She looked even more enticing than when he first saw her. He was already imagining doing everything with her that his money could buy.
“You’re from the naval station?” she asked.
“I am,” he said, sliding closer to her. “I’m sailing out on a submarine tomorrow and thought I’d give myself one last hurrah.”
“All those men on the submarine,” she said in a wistful tone. “It must get very lonely without any girls.”
“You have no idea,” he said, putting a hand on her kimono-draped leg. The silk felt smooth and alluring under his hand.
“So much time in the middle of the ocean, deep underwater, surrounded by the dark,” she said. Her green eyes flashed. The top of her kimono drifted open just enough to reveal the curve of her breast. “Don’t you ever get scared?”
“Of the dark?” he asked.
“Of everything that could go wrong on a submarine,” she said. Her hand traced lazy circles across his chest.
“There’s… there’s nothing to be scared of,” he stammered, growing more aroused at her touch. “We train and we drill. We know what to do if anything goes wrong.”
“So, nothing scares you?” she asked.
He could tell from her smile that she was teasing him. “Not a thing,” he said.
“Good.” She stood up and walked into the adjoining hallway, disappearing into the inky darkness. “Aren’t you coming?” she called back to him.
He stood up and went to follow her, but something made him pause at the mouth of the hallway. The darkness that filled it was absolute. Not even a glimmer of ambient candlelight filtered in from the room. It was like staring into a black hole. Then, farther down the hallway, two eyes glowed, like a cat’s eyes reflecting the light—except that there was no light to be reflected, only the stygian darkness around them. For a moment, he thought he was dreaming.
“Baby…?” he called.
The girl didn’t answer.
“Baby, is that—is that you?”
He took a step forward into the hallway, then another, and then the darkness swallowed him whole.
CHAPTER ONE
Without a doubt, the most insidious dangers were the ones that hid in plain sight, camouflaging themselves inside the minds of rational men. Petty Officer First Class Tim Spicer of USS Roanoke knew this all too well. He had seen men—good men, strong men—who thought they were equipped to handle life on board a submarine discover otherwise after being crammed into a three-hundred-foot tube in the depths of the ocean with over a hundred other men. Most underways lasted three months, some longer, and in that time even the sharpest minds could crack under the pressure.
Case in point, Roanoke’s previous planesman. Petty Officer Second Class Mitch Robertson had been fresh out of BESS, the Basic Enlisted Submarine School, which had opened just a year before in Groton, Connecticut. He thought he was ready for everything the ocean depths could throw at him, but his first underway had been a long one—nine months escorting a carrier group around the tip of South America and into the Atlantic. Robertson had lasted only the first three months, growing more frantic and disheveled as time passed. In the mess, he kept to himself, eating less and less until he stopped altogether. In the control room, his response to orders became sluggish. Not seeing the sun for months, not breathing fresh air or seeing any new faces had driven him to the edge. But nothing went unnoticed on a submarine. As a matter of course, the officers kept a close eye on the crew, watchful for signs of fatigue. They had to. Everyone’s lives depended on their recognizing it in time, and they caught it right away in Robertson. On long underways such as that one, Roanoke would visit port every three months to stock up on food, since she could only carry a hundred days’ worth at a time, and Captain Weber had decided to swap Robertson out at the next port. When Robertson found out, he went to his locker and got his toilet kit, went into the head, and slit his wrists with his shaving razor in one of the stalls. Maybe he was ashamed that he didn’t have what it took, or maybe something deeper and darker inside him drove him to it. Tim never knew. It was he who found Robertson there, slumped over in the stall, blood from his wrists pooling on the floor—more blood than Tim had ever seen, so much that his gorge rose at the sight. He had rushed to get the hospital corpsman, who, fortunately, had been able to patch Robertson up in time. Afterward, Roberston was transferred to one of the carriers, where they had the doctors and medical facilities to look after him, and Tim got a lot of pats on the back from the crew for saving the man’s life.
So when Captain Weber summoned him to his stateroom shortly before Roanoke was set to pull out of port, Tim thought maybe it had something to do with Robertson. A personal meeting with the captain wasn’t something most petty officers ever experienced, especially with Captain Weber, who was notoriously standoffish with his enlisted men. The summons had sounded urgent, and Tim double-timed it, worried that the captain would tell him Robertson had tried to kill himself again—or, worse, had succeeded this time.
Roanoke was a 688, a Los Angeles–class nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine, outfitted with three levels that housed the crew’s living spaces, weapons systems, and control centers. Captain Weber’s stateroom was on the top level, forward of the control room, in a short corridor known as the captain’s egress.
When Tim got there, he found the stateroom hatch open. The space inside was small and cramped even though it belonged to the captain. There just wasn’t enough room on the boat for anything larger. Inside, Senior Chief Farrington, chief of the boat and highest-ranking enlisted man aboard, was deep in conversation with the captain. Farrington was a no-nonsense career sailor, an aging senior chief petty officer with scant hope of making master chief before retiring. Word on the boat put him at fifty, maybe even fifty-five. Old enough to have grandchildren back home, and certainly the oldest man aboard Roanoke. As COB, Farrington was the primary liaison between the commissioned officers and enlisted men such as Tim, which meant that he too had to be present for this meeting with the captain.
Captain Weber, a short, roundish man in his forties, sat at the desk that folded down from the wood-paneled wall. A calendar had been pinned up, the days X-ed off up to today—Thursday, November 17, 1983.
“You sent for me, Captain?” Tim said, standing at attention in the doorway. Saluting was never done indoors, not even for the captain.
“Come in, Spicer,” Captain Weber said, barely looking up from the papers strewn across his desk.
Not the warm-and-fuzziest commanding officer Tim had ever seen, but not the kind who spent the entire tour yelling at crewmen, either—even though he did have stringently high standards, which he expected his men to meet. He was more the strong-and-silent type, like John Wayne, only in Barney Rubble’s body. Tim stepped into the stateroom, then waited to be addressed before speaking. A file folder was open in front of the captain. Tim read the name across the top, upside down: White, Jerome: Petty Officer Second Class.
“Have you met your new planesman yet, Spicer?” Captain Weber asked. “PO2 White?”
“I’ve seen him, sir, but we haven’t spoken,” Tim replied.
“What have you heard about him?”
“Nothing yet, sir.”
Senior Chief Farrington, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, said, “What if I were to tell you our new planesman suffers from a bad case of CRIS, Spicer?”
CRIS was seaman’s jargon: cranial-rectal insertion syndrome.
“Sir?” Tim asked the captain.
Captain Weber sighed and leaned back in his chair. “What Farrington is trying so colorfully to say is that it appears White comes with some baggage. There was an incident on his last boat, USS Philadelphia.”