Then it all stopped. The announcements, the coughing: it all stopped.
Quietly, he drifted aft, to the most remote part of the ship: shaft alley.
While in port, he’d read an incident report about a Freon casualty onboard a Trident submarine. Some dumbass had dumped the entire contents of one of the big refrigeration units. Because of the actions of some other dumbass ashore, that Freon had recently been replaced by a variant that, when it came in contact with the ship’s high-temperature atmosphere control equipment, actually mutated into Phosgene gas: nerve gas. One man had died and the whole ship had been in danger.
It had been a pretty spectacular incident.
He hadn’t been required to read it but he did anyway, fascinated by the chain of errors made, and by the improvised actions of the crew that had saved the day. Equally fascinating, as always in these incident reports, was what was unsaid. Who lost their job? Who went to jail? What did they do with the dead body? He’d asked around and had it on good authority that the boat was the Alabama: he’d vowed to find a veteran of the Alabama someday and fill in all the blanks.
At the end of that report, the Navy reported the results of some extensive tests they’d run to determine the path of airborne contaminants across a submarine. They’d run the experiments on both a Trident and a 688 boat, like the Boise, and the results had been similar. Given enough time, the boat’s ventilation systems would achieve what the chemists called “perfect mixing,” making the atmosphere perfectly homogenous everywhere in the boat. But that didn’t happen instantly. Depending on where the source of the contaminants was, it could sometimes take hours before it reached the entire boat. And in almost every scenario, and on both classes of submarines, shaft alley was where the air stayed untouched the longest. There’d been a color illustration of it in the book, a heat map with red and orange blobs representing the areas quickest to be contaminated (Crew’s Mess and Control) and a soothing blue area for the area that remained safe the longest: shaft alley.
It was not a surprise to anyone who had ever spent time in shaft alley, the aft-most end of the engine room where the shaft that connected the ship’s propeller to the main engines actually penetrated the hull. It always smelled damp back there, the heaviness of unmoving air. And Lehane thought that unmoving air might be just what he needed.
As he walked aft he secured all the engine room fans he passed.
By the time he got to shaft alley, the ship had become ominously quiet. In shaft alley he could see, however, that the screw was still turning, which was mildly comforting. He counted the turns against his watch and saw they were still just going five knots. Suddenly the speed of the shaft increased, and that gave him hope, even though it had occurred without the announcement of a new bell. The change in speed made it appear that someone was still in control, perhaps clearing baffles at a higher speed in order to go to periscope depth. The acceleration stopped, however, and the speed smoothly reduced back to five knots.
From shaft alley he could also see the hydraulics that controlled the stern planes and the rudder; these also moved slowly, small iterative motions that showed the ship was just maintaining course. You could take manual control from back there, steering the ship from shaft alley in the event of a problem with the ship control in the control room. Which was why there was a sound powered phone back there.
Lehane picked up the phone and began speaking.
“Shaft alley here… shaft alley on the line.”
There was no response.
He was just getting ready to hang up when he heard a voice. “Shaft alley?”
“Shaft alley on the line!”
“This is Baer… I’m forward of maneuvering. I just looked, they are all unconscious in there. What the fuck is going on?”
“Get back to shaft alley,” said Lehane. “Turn off every fan you pass on the way back.”
Baer showed up a few minutes later, his eyes wide with fright.
“You see anybody else?”
“Nobody on their feet,” said Baer. “How about you?”
“Nobody. And nobody is on the line.”
“Jesus Christ, what do you think it is?”
“No idea,” said Lehane. “Something in the air I guess. Poison.”
“They need to blow to the surface!” said Baer. “What are they waiting for?”
“Maybe there’s nobody left to do it.”
Baer slumped at that, and went pale. “Oh fuck.”
They both looked down at the smooth shiny steel of the hydraulics for the stern planes. “Somebody is still driving, it looks like,” said Baer, trying to make himself feel better.
“It’s the autopilot,” said Lehane. “I’m pretty sure. You can tell by how smoothly it’s working… super small adjustments.”
They watched and confirmed what Lehane was saying.
“What about manual control?” said Baer suddenly. “We can control it from back here! We could just jack those stern planes, drive right up to the surface! We could go right up through the engine room hatch!”
Hope shot through Lehane for just a moment at that… it was a good idea. He looked down at the controls and ran through the procedure in his mind.
“Fuck,” he said. “We can’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“They have to enable remote operation in control.”
“Goddamit!” said Baer.
They ruminated, again their eyes drawn to the robotically efficient movements of the stern planes and rudder.
“I’ll do it,” said Baer.
“Do what?” said Lehane.
“I’ll go forwardand shift control to shaft alley.”
“No,” said Lehane. “Don’t do it. We don’t know what’s going on up there.”
“I’ll wear an EAB,” he said. EABs were air tight rubber masks that could connect via their hose to manifolds throughout the ship, designed to provide an emergency supply of air.
Lehane thought it a bad idea but in truth… he didn’t have a better one. But looking at Baer — he looked a little pale. Maybe it was just fear, and he hadn’t coughed once. But if one of them was to go forward, he wanted to make sure they made it all the way. And Lehane still felt strong.
“You ever do this?” he asked. “You ever take local control?”
“Shit yes. Dozens of times.”
“Then you should stay here. I haven’t done it that much. I’ll go forward and shift control. Wear the phones, but don’t wait for an order. As soon as you hear control shift, pull in, start driving us up. I’ll get back here as soon as I can.”
“You sure?”
Lehane nodded and pulled an EAB out of a locker at their feet.
“Don’t unplug that thing,” said Baer.
“Don’t worry about that,” he said.
Lehane pulled the mask over his head and sucked in before he plugged it in, pulling the mask against his face, verifying it was airtight. He plugged in and with a hiss the ship’s compressed air banks began supplying him air.
“You ready?”
Lehane nodded. “This will be the fastest trip forward ever,” he said, his voice distorted through the plastic voice box of the mask. “I bet I can do it in one breath.”
“Go,” said Baer. “And good luck.”
Lehane was terrified at a deep level as he walked briskly forward: the silence of the ship weighed on him, and he felt the eyes of the dead upon him as he moved. But his fear was tempered by a strength he felt as he walked forward; the EAB would save him. That slightly pressurized, slightly oily-smelling supply of air from ship’s pressurized air banks would protect him from whatever had befallen his shipmates.