“And if we can’t?”
“We haven’t decided yet.”
The trio of officers from the Louisville walked back across the base.
“Are we ready to go to sea?” the captain asked the XO.
“Yes sir. The reactor is shut down but the plant is warmed up. We could pull out in two hours.”
“Looks like we’ve got until the morning. Let’s rig for dive tonight, brief the wardroom after dinner. Do a reactor start up at five. Danny, you get ready for a nav brief tonight.”
“Aye aye sir,” they both said.
“Any questions?”
The XO said nothing, but after a few steps, Danny said “Yeah, I’ve got about a hundred questions.”
“I’m a busy man, Jabo. Give me your top one.”
Danny thought for a moment. “Why do we need to keep this a secret from the crew?”
The captain mulled it over for a while. “What do you think, XO?”
“Perhaps because they don’t want the crew to think about what’s happened to the Boise.”
“Could be,” said the captain. “Or maybe they don’t want the crew to think about what’s about to happen to the Boise.”
On board, Danny found Stateroom 2, his new home. He threw his sea bag on the bare mattress. His new roommate appeared at the doorway just as he was getting ready to turn around and start preparing for the nav brief.
“Sir! Lieutenant Vijayvergiya!” he extended his hand.
“Say that again?”
“Call me V-12,” he said. “Get it? Starts with ‘V’ and has twelve letters. It’s Indian. I’m your roommate!”
The kid exuded enthusiasm. And youth — Danny couldn’t believe that just one sea tour separated them. “Well, V-12, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m sure we’ll get to know each other soon.”
“You were on Alabama, right sir?”
Danny nodded. He wasn’t used to this. On his shore tour, the highly classified incident on the Alabama was unknown. But apparently, in the two years that he’d been away, it had become part of submarine lore, studied and debated by every man on a boat. “Yeah — I was there.”
“Can I see your fingers?”
“Maybe later.”
V-12 took the hint and stepped backward so Danny could exit. “No problem sir. Looking forward to it.”
Honolulu
Master Chief Cote walked into the windowless conference room on the seventh floor of the hospital where the investigators awaited him. They sat on one side of an enormous conference table. Directly across from them on the table sat two business cards, lined up precisely together. Cote knew they’d been placed there to show him where to sit. If the two civilians thought they were intimidating him, they were wrong. Master Chief Cote didn’t have a business card. But he had four inches of ribbons on his chest, topped with the silver dolphins of a submariner and a Republic of Vietnam Service Medal.
After some perfunctory handshaking, Cote sat down and read the cards. Joshua King of the Naval Investigative Service was the young, earnest man who seemed eager to start. The professorial older man, who appeared to be in charge, was C. David Connelly of the Center for Disease Control.
“Ready?” asked King.
Cote nodded.
With a flourish, King pulled from his jacket pocket a small digital tape recorder. He carefully turned it on, and positioned it on the table so its small blinking green light pointed directly at the master chief.
“Your name?”
“Master Chief Richard Cote.”
“Your billet?”
“Subpac Medical Liaison, Tripler Army Medical Center.”
“And you were with the victim when he died?”
“I was.”
“Did he say where he’d been in the previous twenty-four hours?” asked King.
Cote sighed. He’d been through all this before, many times. With his entire chain of command at the hospital in the first twenty-four hours after the death, even as the crew from the CDC was spiriting away the body of the sailor from the Boise. Afterwards, of course, as rumors swept the hospital, he’d been asked the same questions by his colleagues. He kept telling everybody the same thing: he knew nothing.
“By the time I got down there, the petty officer was already crashing. He told me he was from the Boise, that’s about it.”
“Did you go through his belongings? His sea bag?”
“Of course not,” said the master chief.
“Did you make physical contact with him?”
“I touched him. His forehead. And his hand. I’m assuming that’s why you guys,” he said, pointing to the older man, “took about a quart of my blood for testing. Hopefully the fact that I’m still sitting here means I don’t have what he had.”
The NIS man reviewed his list of questions, ignoring Cote. “Have you had any contact with his friends or relatives since?”
“Friends or relatives? You guys won’t even tell me his name.”
“Could you answer the question, Master Chief?”
“No. No friends or relatives.”
“Who else did you personally see in physical contact with the victim?”
“Petty Officer Wills, that’s it. But he’d been there all night, I’m sure there were others.”
“Have you had a fever since in the incident? Coughing? Sore throat or diarrhea?”
Cote reached forward for the recorder. King flinched.
“Hey…” said the NIS agent. Cote found the tiny on-off switch, and flipped it with his thumbnail, tossed the recorder back on the table.
“Can we talk like men for a few minutes?” he said.
“Master Chief, this investigation…”
The older man finally spoke. “It’s okay,” he said raising his hand.
“Can you tell me what the hell is going on?”
He sighed. “Master chief, I’ll tell you everything I can. And if I can’t answer you, I’ll tell you so, I won’t lie to you.” He turned to King. “Josh, if you’re uncomfortable with this, you can leave the room.”
The NIS agent pouted as he put the recorder back in his pocket, and then slumped in his chair in defeat.
“How about you start with his name?” asked Cote.
“Petty Officer Third Class Bill Dunham,” said Connelly. “He was an A-Ganger from Bakersfield, California. Smart, hardworking, but recently a bit of a screw up. Had been AWOL a few days before, reported back to the boat after being gone three days, a former shipmate thinks it had something to do with a girl. We think the captain was getting ready to take him to mast when he got sick. They brought him here, to Tripler, right before deploying.
“What was wrong with him?”
“We’re really not sure. Something fast, and obviously virulent. We’ve identified similar strains in east Asia but we can’t figure out exactly what he got or where he got it.”
“Had the boat been to Asia?”
“Not in four years, and the entire crew has turned over since then.”
“Contagious?”
“By the time you saw him, it obviously was not. Or you and I would be having this conversation through a wall. We’ll continue to keep an eye on you and your coworkers, but so far no one is symptomatic at all. We haven’t figured out the method of transmittal. We’re not even sure how deadly it is — so far we have only one victim, and for all we know his immune system might have been compromised.”
“One of the reasons you keep talking to me, and the others.”
“Correct.”
“What else?”
“We’re trying to figure out exactly where he caught this and how,” said Connelly. “That’s the most important thing. Obviously this is a deadly illness of some kind and we need to know more. The rate of transmission. The fatality rate. To do that, we need to keep track of everyone who could have come into contact with him during the contagious phase, whatever that was, if there was one. The only thing worse than a mystery illness is a mystery pandemic. So far, we haven’t identified any other victims, but it’s imperative that we find them if they’re out there. That’s why we need to know if you hear from any of Dunham’s friends or family.”