“Sir, I didn’t get the impression the chief corpsman was real sure.”
“Forward berthing? I’ll be down right away. Does the XO know?”
“I’ll notify him soon as I get off, sir. Figured you ought to hear it first.”
Dan told him he was right and hung up. Dressed as quickly as he could. The blue coveralls were a forgiving uniform, though he didn’t care for the way they showed a corner of your skivvy shirt. He pressed his pins into his chest with the palm of his right hand and let the door lock click behind him.
Five decks down, in the muzzy humidity of the berthing compartment. When he’d first joined the Navy, these had been pipe bunks, metal frames four high, a thin pallet and a worn fartsack sagging on a crisscross of webbing. Now each sailor had his own nook with reading light and curtain. Not exactly roomy, with fifty men in a compartment, but there was some privacy, at least.
The man who lay in bunk 24 was past privacy. The face, immobile as dark wax, and staring eyes told him that. The corpsman, Grissett, looked up from ballpointing notes. An astringent smell edged the air. Grissett wore thin blue latex gloves. A transparent tube lay on the bunk, still sealed in plastic. Behind him stood Chief Toan, the master-at-arms, badge glittering, hands behind his back. They both swung as they caught sight of Dan. A very slight, ugly young man with a dirty tee, scuffed, torn boots, and coveralls peeled down to his waist hovered a few feet away. “What happened?” Dan asked.
“Morning, sir. I mean, afternoon. The Troll here—”
“The Troll?”
“Sorry — the compartment seaman, here. He called the master-at-arms when he couldn’t get Goodroe up.” The corpsman nodded at the body. “Cold. No pulse. He’s been dead awhile.”
Dan looked the corpse over. By no means the first he’d seen, but definitely one of the most peaceful-looking. The heavy-jawed face was expectant, as if at a joke just heard but not yet fully grasped. The nude chest was covered with thick curling black hairs that shriveled to stubs as they approached the beard line. A trace of what might be dried foam at the corner of bluish lips. He bent closer; a hint of brown in it? Started to reach out, then, at a cautionary flinch from the corpsman, retrieved his finger before touching anything. “Is that blood? At the corner of his mouth?”
“Take a sample in a minute, sir. Downie here”—the compartment cleaner grinned, then sobered—“he says he, I mean Goodroe, felt a little down and had a cough. He was off watch, so he turned into his bunk. That’s all.”
Usually you looked for an off-watch sailor in his work center during the day, but the era when all hands were expected to turn to at daylight was long gone at sea. These days, a sailor off watch, and not feeling well, might well decide to turn in for a Tallerigo. “What’d his work-center supervisor say?” Dan asked the CMAA.
“On his way down, sir. He knew Goody was in his rack, but didn’t know nothing else.”
“Any history? Anything … Any idea what’s going on here?” Dan scratched his head. He’d been talking to the man, what, just yesterday? A young, husky, jock-type guy. Maybe a little … antagonistic, with his remarks about how the crew needed to be in the picture more. But he hadn’t seemed ill. “Is this a natural death? Or what?”
The corpsman frowned. “A lot of possibilities right now, sir. You know most of our guys are strong, healthy specimens of testosterone-filled manhood. So the first thing, you look for signs of strangulation, or beating. But I don’t see any. Could be a drug OD—”
“I’ve seen those,” the CMAA murmured.
“—or poisoning, accidental or deliberate. He could’ve had underlying valve disease. A heart murmur they let go, or didn’t hear, when he enlisted. If he got septic in the night, maybe endocarditis — the infected valve sends emboli to the rest of the body, like fingers. But, bottom line, this is gonna be a coroner’s case, sir. We got to handle it by protocol, and get the body to the medical examiner ASAP.”
“Okay, I get it. Anything in his record?”
The chief corpsman slipped a file folder from beneath a clipboard. “His last entry’s the final installment of the anthrax inoculation. That we got in Naples.”
Dan scratched his head again. He’d had a course of what he assumed was the same vaccine, experimental then, during the Gulf War. “This vaccine. Is it, I don’t know, ever dangerous?”
“It’s a mandatory inoculation.” The chief shrugged. Flipped pages. “A three-shot buildup and booster. No record of any adverse effects to the first two shots. No, wait … he reported fever and swelling after the second. Two days later, follow-up, he’s fine.”
“Good records. When’d he get the booster?”
“Two days ago. I gave him that myself.”
“This is the AVA stuff, right? Is this a documented side effect? Sudden death, I mean?”
“Anthrax vaccine adsorbed, yes sir. No sir, there’s no such warning on side effects.”
“So what killed this apparently healthy guy? Best guess?”
“Captain, I just can’t give you an informed opinion right now. If we had an MD aboard, maybe, but I doubt he’d want to come out and tell you something that might turn out to be a hundred and eighty wrong either.” The chief snapped the latex on one glove, then tore open the plastic wrapping on the flexible tube. He peeled down the corpse’s boxers, dug out the slack flaccid penis, spread its meatus, and began threading the tube into it.
Dan said, “Uh, what exactly are you—”
“Drug screen. Gotta catheterize him. And we’re gonna have to take lots of photos, at the highest resolution we can.”
Dan got Almarshadi on the Hydra and told him to get the ship’s photographer down to forward berthing, and then to meet up with him. “Okay, do the protocol,” he told Grissett. “By the book. Then body-bag him, and back to the reefers until I can get direction on disposition. Can you decontaminate, I mean, disinfect the rack? Would that be something we’d want to do?”
“Yes sir, that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary. Once we get him out of the compartment. I can use an alcohol solution. A spray bottle. And take his linens to the laundry in a separate bag, do ’em in superhot water.”
“Good. Anybody else touch him? Uh — Troll?”
A flinch; a grin. “No sir, I didn’t touch him.” Then a frown. “Well, yeah, I did. To sort of shake him. To, uh, wake him up.”
“I’ll get his hands disinfected too, just in case.” The corpsman studied the body and snapped the glove-rubber again. “You didn’t touch your face afterward, did you?”
Dan left them there, gathered around the drawn-back curtain like a nineteenth-century tableau: grave visages around a sickbed, silent and respectful in the unexpected, yet never faraway, presence of the Dread Leveler.
Almarshadi caught up as he was letting himself out on the main deck. Dan wanted to get some fresh air; the old-socks-and-deodorant man-reek of the berthing space seemed ominous once associated with death.
They stood by the lifeline, buffeted by a cold wind, as sailors ducked into the breaker — the covered walkway, almost like a highway tunnel, that led from the port side midships up to the forecastle. The sea roared as Savo ripped through it, peeling off curving chunks of whitecap that toppled to either side like dump-truck loads of shiny pale green and white marbles, and now and again she rolled and the wind tore a spatter of spray across them, the scent and taste sharp and refreshing. At intervals, when the sun broke through, crystalized salt sparkled on the bulkheads by the refueling station, on the chocks, bitts, life rails, the davit socket, like gypsum deposits in a cave.