Fromley looked as if he had been abandoned like some waif of a dog cast aside by a reluctant master. Fromley had the human features of a weasel-thin face pockmarked from teenage acne, and a protruding chin nearly as long as the sailor’s too-thin nose. It must have scared the shit out of Fromley’s dad when he first saw his son, Bleecker thought. “Jesus Christ! It’s alive!”
“What’s alive, Lieutenant?”
“Nothing, Potts; just thinking out loud.”
“I can’t see in this red light,” Potts complained after a couple of steps.
“Shut up. When you finish the checks in the battery compartment, the sub is going to be on red lights, so I expect it to stay on red lights. You’ve been in the Navy long enough to know your eyes will adjust.” Bleecker reminded himself to make sure Gled-hill kept the engine rooms in red lights also.
“I thought we were going to do some more dunks, Lieutenant.”
When Bleecker failed to answer the question, a nervous Potts asked, “You want me to secure the hatch, Lieutenant?”
Bleecker acknowledged the question. His eyes rapidly took in the battery room. Batteries were his bane. There was a multitude of things that could sink a submarine, and most of them were on board. Depth charges were the least effective method of sinking them. All it would take is salt water to turn this compartment into a huge gas generator like those the Nazis used in the concentration camps. He had seen the photographs. While he worried about the idea, he also believed that if it ever happened where salt water covered the batteries, they’d be long dead before the sulfuric acid burned through the linings of their lungs. They’d hit the bottom of the dark Atlantic long before the poison air reached them.
Bleecker pointed to the meters along the bulkhead. “We’ll need to read the batteries, Potts. Grab the logbook. I’ll read off the battery and the charge reading.”
“That’s what Fromley and I were just fixing to do, Lieutenant.”
“Well, you weren’t doing it when I came in.”
“But we were fixing to,” Potts said, opening a small cabinet. Several green logbooks lay on top of each other, each one lighter than the one below it. Those books represented every battery check since Squallfish was commissioned in 1943.
When Potts turned around, he found himself staring into the eyes of Bleecker.
“I heard, Potts, you been fucking around with the steward mates.”
Potts leaned back, away from the angry face of Bleecker.
“Let me tell you something, Petty Officer Potts: Crocky has been around this man’s Navy longer than you been alive. He tells me you been giving a bunch of white man-colored man shit to the new cook. He further tells me you been giving him some lip.”
“Look, Lieutenant—” Potts said, trying to explain.
“Don’t ‘look’ me, Potts. I’ve seen troublemakers like you and Fromley before. The Navy has a lot of experience in taking care of shitbirds like you two.” Bleecker backed away, but took satisfaction that Potts remained braced against the cabinet. “You got potential, sailor, but you won’t have it if you keep screwing with Crocky. He’ll have your nuts for his mantel if you piss him off enough.”
“But Lieutenant, I didn’t mean to upset them.”
Bleecker crossed his arms, thick, sinewy muscles rippling along the forearms, while thick biceps bulged the ragged sleeves of the T-shirt. “Don’t lie to me. Yes, you did mean to piss them off. You went out of your way to insult them. Crocky is more a man than you are, and I don’t want you to forget it.” He reached out and poked Potts hard a couple of times in the chest. “This is what we call in the Navy a counseling session, Potts.”
“Counseling?”
“Counseling.” Bleecker backhanded him, knocking Potts’s head into the cabinet, breaking the skin slightly above the ear. He crossed his arms across his chest. “I think you want to apologize to Crocky.”
Potts held his ear. “Apologize? Apologize to a bunch of—”
He never saw the second slap coming. The right side of Potts’s head bounced off the metal cabinet.
“That wasn’t a question, Petty Officer Potts. I don’t care about the new steward, but Crocky does, and what Crocky cares about, I care about,” he said, accenting each work with a thumb in his chest. “You get my drift, Potts, or do we have to continue this counseling?”
Potts reached up and ran his hand along the right side of his head. Bleecker saw the swelling growing alongside the upper hairline. Sometimes a sailor needed a kick in the butt to straighten him out. Sometimes, like the chief did for him, it sinks in quickly, and you regain a sense of direction.
“I understand, Lieutenant.”
Bleecker reached out and grabbed Potts by the throat. He put just enough pressure to ensure the sailor knew there was a lot more pressure where that came from. With his huge thumb, Bleecker raised the man’s chin. “Here is what you are going to do: within the next couple of days you are going to find an opportunity to apologize to Petty Officer First Class Crocky so he can forget about killing you.” Bleecker saw with distant amusement the shocked look on Potts’s face. “Yeah, I said ‘killing you.’You think a veteran of depth charges and the war is going to let some asshole whipper-snapper like you piss on his parade? He isn’t.” He let go of Potts’s neck. “We understand each other, Potts?”
“Yes, sir, Lieutenant,” Potts mumbled, rubbing his throat. “Good.” Bleecker turned away for a moment, then spun around from the waist. “You know, Potts, if you get your act together and quit trying to be the big man on campus you were in some hick high school, you might make a good engineer. Right now, you’re working your way to the morgue or to the brig. Either one is going to disappoint your parents.”
“Yes, sir, Lieutenant.”
“Now, pick up that logbook before it gets damaged. Let’s get to work on checking the batteries before Fromley comes back. We won’t speak of our counseling session, now, will we?”
Potts bent down and hurriedly picked up the logbook. “No, sir, Lieutenant.”
For about five minutes Bleecker did the readings. He enjoyed doing them periodically because it renewed his belief that if you take care of the little things, the big things will take care of themselves. Bleecker traced the lines from the battery cells to the meters that checked their status to the lines exiting the compartment heading toward the diesels.
When the submarine reached a depth where the snorkel could no longer provide air for diesels to operate, these battery cells powered the boat. Battery power was nowhere as fast as diesel. The more speed demanded from the batteries, the less time a submarine could stay submerged. So when submerged and on battery power, submarines tended to transit at four to six knots, reserving battery power for when they may need it. In an emergency situation, if you had sufficient battery power, a submarine could hit twelve knots for a short burst of escape speed. But that burst also could cost a submarine any edge for error.
When Fromley returned with a couple of hot pastries, Bleecker took both of them and left the compartment, expecting the two sailors to finish the status readings.
“Arneau, slide in here. Alec, you slide around on the other side of me,” Shipley said, motioning the young operations officer to the left. Near his coffee cup on the table lay the brown doublewrapped package. He could have opened it sooner, but these things were always bad news. He smiled, wondering what the others would think if he raised the envelope and held it against his forehead like some mystic and then announced he foresaw “bad news.” Shock would cover their faces, for it would be out of character.
The three officers filled the front half of the wardroom. Here the officers ate, tried to relax, and was where wardroom meetings were held. The wardroom mess was big enough for eight officers at a time, in comparison to the crew’s mess one deck below.