“Engine room upper level ambient. It’s a hundred and ten degrees up there, hotter than heck.”
“From the main engines?”
“The main engines and those high pressure drains. All that steam is really heating things up, the refrigeration units can’t keep up. Especially since we’re down to two, with all that Freon we lost.”
“And water?”
“Everything is going into the reserve feed tanks. We’re probably going to have to suspend showers on your watch. Hope you took one.”
“I didn’t.”
“Well let me get mine in before you shut the valve.”
Duggan looked behind Morgan, at the primary system status board, wondering if there was anything else he should ask.
“You’re ready,” said Morgan. He said it as a friend, not as someone just trying to get out of the box and to dinner.
“You think so?” Duggan laughed. “The watch qual book says I am, so I guess I am.”
“You know something is going to happen right?”
“I’ve heard.” It was an old superstition, one he’d heard many times in the days leading up to his board.
“It always does. Something always happens on your first qualified watch.”
“What happened on yours?”
“I remember,” said Barnes, without turning around. “That was my first watch too. Thought we had carry over. Almost shut the whole thing down.”
“That’s right!” said Morgan. “I forgot you were in here with me. They’d done SGWL maintenance on the previous watch.” He referred to the system that controlled steam generator water levels, pronouncing it as ‘squiggle.’
“They fried one of the flip flops,” said Barnett. “But we didn’t know because it was high range. Didn’t pick up till we increased power on our watch.”
“That’s right. So we get over fifty-percent reactor power, and in here, it just looks like level is going up. In both generators.”
“Doesn’t shoot up…just creeps up,” said Barnett. “Just like it really would in a casualty.”
“But we didn’t have any of the collateral indications,” said Morgan. “No noise in the engine room, nothing. But all I know is what I’m seeing here. I’m afraid water is getting ready to carry over, go right out there and shred both main engines, both turbine generators.” It was a frightening prospect — any moisture travelling into the thin, precisely engineered turbine blades at their high speeds would destroy them, obliterating both propulsion and electricity. Morgan continued.
“Tremain was the throttleman…he had his hands on the cutouts.” He pointed to the big hydraulic valve handles that should shut off all steam to the engine room. “We’d still lose power, still lose propulsion, but we’d save the turbines.”
“Jesus,” said Duggan.
“Right, I know…it would cause a scram, too, don’t forget, automatically. And we were ready to do it. I was ready to give the order. I was two hours into my first watch.”
“Then Chief Flora comes haulin’ ass in here from instrument alley,” says Barnett. “Saying, ‘don’t do it! Don’t do it! We fried the flip flop!’”
“He’d been reviewing the maintenance records and noticed a discrepancy…ran back to the engine room just as we were calling it away, put it all together and stopped us just in time,” said Morgan.
“I still think you should have called it away,” says Barnes. “If you’d been following the procedure…you had the indications. You had no way of knowing. What if Flora had just lost his mind? What if he’d decided to try to kill us all?”
“I guess Flora was right,” said Morgan, grinning. “And so was I. So…I wonder what will happen on your watch?”
“We’ll see,” said Duggan. “Hopefully nothing.” He took a deep breath. “Lieutenant Morgan, I am ready to relieve you.”
“I’m ready to be relieved. Reactor is at 100 % power, normal full power line up, reactor plant is in forced circulation, all main coolant pumps on fast. Keep an eye on the main engine bearings, and make sure someone takes McCormick some ice water in upper level, so he doesn’t pass out or puke.”
“Will do. I relieve you.”
“I stand relieved!” Morgan slapped him on the back and started to walk out.
“Ensign Duggan is the Engineering Officer of the watch,” he said. He wrote the time and same words on the EOOW’s log, his first entry as a qualified watch officer.
“Throttleman, aye.”
“Reactor operator, aye.”
“Electrical operator, aye.”
Morgan spoke from the other side of the chain. “Good luck, pal.”
“Thanks,” said Duggan. He watched him walk away, and a few seconds later heard the clank of the engine room watertight door. Morgan was gone, and Duggan felt the full weight and loneliness of being the sole officer in the engine room of a United States nuclear submarine. He reached below his small desk, where copies of all the reactor plant manuals and casualty procedures, thousands of pages of documentation, were kept. He pulled out one of the thicker books, opened it, and began to review the procedures for steam generator water level casualties.
As Jabo walked aft he was aware of the throbbing in the deck plates beneath his feet — it was the feeling of the boat moving very fast, a harmonic that ran through the very hull caused by both the friction of the cold sea against the ship and by every piece of machinery on the boat running at maximum speed. He’d never been on the boat when they ran so fast for so long. Or, for that matter, so deep for so long, the depth dictated by the submerged operating envelope. The boat was designed to operate at that speed indefinitely, of course, but it was just so unusual, after a few days it was unnerving, a feeling that the boat was frothing like an overworked horse, begging to catch her breath.
As he walked, he thought again about the nav, and all that had happened that patrol. That business about him stabbing himself in the leg; the talking to himself in the officer’s study, all the general weirdness. And now…a missing message hidden in his desk.
Jabo was glad he’d kept the folder with him, lest the message disappear again before he got a chance to talk to the captain. The word ‘evidence’ floated through his mind, and he thought again about another odd place the nav’s name had come up: on Howard’s yellow sheet of paper, where the sailor had been trying to compile evidence (that word again) to exonerate himself.
Jabo arrived in Machinery Two, nodded at Renfro, who was exhausted and trying to stay awake by the oxygen generators.
“You doin’ alright, Renfro?”
“Fuck no, sir. You ever been port and starboard this long? It kinda sucks.”
He pointed to the deck. “Anybody down there?”
Renfro nodded. “No, all that exercise shit is still tagged out. Not that anybody has the energy or the time to work out right now anyway.”
Jabo climbed down the ladder into the lower level.
The treadmill was silent, a red DANGER tag hanging from its switch. Jabo walked over to it, read the tag. Signed by the corpsman, which was unusual, within hours of Howard’s death and the Freon casualty. He checked his watch; the navigator wanted to meet him in the captain’s stateroom in about two minutes. Jabo’s confidence was building, and he didn’t want to get their meeting started by arriving late.
He hesitated at the treadmill, and then on impulse flipped the switch to ON, in violation of the danger tag. All the lights on the console came on, and then the readout began to scroll. WORKOUT COMPLETE….10.0 MILES….WORKOUT COMPLETE…
He stepped off the treadmill and thought it over. Kincaid was right…he was the only person on the boat that would put those kind of miles on the treadmill in one workout. Certainly the navigator hadn’t devoted that kind of time to running in his pristine running shoes. So Kincaid had been the last person to run before the Freon casualty and the treadmill got tagged out. And yet…the navigator had been down there, in his workout gear, right before the Freon casualty. His presence down there had seemed notable enough for Howard to write down in the logs. And now it seemed the navigator hadn’t even exercised while he was there. Which begged the question…what had he been doing in Machinery Two?