Steven Kent - 100 Fathoms Below

“Damn,” Jerry said.

Most of the bodies, Tim explained, had been piled in the captain’s stateroom, which looked like something out of the Jonestown massacre, but the search party had only to follow their noses to find more in the auxiliary engine room, the garbage disposal room, and the wardroom. They checked the torpedo tubes as well, but all they found was the missing part of Lieutenant Duncan’s corpse.

“I take it we have you to thank for Duncan losing his head?” Tim asked.

“I never did take kindly to bullies,” Jerry said. He nodded at his knee. “Who do I have to thank for this?”

“One of the ensigns had some emergency training from back home, and it turns out Oran Guidry knows a thing or two about patching people up after a bad fight. You’re probably going to need a cast on that knee, but the splint will have to do until we reach land.”

“How long will that be?” Jerry asked.

“To be honest, I don’t know. Getting out of Soviet waters is our first priority right now. We may be shorthanded, but everyone’s pulling their weight. We had to train some men to work the essential stations in the control room. I’ve got Aukerman, a PO from engineering, covering sonar while I’m down here. I made him promise if he hears so much as a peep to come get me. They’re learning on the job, but it’s slow going. I think you’ll be the only one getting any sleep for a while.”

“How many of us are left?” Jerry asked.

“Not a lot. Twenty-three. When we searched the boat, we didn’t find any more survivors. Only the crewmen who were in the reactor room survived.”

“Christ,” Jerry said. “There were a hundred and forty men on this sub when we launched.”

“We’re practically a ghost ship now,” Tim said. “I guess we’re just like our namesake, like you said—the colony where everyone disappeared.”

“Can I ask you a personal question?” Jerry said.

“Shoot,” Tim said.

“When you were in the control room with the vampires, were you scared?”

Tim nodded. “Scared enough my poopie suit almost lived up to its name. What about you?”

“I wasn’t,” Jerry said. “It’s the strangest thing. I knew what I had to do, and I figured either I would do it or I would die. I was… calm. When I saw Jefferson, I just came up behind him and…”

“Staked him.”

Jerry nodded. “I was close enough to Jefferson that he could have knocked my block off, but I wasn’t scared. I don’t know why.”

“The same reason you weren’t scared to run into that burning engine room on Philadelphia ,” Tim said. “You’re braver than you give yourself credit for.”

“Or stupider,” Jerry said.

Tim grinned. “Or maybe it’s because Jefferson wasn’t the first XO you had trouble with.”

“ Philadelphia ’s XO wasn’t a vampire—just your garden-variety asshole,” Jerry said.

“What happened on that boat, Jerry?” Tim asked. “You never told me.”

Jerry sighed. He settled back against the pillow, groaning with discomfort. “It’s a long story. Maybe some other time.”

“If I’ve learned one thing on this underway,” Tim said, “it’s that you never know how much time you’ve got left. Best not to put things off.”

“Yeah, I suppose you’re right about that,” Jerry said. “Back on Philadelphia , I was friends with a radioman named MacLeod. This guy had always wanted to be in the submarine service, ever since he was a kid. It meant something to him, and he worked his ass off to get there. But to join the navy, he had to hide who he was. Do you know what I mean by that?”

“I’ve heard a few stories,” Tim said.

“Personally, I didn’t care about that stuff. MacLeod was a good sailor and a friend,” he said. “I don’t know how, but our XO, Lieutenant Commander Frank Leonard, found out. Only, he didn’t report MacLeod. He held the knowledge over him instead. He rode MacLeod hard, even harder than Duncan rode me. He was on the guy’s back about everything , chewing him out, treating him like shit. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Leonard had a taste for drugs when he was off duty—coke and pills mostly—and whenever we were in port, he would turn MacLeod into his errand boy, making pickups from his dealer. It didn’t just put MacLeod’s career at risk if he got caught; it could have landed him in jail. But it was either that or Leonard would spill the beans about him being gay, so MacLeod thought he didn’t have a choice. He bit the bullet and did as he was told.

“I was furious when I found out about it. I wanted to report Leonard, but MacLeod begged me not to. He said if I did, the navy would find out the truth about him and kick him out. That same fear of being found out was why he never went to the COB to complain about Leonard. But I did it anyway. I knew I couldn’t prove anything about the drugs without MacLeod’s help, so I did what little I could. I filed a formal complaint about the way the XO was treating him. There was an investigation. Leonard had been up for a promotion at the time, but after the investigation he was passed over. It was his third time getting passed over, and you know how it goes in the navy: three strikes, you’re out. That was the end of his career. Of both their careers, it turned out, because MacLeod was right. The truth about him came out in the investigation and he was discharged, just like he always feared would happen. He never spoke to me again. I thought I was doing the right thing, but I wonder sometimes.”

“It was a tough call to make,” Tim said, “but you definitely did the right thing. If that was who Frank Leonard was, he didn’t deserve to be in the navy.”

“Yeah, but MacLeod did. That’s what stinks.”

He took a deep breath through his mouth. He hadn’t expected to tell this story to anyone, on Roanoke or anywhere else, ever again. He just wanted to put it behind him, but he was surprised how good it felt to get it off his chest.

“Anyway, I learned my lesson: keep my head down and don’t get involved. That was the plan for my time on Roanoke. Guess that went right down the shitter, huh?”

“I’d say risking your neck to kill vampires and save your crewmates is getting pretty damn involved,” Tim stood. “Get some rest. I’ll come back to bother you some more later.”

“No rush,” Jerry said. “I feel like I could sleep for a week.”

Tim turned around to leave the berthing area, but a sailor appeared in the doorway, breathing hard, as if he had run all the way from the control room.

“Spicer, the captain wants you back in the sonar shack now!” the sailor said. “We’ve got a bear on our tail!”

Tim’s first thought was that the Victor that had tailed them before was back. During the time the crew lost control of Roanoke , it had strayed fifteen miles north along the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula, which could have given the Victor plenty of time to find them again. The captain had changed their bearing as soon as he had control once more, setting course for the closest American territory—the Aleutian Islands to the east, 1,200 miles off the tip of the Alaskan peninsula. But for the moment, they were still in Soviet waters. If they wanted to get out in one piece, they were going to have to shake the Victor off their tail.

Captain Weber had already ordered Roanoke rigged for ultraquiet by the time Tim arrived in the control room. The screw was slowed, and their speed was reduced to two knots. The control room was still rigged for red, casting everything in a crimson tint. The bodies, both human and non, had been cleared out to make room for the captain’s skeleton crew: a quartermaster, one man in Fire Control, a diving officer, a planesman, and a helmsman. That was it. There was no officer of the deck or chief of the watch. The surviving crew of Roanoke was stretched thin, which left the watchstanding sailors to take their orders directly from Captain Weber himself.