Steven Kent - 100 Fathoms Below

Senior Chief Farrington, the COB, was serving as chief of the watch for the underway. Seated in front of the ballast control panel on one side of the control room, he oversaw the moving of water in and out of the ballast tanks to control the submarine’s buoyancy, as well as monitoring all hatches and hull openings. Tim suspected that Farrington wasn’t all that happy to be in the control room with White after objecting to his transfer to Roanoke , but the COB was a good, experienced sailor. He kept his eyes on his control panel and didn’t let his personal feelings distract him.

Tim crossed the control room to the enclosed space affectionately known by sonar techs like himself as the sonar shack. Inside, he sat down in front of his display console, put on his earphones, and prepared for the launch.

Submarines didn’t launch on a single order; they launched with a dialogue. The submarine corps choreographed its procedures to the last detail. It was the officer of the deck who began the dialogue.

“Bridge rigged for dive,” Penwarden reported. “Last man down.”

Captain Weber stood in front of the two periscopes on the conn, the raised stand positioned a few feet back from the helm. “Rig for dive, Ensign Penwarden,” he ordered.

“Rig for dive, aye,” Penwarden replied. After double-checking the report that all hatches were secured, he added, “Bridge rigged for dive, aye. Last man down, aye. Two minutes to dive point, sir.”

“Excellent, Ensign Penwarden,” Captain Weber said. “Chief of the Watch, rig control room for red.”

“Rig for red, aye,” Farrington replied.

In the sonar shack, Tim sat in front of his sonar display screen and braced himself. Though he had experienced it nearly a dozen times now, when the darkness came there was always something menacing about it. The overhead lights winked out in the control room, and the red lights snapped on. The crimson hue lent the control room an eerie, otherworldly appearance, as if everyone and everything in it were covered in a haze of blood.

“Officer of the Deck, report,” the captain said.

But here Penwarden, who had been doing well until now, tripped over his tongue and didn’t answer quickly enough.

“Officer of the Deck, what is our status?” the captain repeated, an annoyed edge creeping into his voice.

Lieutenant Commander Jefferson came up beside Penwarden and whispered in his ear, “Take a deep breath, Ensign. You’re doing fine. We haven’t hit anything yet.”

With Jefferson’s encouragement, Penwarden pulled himself together. He called out the depth soundings, course, and speed to the captain. “Ship rigged for dive, sir. We are one minute from dive point, Captain, confirmed by navigator. We hold no surface contacts by visual or sonar. Request permission to submerge boat, sir.”

“Very well, Ensign Penwarden,” the captain replied. His expression gave no indication whether Penwarden had burned his chance or pulled himself out of the fire at the last moment. “Submerge boat to one-five-zero feet.”

White adjusted his yoke, ready to control the dive as soon as the OOD made the necessary announcement. Penwarden picked up the phone talker of the main circuit, the submarine’s PA system.

“Dive! Dive!” he shouted into the phone talker.

The high, shrill alarm sounded, and Tim braced himself. The first dive was always a tense moment. Then the floor tilted under his feet, and he could picture Roanoke submerging beneath the waves, engulfed in the endless dark of the ocean.

Fully stocked, Roanoke ’s torpedo room held 24 torpedoes, 20 of which were housed in the storage racks. The other four currently rested on a set of skids along the bulkheads—trays that were used to load live torpedoes into the tubes. The space was long and narrow, no more than eight feet across from bulkhead to bulkhead, but with the skids taking up two feet on either side, that left only four feet of width for Warren Stubic and the other sailors manning the torpedo room.

They moved about the space, double-checking that the torpedoes had been properly secured for the launch. If one came loose, it could roll out of the racks or off the trays when the submarine dived. It wouldn’t explode when it hit the floor—this wasn’t a Road-Runner cartoon—but the fall could damage it enough to render it useless as a weapon, and one dud torpedo during an exchange with a Soviet sub could mean Roanoke ’s number was up. And that wasn’t even taking into account the injuries it could cause if it fell on a sailor. Torpedoes were long, heavy, and made of steel. If one got loose, it wouldn’t be pretty.

Stubic knew the routine. This wasn’t his first time helping secure a torpedo room, but he found it hard to concentrate. He was sluggish, groggy, and deeply worried because he couldn’t remember what happened last night in Waikiki. A dull, throbbing headache had developed behind his eyes this morning, and it showed no signs of leaving.

“Look alive, pal.” One of the other torpedomen grinned at him. “Plenty of time to deal with the hangover later.”

Stubic smiled back weakly, blinking in the bright, painful light. If only this were a hangover. Then he would have an explanation for at least some of what was happening to him. But not for everything. Even if he’d had too much to drink last night, which he damn well hadn’t, it wouldn’t explain the marks he found this morning on the side of his neck. Two small welts like bug bites. The tropical climate made Hawaii a welcoming environment for all sorts of insects, especially the nocturnal ones. Something had bitten him, and he wondered whether his symptoms were an infection brought on by the bite. Oh, God, was this malaria? He took a deep breath and tried not to think about it.

His head throbbed as if it were being jackhammered from the inside. The waves were getting worse with each one that crashed over him. Maybe he should go see Matson, the hospital corpsman, and get himself checked out. Except that he couldn’t, could he? Matson would want to know where he’d been, and Stubic couldn’t tell him. If anyone knew he’d gone to a brothel, he could lose pay or get bumped down in rank. Matson would also want to know everything that had happened, and Stubic wouldn’t be able to answer that, either, because there were things he simply couldn’t remember.

Why couldn’t he?

After he entered that dark hallway, everything was a blank until he woke up in his barracks at the naval station, feeling like shit. He couldn’t remember driving home from Waikiki. He couldn’t remember anything. Something had happened to him in that hallway…

The sharp klaxon of the dive alarm jolted Stubic from his thoughts and made his head flare with pain.

Another torpedoman shouted, “Grab hold of something, Stubic. We’re about to dive!”

He held on to the steel support of the torpedo rack. A moment later, the deck tipped dizzyingly downward. He closed his eyes. This must be what it would be like to be awake when they lowered you into the grave.

Tim Spicer’s first watch section went smoothly, though not quickly. As one of Roanoke ’s sonar techs, his job kept him planted in front of a sonar display screen for the full six hours of his watch. It was harder work than it looked. People thought he got to just sit there, basically watching TV, goofing off until a blip appeared on his screen. But the reality was more like being a guard in a maximum-security prison. He had to be on constant alert, his mind focused and continually interpreting data. If he took his eyes off the sonar display for any extended time, he would be leaving his boat vulnerable to attack. Staring at a screen for six hours straight was enough to leave even the strongest mind feeling wrung out. But, of course, there was nothing dangerous for the sonar to pick up yet as they sailed north from the Hawaiian islands—just other friendlies sailing into and out of port.