“What if we need more than forty-five minutes at the scene?” asked Dan.
Santini, standing behind him, rolled his eyes as if to say, What for?
“Well, sir,” Graveley replied, “we all come back out, change out air bottles, and go back in.”
“We’ve done the crime-scene work,” said Santini impatiently. “This is mostly for your benefit—to see the body in situ before we remove it for autopsy.”
Dan got the message: This is a drill, for the benefit of the amateurs; the actual cops have already done the real work. But he kept his patience.
“I understand that, Mr. Santini. But we do have to go down there and see what we see.”
Santini shrugged his shoulders and began attaching his mask to his face.
The others followed suit, and once the lieutenant had checked their air systems, they entered the air lock mounted to the athwartship passageway hatch and went inside. Dan found that the atmosphere against his neck and hands was cold and palpably dry, and that the lieutenant had understated the lighting problem. Rigged to the overhead cableways was a thick industrial extension cord with a single caged bulb mounted every twenty feet. Through the slightly fogged and scratched visor of his breathing mask, the passageway looked like a steel mine-shaft tunnel with dull green sides. All of the bulkhead-mounted fittings— electrical junction boxes, hose reels, hatches and doors, ventilation diffusers, and fluorescent light fixtures— were in shadow, and his eyesight was further restricted by the limited peripheral vision caused by the mask.
The probing white light from their helmets briefly illuminated brass fittings, the asphalt tiles on the deck, the dull gray cabling running along the overhead, and the brass ladder rails of the first main passageway ladder going down to the second deck.
They went down the double-wide ladder to the second deck. They passed through what appeared to be a berthing area, and Dan tried to imagine what it had been like when the ship was alive with its crew of over a thousand men. Now it was like being inside a pharaoh’s tomb—literally, considering what they were going to see. They proceeded aft for about a hundred feet, and then turned right into a vestibule to go down through a second hatchway, ducking their heads and using their hands to deflect the hanging lightbulbs. Dan was reminded that they were in a battleship when he noticed that the deck through which this ladder descended was several inches thick. He shined his light on the hatch, which was held back by glistening hydraulic arms; five inches thick itself, it must have weighed a couple of tons. At the bottom of this ladder, they entered a longer and much narrower passageway, which was even darker than the one above. This passageway appeared to have a series of watertight hatches running down either side, each leading to one of the main propulsion machinery compartments arrayed in a line down the ship’s center line—hence its name, Gasoline Alley. This deck was lined with stainless-steel plates that had a raised herringbone pattern. Each of the side hatches was less than man-high and was surrounded by a battery of remote operating steam-valve wheels, emergency fuel shutoff handles, and emergency communications ports.
Dan tried to remember the layout diagram he had seen that morning at the NIS office: The battleship had eight main machinery spaces, laid out in a boiler room/ engine room, boiler room/engine room configuration, aligned along the centerline, with Gasoline Alley running longitudinally down the centerline, on top of the machinery spaces. In addition to the four boiler rooms, the ship had four main steam turbines, one per engine room, which together were capable of driving the armored behemoth at nearly thirty-eight miles per hour.
The body had been found in number-one fire room, in the steam drum of the port-side boiler.
The lieutenant led them to the hatch leading into number-one fire room; it was marked by a cluster of lights suspended from the overhead around the hatch and, incongruously, considering the nitrogen atmosphere, by some yellow crime-scene tape. The hatch itself was open, and its six dogging handles were wrapped in what looked like clear plastic wrap.
Lieutenant Gravely led the way through the hatch, stepping up over the knee-high hatch coaming and onto a steel platform just inside the fire room. He pointed down a steep ladder with his flashlight, then descended, followed by the others. The ladder rails, like the dogging handles, were also wrapped in plastic. At the bottom of the ladder, Dan found himself standing on deck grating between the two steam boilers, which stood side by side like two stainless-steel buildings. He was actually on the upper level of the fire room, standing one level above what was called the “firing alley.” The steel gratings were closely spaced but allowed a clear view of the boiler-front area beneath them.
There were six caged bulbs on a temporary string suspended between the boiler fronts. The steam drum on the port-side boiler was open, and a single portable floodlight was positioned to shine into the opening of the steam drum.
The steam drum was a heavy steel cylinder at the top of the boiler; it looked to be about twelve feet long and about three feet in diameter.
Access to the internals of the steam drum was through an oval manhole, whose cover and hold-down bolts had been removed and were lying on the deck gratings in front of the boiler. The lieutenant pointed soundlessly to the steam drum’s opening and stepped back. The riggers stayed together over by the ladder leading up out of the space.
Dan and Grace approached the manhole and peered in, bumping their facemasks against the cold steel. The body was lying on its back, left hand at its side, right hand raised slightly, the head thrown back at an odd angle, feet toward the aperture of the manhole. It was dressed in what looked to Dan like Navy working khakis, and the single silver bar of a lieutenant junior grade glinted in the white spotlight. Dan could not see the entire face, but from what he could see of the neck and arms, the body had apparently mummified in the cold, dry, anaerobic atmosphere within the ship. The chest had lost definition, and the entire body seemed to have shrunk and flattened. The hands were clawlike, with dark, dry skin pulled over the bones like parchment.
