The closed hatch of the torpedo room seemed to stare back at him. He shivered.
Maybe there’s more than one of ’em.
He returned to the auxiliary engine room and started gathering together the armful of cans he needed. He heard footsteps again, but this time when he looked up, he saw someone silhouetted in the doorway, his face in darkness with the light at his back. The techs shined their lanterns on him just as they had on Oran, revealing Ensign Penwarden.
“Get those lights out of my face,” Penwarden said irritably.
“Sorry, sir,” the first tech replied.
“You gave us a start, sir,” the second tech said. “Thought for a moment you might be the mad light-smasher. You never know where he’ll strike next.”
“Except that he already did,” the ensign said. “I ran into the XO up on the middle level. He sent me to get you. He said you’re needed in the head and the lights down here can wait.”
“The head, sir?” the first tech asked. “He broke the lights there too?”
“It’s a little worse than that. You’d better see for yourself.”
Both techs picked up their tools and left the auxiliary engine room. They took their lanterns with them, leaving Oran in a darkened room with only the light from the corridor outside to see by. He felt a chill again, spooked by the idea of being alone in a dark room with a crazy man loose on the sub. He stooped to collect his tomato cans. He could barely see and had to feel his way. From the corridor outside, he heard Penwarden say something that didn’t make any sense.
“Bodine? Is that you?”
Oran glanced up. Penwarden was just outside the doorway. Oran couldn’t see who he was talking to, but he doubted it was Bodine. Wasn’t he quarantined?
Penwarden said the name again. “Bodine?”
Penwarden walked away, and Oran collected his cans. Perhaps his bad feeling had been wrong after all. If Bodine was up and about already, maybe there was nothing to worry about from the disease. Matson must have cured it somehow, or maybe the quarantine had given the fever time to run its course and it turned out not to be life-threatening. After all, Stubic had died from freezing himself, not from the disease. Maybe everything was going to be all right after all.
Carrying four half-gallon cans of tomatoes, Oran left the auxiliary engine room. He glanced down the corridor, but neither Penwarden nor Bodine was there.
The torpedo-room hatch was still closed.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
As soon as Oran returned to the galley, Gordon Abrams put him right back to work, helping prep first meal. LeMon stood by the stove, stirring a big pot of bright yellow liquid with red flecks. The sharp, peppery fumes coming out of that pot made Gordon’s eyes water. He wasn’t sure what was in there, let alone whether it was fit for human consumption, but he had learned to trust the Guidry brothers’ culinary skills as long as the crew was happy.
The three of them talked among themselves as they always did while the Guidrys were cracking eggs and frying bacon for first meal, but all conversation ground to a halt when Lieutenant Commander Jefferson stormed into the galley. Behind him were Jerry White and Goodrich, the copper-haired auxiliary tech who had replaced the broken light fixture in the mess. Jefferson looked angrier than Gordon had ever seen him.
“Lieutenant, did you hear anything out of the ordinary earlier?” Jefferson demanded.
“No, sir, nothing,” Gordon replied. “What’s going on?”
“Grab a lantern and catch up to us in the head,” Jefferson said.
Then, as quickly as they had arrived, Jefferson, White, and Goodrich hurried away. LeMon shot Gordon a concerned look.
“What’s goin’ on, suh?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Gordon said. “Stay here, both of you. I’ll be right back.”
He opened the galley cabinet where his battle lantern was stored. Every department had its share of the portable, battery-powered electric lights in case the power went out, which it rarely ever did, so the things tended to gather dust. They were bulky yellow waterproof cubes of molded high-impact plastic, with thick, sturdy handles on top, and bracket attachments on the back so they could be mounted on bulkheads. Gordon grabbed his lantern and ran out of the galley.
Jefferson had asked him to meet them in the crew head. Something must have happened in there. His mind was already preparing for the worst.
Someone had blown a shitter.
As funny as the expression was, the reality was no joke. Emptying toilets was a major problem on submarines. At 400 feet down, the pressure pushing in on the hull was about 300 pounds per square inch. If the boat tried to flush out its human waste with less pressure than what was pushing in, all that shit would fly right back into the boat. That was why, instead of flushing into the ocean, the toilets on Roanoke emptied into sanitary tanks, which Engineering purged every few days.
But purging the tanks still meant the contents had to be pressurized so that they didn’t all come flying back. If the pressure on the hull was 300 pounds per square inch, the sanitary tanks had to be pressurized to more than that—a minimum of 301 pounds per square inch. Auxiliary Division posted signs all over the head before they pressurized the tanks, warning sailors not to use the facilities, but if some idiot ignored the signs and flushed the toilet while the tanks were pressurized, the poor bastard would be rewarded with a 301-psi enema. For comparison, the water in fire hydrants was pressurized to only 100 pounds per square inch. This would be three times as strong. Under that kind of pressure, the shit would quite literally fly.
But as Gordon approached the head, the first thing he noticed was that he didn’t smell anything. If someone had blown a shitter, the stench of sewage would be overwhelming. Hell, now that he thought of it, he would have been able to smell it all the way back in the galley.
The second thing he noticed was the absence of any light coming out of the open hatch.
When he entered the head, he found Jefferson, Jerry White, Goodrich and two other aux techs standing in a completely dark room, pointing lanterns up at the ceiling. All the light fixtures in the head had been smashed. The floor was littered with shards of glass and pearly white dust from the fluorescent tubes.
“Oh, Christ, not again,” Gordon said.
“Earlier, the son of a bitch got the lights down in the auxiliary engine room too,” Jefferson said. “But this time, we have a witness. Isn’t that right, White?”
“Yes, sir,” White said. “I just wish I had more information to give you. The sound of it woke me up, but I didn’t see it happen. At first, I thought it was a dream, so I didn’t get out of my rack right away. I wish I had, sir; then I might have caught whoever did this.”
Even if they did catch him, what then? Roanoke didn’t have a brig, and they sure as hell weren’t going to lock up someone who seemed compelled to destroy everything around him in one of the officer staterooms. They couldn’t hand him off to a surface ship, or they’d wind up alerting the Soviets to their presence again, and as far as Gordon was concerned, one Victor shadowing them was one too many.
Back when his mother had worked in the psychiatric hospital, she taught him that people who did inexplicable or harmful things were more likely mentally ill than malicious. Whoever was breaking the lights on Roanoke obviously fit that bill. Stress, claustrophobia—all sorts of things could make a submariner lose his mind. This was Mitch Robertson all over again, except that the light-smasher was turning his anger outward instead of inward. He desperately needed help, but what help could they offer him? There was no shrink on board, and Matson didn’t have any psychiatric meds in sick bay. Were they just going to have to tie this guy up somewhere until the op was over?