summer job in a produce warehouse, lugging crates of fruit and 50-pound bags of potatoes from the storage aisles to the loading dock, eight hours a day. It had been hard work—thirsty work, his grandfather had called it—but it had also been gratifying work. Not just for the paycheck, although as a teenager it had been nice to have some spending money, and not just because the manual labor had honed his muscles and built up his strength, but also because it had taught him how to move quickly and easily through cramped spaces. The warehouse had been as big as a football field, but around harvest time they would ship out so many pallets of potatoes, he could barely fit between them. That was how it felt inside a Los Angeles–class sub every minute of every waking hour. Roanoke was barely longer than a football field and only 33 feet across at her widest, on the middle level. The top and bottom levels were even narrower. It wasn’t a lot of space to begin with, and most of it was crammed tight with workstations and equipment.
The middle level of the submarine was devoted to the crew’s living spaces. At the forward end sat the officers’ staterooms, in an area the enlisted men referred to as “Officer Country.” It was where the officers slept in their dorm-like rooms, much to the envy of the enlisted sailors, who were forced to hot-rack for the duration of the underway. The middle level also held the head, the berthing areas where the enlisted men slept, the wardroom where the officers took their meals, the galley, and the mess where the enlisted men ate, which was at the aft end of the corridor, up against the bulkhead that separated the forward compartment from the nuclear reactor and engine room aft. Tim walked briskly through the middle-level corridor while enlisted men hurried back and forth on either side of him in their poopie suits—the unfortunate nickname given to their submarine uniforms: blue coveralls designed to contain body heat in the event of a flood. No one knew where the nickname came from, but they were pretty sure it wasn’t anything good.
A few of the men were shooting the breeze. Had they seen the third Star Wars movie yet or heard the Ramones’ latest album? The sailors Tim knew nodded at him or gave him a clap on the arm and a quick hello, while the newer faces in the crowd dashed purposefully toward their stations. Morale was high. It always was at the start of an underway, even for the most jaded sailors among them. The ocean was in their blood, and they didn’t like to be away for too long.
Tim spotted a sailor standing near the curtained entrance to a berthing area. Everyone else in the corridor was hurrying somewhere, but he was perfectly still. He was facing away, with his back to Tim, one shoulder leaning against the bulkhead as if for support.
“You okay, buddy?” Tim called as he approached.
The man didn’t answer. He didn’t even move.
“Hey,” Tim called. “Everything all right?”
The man jumped as if Tim had startled him. He straightened up slowly, still facing away. He moved stiffly away from the bulkhead and smoothed down his uniform. He glanced over his shoulder at Tim, who recognized him as PO3 Warren Stubic. Only, he’d never seen him like this before. Stubic had always been someone who grabbed life by the horns, who liked to tell raucous stories in the mess, but today he looked distracted and out of it. His face glistened with sweat, and his eyes looked wild.
“You feeling all right, Stubic?” Tim asked, walking closer.
“Fine, fine,” Stubic muttered.
“If you’re not feeling well …”
“I said I’m fine, Spicer,” Stubic insisted.
He bolted past, his shoulder bumping Tim’s as he went by. Tim turned and watched him go, dumbfounded.
***
The bridge of a submarine was nothing like the bridge of a ship. It wasn’t the room from which the sub was commanded—that was the control room on the top level—but rather a small, open observation platform at the top of the tall dorsal tower known as the sail. When the clock struck 1500 hours, Tim was already on the bridge, determined not to miss his shot. Captain Weber joined him, along with Lieutenant Commander Lee Jefferson, Roanoke’s six-foot-five executive officer, who had played starting linebacker for the Naval Academy and looked as though he still could. As a commissioned officer, Jefferson wore a different uniform from the blue coveralls of the enlisted men, and to Tim it looked a hell of a lot more comfortable—a starched and pressed khaki shirt and pleated khaki slacks, with the gold oak-leaf pin on his collar that marked him as a lieutenant commander.
Now that Tim was outdoors, it was appropriate for him to salute his superior officers. “Reporting as requested, Captain. Lieutenant Commander, sir.”
“Good to see you, Spicer,” Jefferson said with a nod.
“You too, sir,” he replied.
Tim hadn’t encountered a lot of black officers in the submarine service, especially senior officers, but it was the 1980s now, and it seemed things were finally changing. Here was a man who was going places. Talk among the crew was that Jefferson would have his own command within a year. Tim had served with him on previous underways and found him to be a good man with a sharp mind and a practical outlook. But more than that, Jefferson didn’t mind walking among the enlisted men. He didn’t keep them at arm’s length or consider them beneath him the way other officers did. Even Captain Weber fell into that mind-set much of the time. Tim liked and respected the captain, but the man rarely came out of his stateroom to talk to the crew.