One of the body’s shoes had a hole in the sole. Lumpy bags of desiccant powder surrounded the body like cement pillows. Dan backed away so that Grace could get a better look, and she put the one arm with her flashlight and then her whole head into the steam drum.
Dan found another ladder and went down one level to the lower level and looked around the boiler-front area. The fuel-oil valves, burner assemblies, and even the deck plates glinted in the light reflected from above.
He touched a burner assembly and found it smooth, cold, and slightly oily. Perfectly preserved, like that guy in there. A black man, the NIS preliminary report had said. Age about twenty-something. A lieutenant junior grade. No identification in pockets, no rings, no watch, no wallet. Fingerprints taken but distorted. No signs of injury visible from the manhole, but an autopsy would tell the tale.
He looked around. The fire room looked like all naval boiler rooms: a maze of steam piping in the shadows of the overhead and suspended under the upper-level gratings; the silent, yawning maws of ventilation ducts pointed into the firing alley; two double-walled, two storied, stainless-steel boilers sitting side by side. He recognized the M-type, recalling the design from engineering school, with separately fired superheaters producing 600 psi main steam. The burner assemblies for the four registers on the saturated side and the three on the superheated side stood in shining ranks on stands in front of each boiler, clean, lightly oiled, ready to go.
The burner registers—large round holes with teethlike vanes fanned around their circumference to swirl the incoming combustion air with the fuel—were equally clean and shipshape. The face of the boiler-control console at one end of the firing alley gleamed in highlights of brass and stainless steel, its instruments airtight and all pointing to the far left. Mounted high on steel stanchions were the primary boiler gauges—main steam, auxiliary steam, fuel-oil pressure, feed-water pressure.
He checked the expiration dates on the gauge-calibration stickers: December 1991; W
isconsin had been decommissioned in September 1991, after Desert Storm.
He admired the cleanliness and order, the solid paint, the absence of rust and dirt, the clean and oil free lagging on the pumps and forced-draft blower turbines, and especially the little green notebooks hanging off the individual pieces of machinery, filled with notations as to each machine’s quirks. Her engineers had laid her up properly, almost lovingly. One final ladder led below the lower-level deck plates, and there, in the bilge in front of IB boiler, was the burst bag of desiccant powder that had attracted the sounding-andsecurity watch’s attention in the first place. A bag moved out of the steam drum to make room for the body?
How long had this guy been in there? Two years or so?
At least—long enough to have mummified. Or had the ship’s atmosphere not yet been evacuated when he was locked up in the steam drum? They would have to check the time sequence. He shuddered at the thought of waking up inside the internals of a ship’s boiler, encased in a soundproof two-inch-thick steel cylinder in absolute darkness. If this guy had been a surface-ship guy, he would have probably figured out where he was … He climbed back up to the upper level just as Grace was withdrawing her masked face gingerly from the steam drum. Lieutenant Gravely was giving him a
“Well?” sign with his hands. He then pointed to his watch and indicated they had about fifteen minutes.
Santini was standing over to one side, arms folded, his body language expressing total boredom. The other shipyard workers were sitting on the upper-level railings, waiting, something they seemed to know how to do.
Dan looked over at Grace, who indicated she wanted five more minutes to look around. He pointed down and then led her to the desiccant bag on the lower level, which she acknowledged with a nod of her head. She pointed back up, then led Dan back up the ladder to the upper level and over to the hatch that gave access to the fire room. She shined her light all around the hatch coaming. Dan did, too, but did not know what she was looking for. The lieutenant came over and pointed again to his watch, and Dan nodded.
They filed out of the fire room, with Santini coming out last, pulling down the hatch dogs to seal the space.
They retraced their steps up through the silent passageways to the air lock on the main deck. Once the group exited the air lock on the main deck and removed their masks, Santini took charge.
“If that’s all the sight-seeing you plan to do, Commander, I’m ready to take a medical team down there to extract the body and wrap up the crime scene. I’ve made arrangements with the Philadelphia Police Department’s medical examiner to get an autopsy done.”
” ‘Sight-seeing,’ Mr. Santini?” Dan was rubbing his face where the hard rubber of the mask had left its mark. He put an edge in his voice.
“Well, I—”
Grace Snow spoke up. “Mr. Santini,” she said.
“Commander Collins is in charge of this investigation.
If you have a problem with that, I can make a quick call and probably get someone from headquarters up here who will be more accommodating.”
Santini stared at her with all the hostility field-office people reserve for interfering Washington headquarters types, but then the Italian in him took over, and he threw up his hands.
“Okay, Okay, Ms. Snow, whatever you say. We’ve had enough parades through this scene—one more or a hundred more won’t make a shit, I guess. So, Commander, what do you want us to do?”
“I want you to complete your examination of the area around number-one fire room, upper level, and then remove the body for autopsy. You keep calling it a crime scene. But I have to wonder if the murder, if that’s what we have here, took place in or near the boiler. This whole thing looks like an effort to put a body where it would almost never be found.
