“Yes, Lieutenant!” they said in unison.
“And do you think anything got by your LPO and me?”
“No, Lieutenant!”
He shook his head. “Well, think again. I have intentionally left at least one thing, maybe more, off the list. I expect you to find what it was and tell Petty Officer Gledhill or me, but one of you had better find it. Otherwise, if I have to tell you what it is, then I’ll know we’ll need to stay on board when we get back to Holy Loch for some remedial training.”
A moan rose and fell within the compartment, drawing a smile from Bleecker. “I knew you would support me in this endeavor.”
“That’s not fair, Lieutenant,” Brown said.
“Life’s not fair—”
“—and then you die,” the sailors finished in unison.
“What’s an endeavor?” Fromley asked quietly, leaning toward Potts.
“It’s a type of fish,” Potts answered. “Now, keep your trap shut or—”
Gledhill turned and stared at Potts. He put his finger to his lips.
One day he was going to take the straggly little LPO’s neck between his hands and twist it like he would kill a chicken. He looked down at the deck, ignoring the LPO’s warning. Damn Fromley.
“Okay, now that we have that out of the way; Anderson!”
“Yes, sir, Lieutenant.”
“You’re the 3-M coordinator. I want the premaintenance scheduled for the next two weeks done in the next Iwenty-four hours.” 3-M was the Navy shorthand for its Planned Maintenance System program. Each piece of equipment from a watertight hatch to a bullock to the helm to the pumps to the engine room had a 3-M card designed specifically for it. At set time periods, an assigned sailor would take the 3-M cards and do the checks and calibrations dictated on it. No varying. No skipping a step. And always on the mandatory hour-day-week-month time schedule.
“Lieutenant, I can’t do two weeks of preventive maintenance in twenty-four hours. It’s impossible.”
“Nothing’s impossible when you got a depth charge bouncing off your deck. You got nine other sailors to help you with your 3M chores. Petty Officer Gledhill will make sure they’re available.” A bare, muscular arm rose from the taller sailor filling the hatch. “How about us electrician mates, Lieutenant? Not much to do with batteries.”
“Then, Petty Officer Tully, you don’t know much about batteries.” He turned to Anderson. “Joey, you got any 3-M cards for the pump room that Petty Officer Tully can have?”
“Yes, sir; you know I do. But we did most of the pumps and equipment in that compartment last week.”
“I’ll help you, Josephus,” Otto said, raising his hand.
“Yeah, Otto and I’ll do the pump room,” Tully said.
“Not sure yet what is needed.”
“Just give us the cards and we’ll do them. If we see something that can wait, Otto and I will check with you.”
“Sounds like a winner to me,” Bleecker said. “Do them again if anything is due within the next two weeks. Same for the batteries. Look on the bright side, Petty Officer Anderson: you won’t have to do them while we are on station.” He looked at his sailors, letting his eyes travel from face to face. “Listen to me. What you’ve been used to since you came in the Navy is called peacetime operations. What you’re about to experience is the next level of fun, which is some sort of intelligence reconnaissance in the Soviets’ backyard. I met some Soviet sailors immediately after World War II. They are as young as you. They have families. They love their country. And they’re paranoid as shit. They don’t trust anything having to do with our country. They don’t even believe in God.
“America to them is the antigod to their godless society. So if they think they have an American submarine in their backyard, they’re going to try to blow the shit out of us. There ain’t no other war going on, so they have been stacking up depth charges for such an opportunity.” He poked himself in the chest. “We ain’t going to allow that to happen. I didn’t go through thirteen combat missions during World War II to get sunk in the North Atlantic because one of us failed to do our jobs. Understand?”
“Yes, Lieutenant.”
“Then get busy. Petty Officer Gledhill, if you need me, I’ll be in my office.” The engineering office was Bleecker’s bunk. He had been up most of the night with the skipper and the XO, going over the quieten ship policies. Submarines were supposed to be permanently in that condition. Squallfish was prepared for an emergent combat situation as much as Bleecker could make it. Even when you make an inspection for quieten ship operations, as soon as you’re done, things start to move, sailors change something, or even someone flushes a toilet.
“Another thing: once we get on station, tell the crew there is no flushing the toilets until I say so.”
“It’s going to stink up the boat,” Gledhill said.
Bleecker shook his head. “I doubt anyone will notice.”
He stepped through the hatch into the forward engine room and kept moving forward, heading toward officers’ country. It doesn’t matter what does it, but quieten ship starts to come apart about as soon as the readiness is achieved.
Bleecker stepped through the forward engine room hatch, turning to secure it once past. This would be good training for Gledhill as well as the sailors. It would give them a sense of urgency knowing the probability of being depth-charged by the Soviets. He doubted the Soviets could hit the broadside of a barn with their meager knowledge of and experience in depth-charging submarines, but sometimes it’s just plain bad luck that takes you down to the bottom.
During World War II, the threat of depth charges was something never far from the minds of a submariner. Perversely, Bleecker hoped they had some dropped while they were there. It would improve performance by the men in future missions. Of course, he wouldn’t want them to explode too near the Squallfish. He chuckled to himself as he headed toward officers’ country. Why in the hell did he feel this way, looking forward to this mission, a mission that might kill them all?
Depth charging really brought out the hidden reserves, and sometimes the hidden fears, of sailors. He had seen some great sailors, he thought, break down — reduced to emotional rubble in those moments. And he had seen some dirtbags rise to the occasion. You never truly know the character of a man until he faces the fear of losing his life.
He climbed the ladder in front of him to the second level. His black gang would be searching for that elusive thing he had said he had left off the list. He didn’t think he had left anything off of it, but his first engineer used to do that. On his last day on board the Wahoo as a fresh young third-class petty officer, the elderly chief told him to always have confidence in himself, but never so much that he believed he knew everything.
He nodded to the greetings in the crew’s mess as he stepped into it to grab a cup of coffee. Crocky shouted at him to quit taking his cups, they exchanged a few words, and then Bleecker continued his parade through the submarine.
He stuck his head through the curtain to the small radio compartment as he passed it, shouting, “Wake up!” at the radioman, Petty Officer Lamar Baron, sitting quietly at his position, reading a paperback book. He laughed when Baron jumped, spouting an obscenity at Bleecker before he recognized the officer, and then profusely apologizing amid Bleecker’s laughter.