LeMon sucked his teeth and said, “I ain’t Grandpa Zephirin. I hear just fine.” Then, to Gordon, “Sausages be ready in two shakes, suh.”
“Good,” Gordon said. The two of them could be a couple of clowns sometimes, but he didn’t mind so long as they continued to perform their duties well. In addition to their culinary skills, they handled the galley like pros. The other day a grease fire had started on the burners, and the Guidrys had calmly and quickly smothered it with a sack of flour before Gordon even noticed. He would have been tempted to call them old hands at this if they weren’t so young.
He went to the pantry and glanced up at the bare spot on the ceiling, where one of the two light fixtures had been removed to replace the broken one in the mess. It rankled him how much of the room was in shadow.
The walk-in freezer was at the far end of the pantry. He put on the jacket, wool cap, and thick gloves that hung from a peg on the stainless-steel door. The freezer was kept at a steady minus-five degrees, cold enough to suck away a man’s body heat awfully fast if he wasn’t wearing protection.
He went in and let the door close again behind him. For safety, the door wasn’t lockable and had a handle on the inside as well as the outside. The twenty-by-six room reminded him of an old narrow-gauge boxcar, with inventory packed as tight as books on a library shelf. The metal shelves were sturdy as hell; they had never once buckled on him, even loaded with hundreds of pounds of food. It was a tight squeeze between those shelves. He had to turn sideways to make his way down the length of the freezer, picking through the shelves as he looked for the roast, already feeling the subzero chill. He found it ironic that so much energy went into warming a submarine when they were running at five hundred feet below, while even more energy was spent keeping the freezer below zero.
Other than the soft noise of frigid air coming in through the vents, the room was as silent as the Arctic tundra in midwinter. His breath clouded in front of him. He had been inside less than a minute, but the cold was already turning his nose numb and stinging his sinuses as he inhaled.
He turned his head to the rear of the freezer, alerted by something he had noticed out of the corner of his eye. Something on the floor that looked out of place. It took him a second to register what he was seeing.
“What the hell?” he gasped, the words coming out in a puff of con-
densation.
A dead man lay on the freezer floor.
Gordon rushed over to him. He was curled in the fetal position, hands tucked between his legs as if he were trying to keep them warm. Jesus God, Gordon thought. How did this happen? Had the man gotten trapped in the freezer somehow? But the door didn’t lock. There was no way to be accidentally stranded inside. Gordon shook his head in horror. He couldn’t think of many worse ways to go than freezing to death in this tiny, cramped space. How had it happened? When had it happened? Oran had done a routine inventory check in the freezer just yesterday, and there sure as hell hadn’t been a corpse in here then.
The man’s face didn’t ring a bell, but he was dressed in the same blue coveralls that all the enlisted men wore. The body was covered head to toe with white, crystalline frost. He was pale, as if all the color had drained out of him, except for the dark semicircles below his eyes—eyes still open and staring at Gordon. No, not at him, he realized, but at the freezer door behind him. The man had died only twenty feet from safety. Had he fallen and been unable to move? Had someone trapped him in the freezer on purpose, blocking the door from the outside to keep him there until he succumbed to hypothermia?
The thought was so horrible, Gordon tried not to think it. He grabbed the dead man by the rigid, icy legs and tried to drag him out of the freezer, but he had frozen to the floor. Gordon rocked the corpse back and forth until it broke free with a sickening pop. Then he pulled the body again, stiff as a board, to the freezer door. He used his elbow to knock the door open, then pulled the body out of the freezer and into the pantry.
“Get the corpsman!” he yelled. “Somebody get the goddamn corpsman!”
He pulled the dead man away from the freezer and left him there, dropping his legs—they made a loud crack as they hit the floor—and slamming the freezer door shut. In the dim light of the one remaining pantry fixture, the crewman’s body looked even more horrible. The dark circles around his eyes became black pits, the empty sockets of a death’s head.
Oran and LeMon came running into the pantry. As soon as he saw the body, Oran pushed LeMon back out, shouting, “Monje, go get the corpsman! Now!”
Gordon yanked off his protective gloves and jacket and crouched down over the body. “He… he was in the freezer—I don’t know for how long.”
Oran shook his head. “Poor fella. How he get in there?”
“No idea,” Gordon said. “Do you recognize him?”
Oran shook his head again. “No, suh. Seen a lot of faces in the mess, but they don’ all stick. But looka this, suh.” He pointed to one frozen hand.
Gordon leaned forward for a closer look. There was frozen blood on the dead man’s hand—dark red icicles from the lacerations in his skin.
“The light fixture, suh?” Oran asked.
“Jesus,” Gordon said. “A smashed light, a dead body in the freezer—what the hell is going on?”
Sick bay abutted the mess, so it didn’t take long for LeMon to run back with help. Roanoke’s hospital corpsman, Senior Chief Sherman Matson, hurried into the pantry with LeMon. Like most corpsmen, Matson wasn’t a doctor, but he was the only medically trained sailor on the boat. He could tend a broken arm, take care of a crewman with the flu, hand out painkillers, or run a physical, but if something life-threatening occurred, his job was to stabilize the sailor as best he could until they reached the closest medical facility. Not that there was anything even the most gifted doc could do for the poor frozen son of a bitch at this point except lay him to rest.
Gordon and Oran backed away while Matson knelt down to inspect the corpse. He felt for a pulse in the dead man’s neck, then yanked his hand back from the frozen flesh. He listened for breath passing between the icy blue lips, but the look in his eye said he knew it was futile.
“What happened here, Lieutenant?” Matson asked, straightening again.
“I found him in the freezer,” Gordon said. “He was just lying there.”
“How long was he in there, sir?”
“Hard to say, but it can’t have been more than a few hours. Do you know who he is?”
Matson looked down at the frozen corpse and sighed. “Yes, sir, I know him. His name was Stubic. Warren Stubic.”
Gordon heard a sudden murmur of shocked voices and looked up. Over Matson’s shoulder, he saw the faces of every sailor in the mess, crowding in the pantry doorway. Damn. Now there was no way to keep word from spreading to the rest of crew, along with all the rumors and innuendo that sprang up whenever two sailors spoke.
“What are we going to do with him?” Gordon asked. There was no morgue on board, no medical ward. Even sick bay was little more than a supply closet full of bandages, medicine, and a few basic surgical instruments.
“I’m afraid we don’t have a lot of options, sir,” Matson replied. “It’s recommended that a dead body be kept on ice until we reach the closest medical facility.”
“He’s already frozen solid,” Gordon said. “Besides, I don’t want to put him back in the freezer if that’s where he died. It doesn’t seem right, you know? There’s got to be someplace else we can put him.”
Matson thought for a moment. “It would have to be someplace private, sir. Someplace removed from the rest of the crew. The problem is, there’s no place private on a submarine. The only place that even comes close is the torpedo room. No one goes in there except the torpedomen. Stubic was one, you know—a torpedoman. Maybe the others would be willing to have one of their own down there until we reach the nearest base.”