Without Lacroix’s hands on the rudder, they were drifting off course. Inexplicably, they were also speeding up. Without an order, Crosby reached to the console to his right and engaged the ship’s autopilot. He did it without saying a word… he knew that uptight prick Lieutenant Dwyer might stop him without an order from the captain.
Maneuvering was a confined space, even by submarine standards. It was the control room of the ship’s nuclear engine room, and held three watchstanders supervised by a single officer, the Engineering Officer of the Watch, or EOOW, pronounced to rhyme with the sound a cat makes. The EOOW sat a few feet behind the three enlisted men: the throttleman, the reactor operator, and the electrical operator. The room itself was almost a perfect cube, and the EOOW had made the decision to seal it off, closing the airtight doors. The ship’s high pressure air compressors were all running, and the EOOW shut the doors so he and his watchstanders could hear each other better over the noise.
“How’s that?” said the EOOW. “Quieter?”
“Better,” the Reactor Operator and the Electrical Operator mumbled. The throttleman coughed into his hand.
“You better not make us fucking sick,” said the RO.
“Fuck you,” he said back. He coughed again.
The announcement came over the 1MC: injured man in the forward compartment.
“Wonder who that is?”
“Probably some sonarman got a paper cut,” said the RO.
“Pussies,” said the throttleman, coughing again.
The EOOW looked him over. “You don’t look good,” he said. “Hungover?”
“I wish,” he said. “I’ve been here all night, doing the pre-critical check list. I can’t stroll onboard ten minutes before an underway like… a sonarman.”
The electrical operator chimed in. “Hey man you volunteered to be a nuke. You could’ve been a sonarman. Choose your rate, choose your fate.”
“Ok,” said the throttleman. “I can’t stroll in ten minutes before… like an officer.”
“Hey,” said the EOOW. “You feel like becoming an officer, I’ll give you the brochure. I’m sure you’ll love it.”
The throttleman coughed again in response.
The EOOW hoped it was a hangover, because if it was a cold or something else contagious, surely they would all have it soon enough. The EOOW pulled at his collar; he didn’t feel all that great himself.
The throttleman coughed again, and then maneuvering grew silent.
“Well, here we are again,” said the Electrical Operator. “Under water.”
“Love it,” said the EOOW. “Underway on nuclear power.”
“What are they going to do with Dunham?” said the Reactor Operator.
“I have no idea,” said the EOOW. “But they’ll probably bust him. Fine him.”
“But no brig? Shit that’s a good deal. I’d lose a stripe and a few bucks for a three day fuckfest off the boat.”
“In your case it would be a three day jacking off fest,” said the electrical operator. “So think it over carefully.”
They all laughed at that, even their grumpy throttleman, but his laughter soon turned to violent coughs.
“My God,” said the EOOW. “Do you need a relief?”
The throttleman looked at him with real fear in his eyes, unable to stop. Suddenly he convulsed, arching his back, and collapsed to the deck. His head hit the steel wheel of the throttle on the way down, opening it incrementally. They began to speed up.
The Engineering Officer of the Watch, the only officer in the engine room, grabbed the 7MC microphone, wanting to announce to control that there was also an injured man in maneuvering. But then he began coughing too hard to speak.
The engineering duty officer came to maneuvering a few minutes later, wanting to know why the main engines were speeding up when no new bell had been announced. When he looked through the window of maneuvering, three men were unconscious and one was dead.
Panic began to sweep the boat.
Some men hid in their berthing compartments, instinctively knowing that their shipmates were a danger to them now, and these men did in fact survive a little longer. But the submerged ship’s atmosphere was a completely closed system and there was nowhere to hide.
Some men were led by nobler instincts to try to protect the boat and each other. A machinist secured the boat’s oxygen generators, just as he would during a rig for general emergency even though one had not yet been officially declared. He did it after watching his chief drop dead about ten feet away from him, deciding they were in an emergency even if an alarm had not yet made it official.
The captain, XO, and corpsman crowded into the captain’s stateroom, a medical book in front of them. The corpsman had given them all light blue surgical masks to wear.
The book was a large, dusty medical reference that the corpsman had brought with him. Captain Jefferies paged through it, looking for something, any kind of procedure that might help them. His job, as he saw it, was to identify the correct procedure and enforce its actions.
The XO saw that the captain’s lack of imagination might kill them.
“We have to blow to the surface,” said the XO. “Now.”
“I’m not sure that will save us,” said the corpsman.
“Well it will make us easier to find at least.”
The captain looked up at him, his eyes wide with as much confusion as fear. He’d made a career out of diligently following procedures, but now, when he needed one the most, there did not appear to be any doctrine to help them. He went back down to the list of pandemics and resumed reading.
The XO turned and started walking to control; somebody had to do it. He would throw the emergency blow actuators himself. They could court martial him if they wanted. As he turned, though, the captain began coughing.
The corpsman had his hand on his back as the coughs turned into spasms. The captain’s head fell on an unhelpful description on Ebola as he passed out.
Well now I’m in charge, thought the XO, as he started to sprint to the control room. He was half way up the ladder when the coughing began. He tried to pull himself up but the coughing was debilitating, consuming him. He fell face first onto the ladder as he passed out, knocking out two teeth.
By the time the XO died, there were just a dozen men left alive on the boat. The only surviving chief, Chief Cassidy, secured all the cooking equipment in the galley as he fought to hang on. He died turning off a deep fryer.
By then there were four men left. Two were in the engine room.
Lehane grew up poor in a decaying steel mill town in the hills of western Pennsylvania. His mom had a fondness for abusive boyfriends and he’d honed an instinct for survival that would have served him well in an infantry battalion, fighting from building to building or cave to cave. The military had been impressed by his sky-high ASVAB scores in high school, however, and had sent him into the nuclear navy instead, where he had excelled. He was one of those kids common in the military a generation or two earlier, a kid for whom barracks life was a distinct improvement in lifestyle: three guaranteed meals a day, occasional hot showers, and most of all some predictability about what each day would bring. The military of the United States had always been the surest path into the middle class for kids like Lehane, and while he shared in the communal bitching about the navy that they all did, to his core he was grateful for what the navy had done for him.
But his love of the navy had not erased his intuition for self-preservation, and from his watchstation deep inside the engine room, he could tell something was seriously wrong.
It started with the 1MC announcements about injured men, all over the ship. The voices in the announcements were tinged with confusion; he could tell things were unfolding that were frightening even to the most experienced men on the boat. Between announcements he could hear coughing from the other watchstanders in the engine room, violent, painful coughing that he could hear even over the chugging of the nearby air compressors.