So to them, the Navy salary had never seemed like a hardship. In fact, she drove a new car, a Honda Accord, for the first time in her life, and she absolutely loved the house they’d purchased together with a VA loan. But, after spending a few hours with Mary Beth Casazza, whose husband had lined up a job at Microsoft before getting out of the navy the year before, she was starting to become aware of the things she couldn’t buy on Danny’s lieutenant’s salary, even with sea pay, sub pay, and the nuclear power bonus tacked on.
“That’s the plan,” Angi said, considering trying on a pair of Manolo Blahniks, even though she would never, she vowed, no matter how much money they someday might make, ever spend that much on a pair of shoes. “If I’m not mistaken, I think he’s already turned in his letter.”
Mary Beth rolled her eyes. “Isn’t that amazing, when you think about it? That you don’t know? That the Navy can just do whatever they want to him, as long as they want? I’ll bet you can’t wait to get out.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Angi. “Danny’s never hated the Navy, and neither have I.”
“But the baby?” she was smiling.
Angi raised an eyebrow.
“Cindy Soldato told me.”
Angi nodded. “I guess it’s ridiculous to pretend it’s a secret any more, now that I’ve told Cindy. I’m a little over three months.”
“You must be so excited!” said Mary Beth. She had the shoes now, was sliding her feet into them. “And Danny will be back…”Angi watched her doing the math in her head.
“Oh no, honey. .”
She nodded. “Yes…probably not back in time. That’s okay. My mom will come in town.”
Mary Beth put her hand on her arm. “No, honey, it sucks.”
“You’re right. It does suck. But we’re not the first to go through it.”
Mary Beth was shaking her head. “Soon, you won’t have to worry about any of this shit. Has Danny applied to Microsoft yet? Larry says they are hiring Navy guys like crazy right now, love the nukes”
“Didn’t you say he’s working all the time?”
Mary Beth nodded. “In comparison to the real world: yes. But compared to the Navy? He’s home every night. He’s home for dinner probably three nights a week. And he’s home every Saturday and Sunday, just like he’s supposed to be. And the money…let me tell you Angi, you’ll get used to it in a hurry. We’re going to France this summer. After I get that out of my system, maybe I’ll talk Larry into getting me pregnant.”
At the register, Mary Beth decided at the list minute to get another pair of the same shoes in brown.
The submarine was, in many ways, just an arrangement of tubes within tubes. Different tubes contained different fluids: water, air, steam, radioactive coolant, refrigerant, drinking water, pure oxygen and pure hydrogen all coursed through different parts of the ship. Some fluids were at high pressure, like the hydraulic oil kept at a deadly three thousand pounds per square inch: a tiny stream ejected from a pinhole leak in that system could pierce a man’s skull. Other systems ran at low pressure but were hazardous in other ways, like the burbling, unending stream of sewage that 154 men created as they lived their daily lives. Most of the tubes ran from fore to aft, the main axis of the submarine, carrying their cargo from its source to its conclusion. Twenty-four of the biggest tubes, however, pointed straight up and down, as they contained Trident nuclear missiles, the submarine’s reason for being. The biggest tube of all was the submarine itself, a giant tapered tube of HY-80 steel forty-eight-feet wide at its widest point, and five hundred and forty eight feet long, blunted at the forward end by the sonar dome, and pinched off at the other by the seven-bladed screw that propelled them through the Pacific Ocean.
Being a qualified officer on the submarine meant being able to identify every one of those tubes on sight: what it contained, where it ran, the implications of a breech. To learn it all was daunting, as the pipes ran everywhere, layered on top of each other in every direction, but the patrols were long, diversions were few, and the men had all been screened carefully for their intelligence and their ability to work tirelessly in pursuit of engineering knowledge. Ensign Brendan Duggan was on his first patrol, in the first stage of the process, tracing the pipes and ducts of a few isolated systems at a time, learning how they tied together to make some part of the boat function. By his third patrol, he’d know every pipe of every system, and be able to hand draw most of the systems with every valve in place. Danny Jabo, on his sixth patrol, was in the final stage of the learning process. Having learned the physical composition of every system, he was tasked with learning the philosophy of its design, why it was a certain capacity, why one material had been chosen over another to construct it, the trade offs that the engineers had made in designing it, between safety, efficiency, and silence.
As part of this process, Jabo was walking Ensign Brendan Duggan through the boat, pointing out valves and ducts, attempting to help him qualify Battery Charging Line Up officer. Jabo knew almost nothing about Duggan. He was an academy guy, Jabo remembered, from somewhere in the south. He’d heard that he knew something about bluegrass music, and a rumor that he’d brought to sea a dulcimer, or a mandolin, or something like that. Thank God he’d had the sense to keep the thing stowed thus far: a nub officer couldn’t be seen doing something as frivolous as playing music.
Battery Charging Lineup Officer was traditionally the first thing a new officer qualified on board, usually in his first week at sea. The BCLU verified that the ship’s ventilation system was operating normally prior to a battery charge, as charging the battery released a number of undesirable elements into the ship’s atmosphere: hydrogen being the most dangerous. It was an unavoidable byproduct of the process that crammed electricity into the battery’s wet, acid-filled cells. Prior to the charge an enlisted man went through the ship and set everything up, but such was the importance that an officer was required to physically verify the position of every valve and every switch. To learn the battery charging lineup was good for a new officer because it took him through every area of the ship. An officer who knew what he was doing could complete it in under thirty minutes. Like so many things a new officer on a submarine did, it was at once tedious and highly important.
Duggan’s qualification was important to Jabo because it would put him one step closer to the watchbill, which might, at some point, result in an extra six hours of sleep for him. Which was why Jabo was willing to take an hour out of his sleep prior to taking the watch to walk through the ship with him, in an attempt to get Duggan to the point where he could withstand an oral examination by the engineer and get qualified, a small step toward becoming useful.
“What’s this?” Jabo asked, pointing to a large, humming machine in Auxiliary Machinery Room 2.
“A scrubber,” said Duggan confidently. “At least one of them has to be running during a battery charge.”
“Correct,” said Jabo. “What does it do?”
“Removes carbon dioxide,” said Duggan.
“What creates carbon dioxide?”
“I do,” said Duggan. “We all do. It’s a product of respiration.”
“Right,” said Jabo. Which is why non-qualified personnel on the boat like Duggan were sometimes called “scrubber loads.” Along with non-qual, nub, dink (short for “delinquent”), and host of other insults. “So how does it remove CO2?”
Duggan hesitated just a moment, recalling a scrap of information from his memory. “It heats up a catalyst…”