But Dean was happy because that night it seemed he might actually get off the boat in time to shower at home, screw his wife, and eat dinner. In that order.
He checked in a final time with the engineer, not quite saying he was getting ready to leave, but verifying that there was nothing preventing him from going home, no urgent problems demanding his attention. He skulked by the XO’s stateroom, to control, and actually had one hand on the ladder to freedom when the radioman spotted him. “Lieutenant Hysong?”
“I’m going home.”
“You might want to see this,” he said, arm extended with a clipboard.
“No. I really don’t.”
The radioman nodded sympathetically, and Hysong took it from him. He read it with increasing disbelief.
“They can’t fucking be serious.”
“Priority one, it says. Supposed to start tomorrow. The Freon truck is already on the pier.”
Hysong’s head was spinning. The message called for a brief, but everyone, including his chief, had already gone home with roughly the same plans he had. But their wives weren’t freaking aerobics instructors. And they had just completed the incredibly tedious, time-consuming operation of switching out every ounce of refrigerant. Now the navy wanted them to switch back.
“I’m not doing it. Fuck’em. Retards.”
“Says safety issue,” said the radioman.
“Fuck safety.”
“Look at the bottom,” he said.
“Oh fuck, is there something else?” He flipped over to the second page. What he saw there was even weirder.
“Holy shit. They’re calling back the Florida?”
“That’s what it says. They’re going to tie up outboard of us and make the same switch.”
Dean dropped the message to his side and thought that over. Calling a boat back from patrol was extremely odd…he’d only seen it a couple of times in five years. The whole operation was odd, and reeked of bureaucratic panic. He tried to remember a message they’d gotten a few days earlier, some kind of warning they’d received about R-118. To achieve this kind of rapid motion, to actually turn a boat around at sea and bring it back to the pier, one had to overcome massive amounts of inertia, and it could usually only be achieved by disaster.
Suddenly he was certain that someone had been killed.
And he knew, from the pre-evolution briefs, that only three boats had made the change: Alaska, Florida, and Alabama. And since nothing had happened on Alaska, he knew the fatality had to have happened on one of the other two. His gut told him it was the Florida. They were bringing her back in, after all, no word about the Alabama. And, as much as he hated to admit it, the Alabama was the tightest ship in the squadron, always at the top of every ranking. He didn’t picture her at the center of this kind of fuck up.
He went topside and walked to the pier to call home, before he’d even shown the message to the engineer or the captain, because he knew that once the word was out he wouldn’t have a spare second.
“Hello?” she said. He could hear a lilt in her voice. She thought he was calling to say that he was on his way home.
“I’m stuck here,” he said.
“How long?” she said without trying to hide her disappointment or disgust. He sighed. “Probably all night. I’ll be lucky if I’m home for dinner tomorrow.” “Okay,” she said, knowing better than to ask why. “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Hysong worked all night preparing the work plan, and by the morning he was ready to brief all the players. As they scrambled to prepare, everyone was asking the same question: What the fuck? Hysong had his theory, that someone had been killed on either Florida or Alabama, but kept it to himself. After he completed his 0900 briefing in the wardroom, the squadron EDO told them that Florida would soon be tying up outboard of them, and would actually get to make the change first — the priority was to get her back to sea as quickly as possible. This gave Hysong a few minutes to catch his breath. He grabbed a cup of coffee and went topside to watch Florida pull in.
It was a beautiful, crisp morning, the type of morning that made the coffee taste better, and made him mourn the sunshine and fresh air that he was about to be locked away from for months. Florida pulled along their port side head to tail, and was nudged gently into place by the civilian tug the Mitchell Hebert. As soon as a gangplank was placed across, Hysong walked over and found Rick Curtis, their DCA. They looked at each other with grim, appraising smiles.
“Hey Rick.”
“How are you, Dean?”
“Did you guys kill somebody out there?”
Rick shook his head. “I was just about to ask you the same thing.”
The switch on Florida took longer than expected, which everyone expected. Then they moved all the hoses over to Alaska, where everyone was waiting, eager to get it over with. They were fairly well-practiced at the evolution by this point, and they efficiently evacuated the R-118. There was a moment of tension when they thought the truck might not contain enough R-114 to fill all their systems, and they would have to wait for the nearest truck….in Spokane…to make its way to the pier, probably well after 2200. Had that happened, Dean would have made sure that the Navy saw its second Freon-related death in a week. But they finally got a break and they were able to replace every ounce of the new Freon with the old with what was on the pier, and the entire evolution was complete and signed off by 1900. Dean grabbed his bag, went to the pier and got in his car without even considering asking anyone’s permission.
At home, Dee Dee was waiting, still grouchy from being stood up the night before. She looked achingly beautiful, her body toned perfectly from her many hours at the gym. They had two nights left before he went to sea again, and Dean desperately wanted to make things right with her, wanted to explain to her how fucked up the last twenty-four hours had been, how he really, truly, had had no choice. And, as he imagined pulling the thin sweatshirt over her head without even leaving the living room, he wanted to explain it all to her in the shortest possible period of time.
“Hey,” she said, hands on her hips, awaiting his justification.
He hesitated for just a moment. “Somebody got killed on the Alabama.”
The next day was Thursday. A happy and satisfied Dee Dee Hysong told most of the class at the gym what she’d learned before Angi and Molly even showed up, their customary ten minutes late. By the time they took their positions, the entire group was chattering about death aboard the USS Alabama.
Jabo checked the position no the chart again, to verify they were making up track. The position was all DR, of course, just an estimate based on speed and heading. They would only be able to get a GPS fix every eight hours or so, during their furtive trips to PD. Any estimate of position between fixes was just a math problem, an educated guess represented by an X on a thin pencil line on a virtually unmarked chart based on course and speed. Whatever errors existed in those measurements were magnified by their high bell. Their location on the planet had become very abstract.