Standing here with the two highest-ranking officers on the boat was an enormous honor, but Tim felt distinctly out of place. Still, he refused to let it bother him. He had always wondered what it would be like to see a launch from the top of the sail, the way the captain and a few lucky officers did, and now he finally had the chance, at the captain’s personal invitation. If anyone had a problem with his being here, they could take it up with Captain Weber.
The sail rose thirty feet above the water, with the observation periscope, attack periscope, and multipurpose antenna mast forming a gray metal forest overhead. From up here, Tim could see everything. It was a clear day with gentle swells in Pearl Harbor, and the Honolulu sun washed over them, bright and warm. Ever since he was assigned to N
aval Station Pearl Harbor, Tim had marveled at how warm it stayed all year round, even in mid-November. Sometimes, he thought he would never get used to it. Other times, he felt that he’d rather die than go back home to Presque Isle, where everything was buried in snow, and the sun hid for months at a time.
He looked up into the sky, shielding his eyes. When Captain Weber had said it was his last chance to say goodbye to the sun, he wasn’t exaggerating. The three of them—Weber, Jefferson, and himself—would be the last to see the sky. Once the submarine went under, it would be three long months before anyone saw it again.
At 1530, USS Roanoke, SSN-709, pulled out of port. Captain Weber and Lieutenant Commander Jefferson stared straight ahead at the lane of open water before them. But this was Tim’s first time at the top of the sail, and he turned every which way, taking in the sights. He watched the braids of water twisting along the side of the hull, and the crewmen in bright green life jackets working briefly along the top of the hull, behind the sail, to secure the rigging. They were moving at about eight knots, Tim guessed, and the wind whispered in his ears.
Freighters and destroyers towered over them on either side. As they passed an oil tanker, Tim craned his neck to look up at its deck and saw the silhouettes of sailors staring down at him. He fantasized about waving at them, but that would be a costly breach of decorum. Still, the idea of one final interaction with other human beings above the surface of the ocean, one last gesture before it was just him and 139 other men in the dark water for months, was tempting.
The American flag was lowered from its pole and folded into a crisp military triangle. Their work finished, the life-vested crewmen on the hull below dropped back down into the sub, sealing the hatches behind them. Tim watched the Honolulu shoreline vanish in the distance as they moved out of the harbor and into Mamala Bay. Beyond the bay, the vast Pacific awaited, its depths as dark and quiet as a tomb.
The captain’s hand fell on Tim’s shoulder, pulling him from his thoughts. “Enough daydreaming, Spicer. Time to go below.”
“Aye, sir,” he replied.
He took one last look up at the sun, as if he could commit its light and warmth to memory. Then he followed Captain Weber and Lieutenant Commander Jefferson down the ladder into the sub. His heart sped up, and an expectant grin creased his face. He was feeling the same thrill of a new mission that he’d seen on the excited faces of the sailors in the corridor.
All except PO3 Stubic, he reminded himself. He couldn’t stop puzzling over how strangely the man had behaved, and the wild, disturbing look in his eye.
Once Tim reached the bottom of the ladder, another enlisted man scrambled up and secured the hatch to the bridge with a loud clang, sealing them all inside.
CHAPTER TWO
Being in the control room of a submarine felt like being in an egg carton. Calling it close quarters didn’t really convey how cramped it was. Crewmen were wedged into their seats practically on top of one another. Sailors couldn’t have issues about personal space on submarines, but especially not in the control room, where they were quite literally breathing down each other’s necks until the end of their watch section. When Tim, Captain Weber, and Lieutenant Commander Jefferson entered the control room, most of the men were at their stations already, including, Tim noted, the new planesman, Jerry White—the transfer Captain Weber had tasked him with keeping on the straight and narrow.
He was a couple of years younger than Tim, in his early twenties, with a skinny frame and sandy-blond hair. He sat at a control panel at the front of the room, with a yoke in front of him that he would use to steer Roanoke once they were underwater. As planesman, White operated the winglike horizontal hydroplanes on the boat’s bow and sail, steering the submarine up or down. He also controlled the vertical rudder at the stern, to make left and right turns. Seated beside him, separated by less than a foot of space, was the helmsman, with the yoke that controlled the angle of the submarine, through the horizontal hydroplanes at the stern. For the sub to run smoothly, both the helmsman and the planesman had to work in unison, developing a wordless rapport.
