Steven Kent - 100 Fathoms Below

The current topic of conversation was the tension between one of the POs, Jerry White, and Lieutenant Junior Grade Charles Duncan. Duncan had chewed White out in front of everyone over a stink White made on his last assignment. Apparently, he had lodged a career-ending complaint against his XO, who happened to be a pal of Duncan’s, and now Duncan was riding White hard in the control room. Word spread through the boat quickly, as it always did, and a new and palpable tension had developed between White and the rest of the crew as well. Too bad for White. Without any friends on the boat, it was going to be a long three months. Only Tim Spicer seemed to be sticking by him.

Gordon prided himself on having his ear to the ground. Nothing happened on Roanoke without his knowing about it.

He left his stateroom and went to the galley early to supervise the preparations for first meal. Glancing down the corridor to the mess, he noticed Lieutenant Commander Jefferson and an auxiliary tech from Engineering standing by one of the tables and looking up at the ceiling. He walked into the mess and noticed four more crewmen sitting at one of the other tables. They had playing cards spread out in front of them, untouched as they looked up at where the XO and the tech were staring. Gordon paused when he saw it. One of the overhead fluorescent light fixtures had been smashed. Shards of glass littered the table below and the surrounding floor.

“Lieutenant Commander,” Gordon said, “what happened, sir?”

“What does it look like, Abrams?” Jefferson replied. His duties as XO included being in charge of security on Roanoke, and he didn’t look happy at having to deal with this. “We’ve got a goddamn vandal on the boat.”

The fixture looked as though someone had put his fist through it. The glass shield that covered the fluorescent tubes had been smashed in, leaving a jagged round hole. Dried blood clung to the spiky shards and, now that he noticed, flecked the table and the floor below. The vandal had cut himself nicely breaking the light. Good. Gordon hoped it hurt like hell.

Jefferson turned to the table of crewmen. “Are you men sure you didn’t see anyone when you got here?”

“Positive, sir,” one of them replied. “It’s like I said when I went to get you: it was like that when we found it.”

Jefferson shook his head and looked up at the fixture again. “Whoever broke it must have been in and out fast.”

“Fast” was an understatement. There was no place to hide in the mess, so the miscreant would have had to smash the light and run. But where? The galley? Sick bay? There wasn’t much room to hide there, either. The head, maybe? But how could anyone move so fast he wouldn’t be seen?

Gordon shook his head. This had come out of nowhere. He hadn’t heard anyone talking about anything that might have led up to this. So much for nothing happening on Roanoke without his knowledge.

The auxiliary tech, Goodrich, a skinny kid with copper-red hair and a face full of freckles, pulled on a pair of thick black rubber insulating gloves. He carefully cleared the broken glass off the table and into a trash can. Gordon made a mental note to have the table thoroughly cleaned before first meal. The floor too. Goodrich stepped up onto the bench and then the tabletop for a closer look. He removed what was left of the broken glass shield. Inside, both yard-long fluorescent tubes behind the shield were shattered. The ends were still in their sockets, but the rest of the tubes had been reduced to dust and little curved splinters of razor-thin glass. The tech climbed down and dumped the remains of the shield in the trash too.

Gordon wished he had been here to catch the son of a bitch, or even stop him, but when he left the galley and hit his rack before midrats, the light had been just fine. The mess was rarely ever completely empty, even in the hours between midrats and first meal. It was where sailors tended to gather during their downtime to study, play cards, or watch a movie on the small TV and VCR setup. Whoever did this either had been very lucky to find the mess empty or had waited for a moment when no one was around.

“Any idea who would do this, Abrams?” Jefferson asked.

Gordon shook his head. “Sir, my mama worked for twelve years as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital. If there’s one thing she taught me, it’s that you can’t understand crazy. Don’t even try.”

Jefferson sighed. “I was hoping for something a little more concrete than that. Like a name.”

The auxiliary tech climbed back up onto the table. He pulled the broken ends of the tubes out of the fixture and dumped them in the trash. Then he took a pocket light out of his poopie suit, turned it on, and clamped one end between his teeth. He used both hands to open a little hatch in the back of the fixture, then took the light out of his mouth to check the wiring inside.

“The ballast that regulates the current is trashed, sir,” Goodrich said. “You’re definitely going to need a whole new fixture.” He turned off his pocket light and looked down at Gordon. “Unfortunately, sir, we don’t have any spares.”

“What do you mean?” Gordon asked.

“If it were up to me, sir, we’d bring everything we might need on an underway, but we don’t have the space. The Supply Department brings only the essentials.”

“You’re saying there are no spare light fixtures on board?” Gordon said.

“Sorry, sir,” Goodrich said. “If you have a light fixture back there in the galley that you don’t need, I could cannibalize it to replace this one. But I’m afraid that’s the best I can do, Lieutenant.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Gordon muttered.

“Can you get by with fewer lights in the galley?” Jefferson asked.

Gordon sighed. The mess was supposed to be bright, cheerful, and inviting for the crew—their home away from home. It made sense to take a light from somewhere else if it meant keeping the mess cheery and welcoming, but it felt like robbing Peter to pay Paul.

“Not the galley, sir. We need to see what we’re cooking.” He added reluctantly, “Maybe one from the pantry, sir.”

“Do it,” Jefferson told Goodrich.

Sure, do it , Gordon thought glumly. He could just use a flashlight every time he needed flour or canned goods. He was only keeping the crew fed; why should anyone care whether he tripped over something in the dark and broke his goddamn neck?

“Whoever did this won’t be hard to find,” Jefferson said. “He nicked his hand good.”

“Everyone on Roanoke comes through the mess eventually,” Gordon said. “All we have to do is keep an eye out for someone with cuts on his hand.”

“Why wait? I’ll inspect every damn sailor’s hands on this boat if that’s what it takes.” Jefferson looked up at the broken light again and shook his head. “It’s the damnedest thing. Why break a light? And why break this light?”

There was a gravity to being Roanoke ’s executive officer that Lieutenant Commander Lee Jefferson gladly shouldered. As the submarine’s second in command, he was the one who would step into the role of commanding officer if anything should happen to Captain Weber. He liked to think he was ready for that. Hell, he knew he was ready. He had heard rumors back at Pearl that the navy was thinking of giving him his own command when this underway was over. He had heard it enough times to think there might be something to it, but for a black man in the US Navy, a healthy degree of skepticism was in order. He had already lost count of how many times white officers with half his experience had been promoted over him. He knew why too, and it sure as hell wasn’t about performance.