“You’re sure?”
“Positive,” said the navigator. “It will all be over soon. In minutes.”
The commander nodded and smiled at that. He shut his eyes and took a deep drag from his cheap-looking cigarette, the tip glowing bright red. “No one knows?” he asked without opening his eyes.
“It’s too late to do anything about it anyway,” said the Nav.
The commander eyes flew open and he looked at him sharply. “Does anyone know?”
“No one knows.”
“I think you’re mistaken.”
“No one knows!”
“One person knows. And we know from past experience that he is weak. You need to get rid of him before that weakness betrays us, and ruins the plan.”
The navigator was at first confused. But then he realized that the commander was
talking about him.
Hallorann sat on the edge of his rack and looked through his qualification book for the millionth time. Like most new men, when a page was full, with every signature block signed, he laminated it with a sheet of plastic, a necessity for a book that was carried next to your body for hour after sweaty hour. It was also a measure of progress, and Hallorann’s book only had two un-laminated pages remaining. He had everything about the book memorized, every signature, every question he’d answered to get the signature. He knew which signatures he’d really earned, the areas and systems on the boat that he really understood: sonar and the main ballast system were his best. And he knew which ones were harder for him to understand: the reactor, which still seemed like some kind of black magic to him, a perpetual motion machine that really worked.
But most of all, he knew which signatures he had left to get. He’d made amazing, rapid progress, and it had been noticed. But that also meant that his questioners were less apt to give him a pass on anything. He was supposed to be hot shit, and they all wanted to see it for themselves. And one of the biggest blocks that was left was the diesel.
His confidence was high as he approached the ladder that would take him down into the torpedo room and Machinery One, home of both the diesel and the battery. As he rounded the corner, however, the navigator was hustling toward the same ladder, a grim look on his face. Hallorann hesitated and let the navigator pass, turning to pretend to read the posted Plan of the Day.
He’d hoped to wander down there and find some beneficent A Ganger, bored and looking for something to do, like perhaps spending twenty or thirty minutes talking to Hallorann and signing his qualification book. He knew it was a long shot, especially with A Gang being short handed and always busy. His second choice, if there was no one down there, would be to spend a few minutes alone with the machine, walking through the procedures, getting that much more prepared for his qualification.
But he had no desire to be down there alone with the navigator. The crew liked to make fun of the eccentricities of the other officers, like Hein’s dweebishness, Jabo’s goofy country charm, and Kincaid’s constant reminders to everyone that he had been enlisted once, too. But the feelings about the nav were different, an almost superstitious kind of discomfort. He was weird, and nobody wanted even to talk about him, other than an occasional word of pity for those enlisted men like Flather who worked directly for him. Which is why Hallorann hesitated, deciding to wait a few minutes to see if the nav might come back up quickly before he descended into Machinery One.
After a few minutes he began to feel uncomfortable loitering in the heart of Officers’ Country. He was standing near the CO’s and XO’s staterooms, the Officers’ Study, and the wardroom. Plus, he was ready, eager to get down the ladder, to the diesel and that much closer to his dolphins. He had no reason to be afraid of the nav…did he? He hesitated one more moment in front of the officer’s bulletin board, pretending again to read the plan of the day and the watchbill. Then he turned and climbed down the ladder.
There was a watchstander in the torpedo room, laughing at something on his computer screen, waiting for his watch to end. Hallorann took a few steps forward into Machinery One.
He saw the nav’s feet first. The soles of his back oxfords dangled a few inches off the deck. Hallorann’s eyes went up. The navigator had hung himself from an overhead pipe with his khaki belt. The navigator seemed to have oriented the belt with deliberate precision, centering the Alabama belt buckle right below his Adam’s apple. His face was turning bright purple and his eyes were bulging, looking directly at him. Then the nav blinked and emitted a small croak, and Hallorann knew that, for the moment, he was still alive.
Duggan got permission from Lieutenant (jg) Brian Morgan, his best friend on board, to enter maneuvering. He’d just completed perhaps the most thorough pre-watch tour in submarine history. He lifted the chain and went inside, aware that for the first time, he was doing so alone, without Morrissey watching over him.
“Gosh!” said Morgan. “I can’t believe it! You’re actually going to start contributing around here.” Morgan was a Mormon, and the fact that he could get through a submarine patrol avoiding both caffeine and profanity was one of the most impressive displays of religious devotion Duggan had ever witnessed.
Duggan nodded and smiled. “I guess so.” He’d spent hundreds of hours in maneuvering on the boat. He’d stood every enlisted watchstation and performed every job in the engine room, from turbidity tests in lower level to analyzing samples of radioactive reactor coolant in the small chemistry lab. And before that, he’d done the exact same thing on a working, land-based reactor in Charleston, South Carolina, as part of his training. And before that…the meat grinder of nuclear power school. But it felt undeniably different, getting ready to take the watch over an operating nuclear reactor on a warship at sea. Nothing could match the terror of actually being the man in charge.
He took note of the maneuvering watchsection, all three men with their backs to him as they dutifully concentrated on their indications: EM1 Patterson at his far right on the electrical plant, ET1 Barnes in the center as reactor operator, and MM2 Tremain on the left, the throttleman. Out in the spaces, he’d seen during his tour, MMC Fissel was the Engineering Watch Supervisor. It was a very experienced, senior group of enlisted men that he was ostensibly supervising on his first watch — Duggan was sure that was not an accident. The XO had probably orchestrated it that way when he scheduled his board, putting the newest EOOW with the saltiest enlisted team. Duggan wasn’t insulted; he was deeply grateful. He started scanning the logs from the previous six, uneventful hours.
“How was your board?” Morgan asked. “Who sat it?”
“The eng, the XO, and Lieutenant Kincaid.”
The reactor operator, Barnes, turned around slightly. “I heard he used to be enlisted, is that true?” They all laughed.
“Kincaid was the hardest,” he said. “He made me go through the complete electrical system, one bus at a time.”
“Every bus?”
“Everything…even the 400 hertz stuff. Really drilled me on it, made me draw it all out. I think that’s when they decided to qualify me, because I actually knew all that shit.”
“Now you can start working on OOD,” said Morgan. “And then…your dolphins. You are definitely on track. Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” said Duggan, a little embarrassed at the praise.
He looked up at the three panels, a final check before taking the watch from Morgan. Everything was pegged…they were still at ahead flank and you could almost sense the engine room, and the reactor, begging for mercy. There were a few yellow warning lights scattered across the panels, bearings that were hot, water levels that were low. One red light caught his attention. “The alarm?”