The helmsman on duty was Steve Bodine, a skinny kid out of Oklahoma and the only black sailor on Roanoke besides Lieutenant Commander Jefferson. Like White, Bodine was in his early 20s, but he was already halfway bald. He denied it strenuously, but everyone knew it was the real reason he kept his hair stubble-short. Bodine had the most stereotypically suburban middle-class background of any sailor Tim had met: swimming pool in the backyard, newspaper delivery route as a kid, Boy Scouts—the whole nine yards. He was a nice, uncomplicated guy, the kind you could have a beer with when you had a night off at the base. Tim figured that if anyone was going to be a good influence on White, helping keep him out of trouble as the captain wanted, it was Bodine. Captain Weber should have asked him instead.
The diving officer of the launch, Lieutenant Junior Grade Charles Duncan, sat behind White and Bodine in a chair so close he could reach past them to the control panel just by leaning forward if he wanted to. A cold and distant officer, Duncan wasn’t one for small talk. Indeed, he was extraordinarily strict with enlisted men. Tim had seen him ruthlessly dress down sailors for even small, easily fixed mistakes.
Ensign Mark Penwarden took his position beside the captain as the acting officer of the deck, or OOD. Sailors abbreviated everything, Tim mused. The chief of the boat was the COB. The executive officer was the XO. Petty officers were POs. The trash disposal unit was the TDU. Nothing and no one was spared the indignity of an initialism. Being OOD was a temporary station, a responsibility that passed between officers with other jobs on board. Normally, Penwarden worked in fire control, where he operated and maintained the combat and weapons direction systems, but he needed to pass his off-quals to earn his dolphins, and acting as OOD during a launch was his final test. He looked nervous but ready. Tim knew how important this was to him. Penwarden had been working to complete the extensive quals process for almost a year now. He was desperate for the dolphin badge that so many other officers on Roanoke proudly wore on their uniforms, not to mention the official submarine qualification that came with it. If he didn’t get it right today, he would have to wait months to try again.
Senior Chief Farrington, the COB, was serving as chief of the watch for the underway. Seated in front of the ballast control panel on one side of the control room, he oversaw the moving of water in and out of the ballast tanks to control the submarine’s buoyancy, as well as monitoring all hatches and hull openings. Tim suspected that Farrington wasn’t all that happy to be in the control room with White after objecting to his transfer to Roanoke, but the COB was a good, experienced sailor. He kept his eyes on his control panel and didn’t let his personal feelings distract him.
Tim crossed the control room to the enclosed space affectionately known by sonar techs like himself as the sonar shack. Inside, he sat down in front of his display console, put on his earphones, and prepared for the launch.
***
Submarines didn’t launch on a single order; they launched with a dialogue. The submarine corps choreographed its procedures to the last detail. It was the officer of the deck who began the dialogue.
“Bridge rigged for dive,” Penwarden reported. “Last man down.”
Captain Weber stood in front of the two periscopes on the conn, the raised stand positioned a few feet back from the helm. “Rig for dive, Ensign Penwarden,” he ordered.
“Rig for dive, aye,” Penwarden replied. After double-checking the report that all hatches were secured, he added, “Bridge rigged for dive, aye. Last man down, aye. Two minutes to dive point, sir.”
“Excellent, Ensign Penwarden,” Captain Weber said. “Chief of the Watch, rig control room for red.”
“Rig for red, aye,” Farrington replied.
In the sonar shack, Tim sat in front of his sonar display screen and braced himself. Though he had experienced it nearly a dozen times now, when the darkness came there was always something menacing about it.
The overhead lights winked out in the control room, and the red lights snapped on. The crimson hue lent the control room an eerie, otherworldly appearance, as if everyone and everything in it were covered in a haze of blood.
“Officer of the Deck, report,” the captain said.
But here Penwarden, who had been doing well until now, tripped over his tongue and didn’t answer quickly enough.
“Officer of the Deck, what is our status?” the captain repeated, an annoyed edge creeping into his voice.
Lieutenant Commander Jefferson came up beside Penwarden and whispered in his ear, “Take a deep breath, Ensign. You’re doing fine. We haven’t hit anything yet.”
With Jefferson’s encouragement, Penwarden pulled himself together. He called out the depth soundings, course, and speed to the captain. “Ship rigged for dive, sir. We are one minute from dive point, Captain, confirmed by navigator. We hold no surface contacts by visual or sonar. Request permission to submerge boat, sir.”
“Very well, Ensign Penwarden,” the captain replied. His expression gave no indication whether Penwarden had burned his chance or pulled himself out of the fire at the last moment. “Submerge boat to one-five-zero feet.”
White adjusted his yoke, ready to control the dive as soon as the OOD made the necessary announcement. Penwarden picked up the phone talker of the main circuit, the submarine’s PA system.
“Dive! Dive!” he shouted into the phone talker.
The high, shrill alarm sounded, and Tim braced himself. The first dive was always a tense moment. Then the floor tilted under his feet, and he could picture Roanoke submerging beneath the waves, engulfed in the endless dark of the ocean.
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