But I assume you’re looking for forensic evidence that might identify who put that guy in there, right? Like maybe fingerprints on that bag of desiccant on the lower level?”
Santini gave Dan a patronizing look. “Yes, sir, something like that. And perhaps a few more sophisticated traces of evidence here and there.”
“Which are described in your preliminary report?”
“Well … we’re getting to that.”
Dan began to fold up the harness on his breathing set. “No doubt, Mr.
Santini. The sounding-and-security inspectors come through, what, monthly?”
“Supposed to be monthly. But Shop Seventy-two says it works out to be about every other month, the time they get around to it.
They’ve got the flooding alarms to warn them if anything big gets going.”
“So any residual dirt from shoes on the deck plates, or ladder backs—that could be from the watch making his rounds, right? For maybe as long as two years?”
Santini nodded again. “Absolutely. Anybody.”
Dan looked at Grace Snow. “So,” he said, “the best we’re probably going to get from Forensics is who this guy is, or was, and how long he’s been dead and down in the nitrogen.”
“And how he died,” interjected Grace, unstrapping her breathing-rig harness.
“Right. And how he died. Okay. Have the body removed.
I’ll need to see a shipyard functional organization chart—which shops do what—and get a tally of everybody involved in the baby-sitting of a sleeping battleship.”
He looked at his watch: 12:30 p.m. “That O-club still open?” he asked.
Santini said yes, and Dan signaled Grace to come along. They went back down the gangway as the ambulance team came up, unfolding the straps of a Stokes litter. Santini changed his air bottle, as did the riggers, in preparation for going back in. Sergeant Degiorgio was dozing in the car, but he woke up quickly enough and ran them over to the NIS offices to change back into their respective uniforms: blues for Dan and a business suit for Grace Snow. Fifteen minutes later, they walked into the dining room of the officers’ club.
By the time they were seated, the noon-hour rush had wound down. Dan ordered a beer and a Reuben; Grace had iced tea and a salad. To Dan’s surprise, the food arrived very quickly. The Reuben was enormous. Her salad looked like it had been lightly microwaved.
“Eating trim,” Dan observed.
Grace eyed the beer and the large sandwich. “How do you manage it?” she asked.
“I’m a rower, remember? I go out for an hour and a half every afternoon on the Potomac and work it off. I usually have a doughnut and coffee for breakfast most days, and a steak and salad at night. But I’m fortunate, I guess—this stuff doesn’t stick.”
“You are very fortunate. I’m gaining weight just looking at it.”
“Not visibly.”
Grace raised her eyebrows at him as if to say, Let’s not go down that road, shall we? Dan put up his hands in mock surrender.
“I guess that wasn’t very politically correct of me,” he said. “But it was meant as a compliment.”
“Thank you. But I think you and I are going to have to keep our relations on a strictly business footing. Remember, we’re not exactly allies in this little venture.”
Dan worked on his sandwich while he thought about that.
“Well,” he said finally, “superficially, I agree about the allies bit, at least in terms of what our respective masters are up to. But, as we discussed, that game is beyond your pay grade and mine, I think. However the bureaucratic rice bowls make out, I do think we’re supposed to find out what happened here.”
“I agree. But if I were a man instead of being a woman, you would not be complimenting my figure.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry, but I’m not yet able to treat a woman like a man.”
“You don’t have to. But I think we’ll get this thing done better and quicker if we keep it impersonal. Now, what’s next?”
Dan finished his sandwich and sipped his beer. He noticed that Grace was toying manfully with her salad.
Womanfully? He smiled.
“What?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Som
ething my irreverent half thought of,” he said.
“So, what’s next? We work on identifying this guy, I guess. The autopsy will reveal how he died. If he’s been in that ship for a while, there should be a missing persons report in the system somewhere.
He’s a lieutenant junior grade in working uniform, which would indicate to me that whatever happened to him happened here in the shipyard.”
“Go on.”
“Well, if he simply disappeared, the Navy will have a UA report on him.”
“UA?”
“Unauthorized absentee. AWOL. He had to have belonged to a command, either here in the yard or maybe on a ship undergoing overhaul. The command would have had to file a report when the guy vanished.”
“Is UA the same as missing persons?”
“Well, not exactly. UA infers that the guy went over the hill, on his own steam. Missing persons—well, that means he went missing and that the command doesn’t think it was of his own volition. An officer going UA is pretty rare, actually.”
Grace sat back and pushed away the limp salad.
“What I’m getting at is, if he was reported as a missing person, the NIS would have a file: the Bureau of Naval Personnel always cuts NIS in when there’s a missing person.”
Dan nodded thoughtfully. “So we can start right here, then. I assume the Philly field office can access your central data banks in D. C.?”
She smiled, and he suddenly realized that she could be really attractive whenever she shed that deadly serious expression.
“Don’t assume, Commander Collins. Actually, it works the other way. The Washington headquarters can access the field office’s computers. But Santini can give us a look. Although it may be archived.”
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