But there was a problem; he saw a group of men frantically pawing at the hose. He leaned over, then detached from his EAB manifold, took two long steps, and moved closer.
“What’s wrong?”
Petty Officer Yowler looked up at him, his face red and sweaty behind the mask with frustration. “It’s pressurized in the rack!” he said. “We can’t get it off!” Jabo saw what he meant. Someone had turned the valve on before the hose had been removed from its rack, engorging it with water and freezing it in place. It was immovable and useless to them. He stopped himself from asking who the fuck did something that stupid — there would be time to worry about that later.
He tapped three men on the shoulder who were standing around the rack, struggling with the hose. They turned, and since they all had EABs on, hiding their faces, Jabo glanced at their chests. One of the three did not have dolphins. “You know what you’re doing with that hose?” he asked the nub.
“Yes sir!” he shouted through the mask. It was the new guy, Hallorann. Jabo was pleased to see him rush to a hose and a fire.
“Okay — forget that hose. Go up to Mike Seven, bring that hose down here from second level. String two of them together if you need to.” He pointed to three others. “You go get Mike Two, up forward. Get both fucking hoses on this fire now!” The six men ran off without a word.
Behind him, two men had stuck two portable carbon dioxide extinguishers into the laundry and exhausted them with a quick white blast. It didn’t slow the fire at all. The lights in the missile compartment suddenly went out, the non-vital electrical bus either being secured as a safety measure or as a side-effect of the fire. Diagrams of the ship’s electrical system ran through Jabo’s mind like a series of rapidly advancing slides; he thought about the weapon’s system 400 Hertz generators one level above them. With the lights out he could see the orange glow of the fire through the billowing gray smoke that was pouring from the laundry.
Jabo had been in fires before on the boat, all the previous ones being electrical, in nature, or “Charlie Class” fires. The biggest had been on his second patrol, when the breaker for a main seawater pump breaker exploded in the engine room. With those types of fires, once the electricity was secured, if it was secured quickly enough, the fire usually diminishing rapidly. But this appeared to be an “alpha” class fire, one feeding on some kind of fuel and leaving ash behind. He heard Jantzen reliably relaying the information about the pressurized hose frozen uselessly in its rack to control, and imagined the XO seething at the news.
Both hose teams arrived almost simultaneously, both nozzlemen jacked up, ready to rumble, one hand on the hose, one hand on the nozzle.
Jabo stepped back, out of their way. “GO!” he shouted.
Both hose teams stepped forward and the nozzlemen threw open their nozzles. High pressure saltwater shot forward in two white, cold torrents. It was the only time you’d ever see submariners enthusiastically bring seawater into their space. Salt water was corrosive and undrinkable. It gathered in their feet in puddles that turned into streams, water that would find its way lower and ruin much of what it touched. The water that hit the fire, in the meantime, turned into clouds of steam and floated upward, filling the missile compartment, and would condense and lead to grounds on electrical systems that would take days to isolate and fix. Seawater was an enemy to a submarine, something they obsessively fought to keep outside the “people space,” but here they were shooting it into the boat as fast as they could bring it onboard. They did it because there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that was better for fighting a fire than large volumes of water. Within seconds you could feel the nature of the situation change, as the acrid smell of smoke gave way to the heavy softness of billowing steam, and the orange glow shrunk, then disappeared.
“Stop!” said Jabo. He had to tap both nozzlemen on the shoulders to get them to throw the bales forward and stop the flow of water. He cautiously stuck his head in the laundry, a crowbar in one hand and a battle lantern in the other, shining its beam through the haze through haze.
There were two washers and two dryers. One set looked to be completely ruined; charred and blackened. Jabo hoped that the other set might be saved — otherwise it would be a long, smelly trip to Taiwan. The charred dryer was stuffed with blackened rags— overstuffed, probably the cause of the fire. Using a crowbar, he gently pulled open the sagging door to the dryer to verify that the fire was out. Something caught his eye inside, something foreign atop the rags. He pulled out the smoldering object, and the words on the cover were still recognizable. It was The Shining.
He dropped it to the deck and walked out of the laundry where Jantzen was waiting for him. “To control, the fire is out. Sending in an overhaul team and setting the reflash watch.”
Jantzen repeated his words into the phone.
Jabo was at the scene for another thirty minutes, overhauling the fire and setting the reflash watch, the whole time sucking air in his EAB as the smoke remained thick and the air unbreathable throughout missile compartment. Finally he was relieved by Lieutenant (j.g) Retzner, who Jabo knew, after his one patrol, was qualified enough to supervise the recovery efforts, even without dolphins on his chest. Once he got through the bulkhead to the forward compartment he was allowed to remove his tightly-fitting EAB, to his profound relief. In Crew’s Mess he sat for a moment and drank two glasses of water, parched and exhausted from the fire. He noticed the tips of his shoelaces had burned down to the knots.
MS1 Straub approached him, wiping flour from his hands. He’d already begun to prepare dinner. “Lieutenant? You’re wanted in the wardroom.”
The captain, the XO, and Lieutenant Maple, the Damage Control Assistant, all sat around the table. A large pitcher of ice water sat between them, and they let Jabo drink another glass before they began. The smell of smoke clung heavily to his clothes, and he wondered again if they were going to be without an operational laundry for the next two weeks. The wardroom’s bearing repeater showed they were slow at 160 feet, executing a wide turn to the left. Clearing baffles, he knew, preparing to go to periscope depth so they could ventilate the smoke from the ship.
“Good job at the scene, Danny,” said the XO. “I’m glad you were there.”
“Thank you sir.”
“What do we think happened?” asked the captain.
Lieutenant Maple spoke up. “It sounds like a dryer was overloaded with cleaning rags, and then secured without cooling. It got overheated as it sat there. In addition, there was a book inside the dryer. That’s probably what caught fire first.”
“A book? In the fucking dryer?”
“Yes sir. We’ll find out whose book during the investigation.”
“I already know,” said Jabo with a sigh. All eyes turned to him. “It’s Howard’s. I saw him reading it on my pre-watch tour. In the laundry.”
“And the fucking genius decided to stow it in a clothes dryer,” said the XO. “Wonderful. You saw this on your pre-watch tour?”
“That’s right.”
“Well then, this brings us to our second problem. I guess you didn’t notice that Mike Six was pressurized in its rack.”
Jabo shook his head. “I thought someone turned it on too early during the firefighting, in the heat of the moment.”
Maple shook his head. “We talked to everyone at the scene. They said it was pressurized in the rack when they got there, before the fire even started.”