Collapse Depth

by Todd Tucker

  “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 clos
ed 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.”

  “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.