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Shi…jyo…bah…

Stepping away from the radio, Captain Wright looked ahead, seeing nothing but ocean as the words continued. The bridge was like a greenhouse, nothing but glass on all sides, and it was the kind of day that sailors lived for: clear, bright, and calm with smooth open water in all directions, nothing to hamper their journey forward. Even though he knew from his review of the radar screen that they were far out of visual range, he lifted his binoculars and stared in the direction of the Chinese fleet. The voice continued on the radio behind him, almost like a chant. Although he didn’t recognize any of the words, there was something familiar about it that unnerved him.

Chee…lyo…woo…ssuh…

“Something wrong, captain?” His men stared, perplexed. The captain knew, somehow, that the chant was nearing its conclusion.

Sahn…urr…yee…QIDONG!

With that final, emphatic word, he realized what he was listening to: a countdown.

“
Right full rudder
!” he ordered. The third mate jumped to comply. Wright knew from looking at the chart that a turn to starboard was the quickest way to open distance from the exercise area. The giant container ship began to respond slowly. A shrill alarm sounded on the radar console.

The captain stepped to the screen: a red arrow with an open circle around it had appeared between them and the Chinese fleet. Under it were the words
unidentified contact
.

“What is it?”

It disappeared briefly from the screen, and then reappeared, having closed half the distance to
Ever Able
in seconds.

“She can’t be moving that fast,” said the third mate, looking at the approaching blip in disbelief, fooled into thinking that the new radar contact was a ship, because the computer had, by default, assigned it that symbol.

Captain Wright ran out the door the starboard bridge wing, binoculars still in hand.

Spotting a small, fast-moving object on the ocean was extremely difficult, but Wright had good eyes and a lifetime of experience staring across the waves in search of peril. He saw the exhaust first, a triangle of intense yellow light behind the missile that was moving directly toward them. A finally honed instinct told them that they were on a collision course.

“All stop!” he yelled, a last desperate attempt to save the ship.

But
Ever Able
was doomed. The missile slammed into the hull amidships, just above the waterline.

E
nsign Brendan Duggan stood at the opening to the massive diesel fuel oil tank, located near the center of the big submarine. The tank was empty, for the moment, except for a lone, unseen enlisted man whose rhythmic banging with a rubber mallet sounded like a mournful gong. When the petty officer was done, Duggan would climb in. It was his second day on the boat.

He had been invited to enter the empty tank by Lieutenant Danny Jabo, who stood there waiting with him, casually fingering one of the twelve large bolts that had been removed to give them access through a twenty-two inch hole. There was a folder of miscellaneous paperwork on the deck: the certification that the tank’s air was safe to breathe, a form for Jabo to sign upon completion of their inspection, and a copy of the danger tags that would (theoretically) keep shut all the valves that, if opened, would flood the tank with either seawater or diesel fuel. While they waited, Duggan read through it all earnestly, more eager to make a good impression on the lieutenant than he was to actually study the information.

In the strictest legal sense, Jabo barely outranked Duggan. They were both junior officers on their first sea tour: Jabo near the end of his, Duggan at the very beginning. While Duggan still held the rank of Ensign, the rank given to him along with his diploma at the Academy, Jabo had been promoted twice, first to lieutenant j.g. (junior grade), and then to full lieutenant. So Jabo had been in the Navy just a few years longer than Duggan, but those years were, importantly, sea time: five long patrols on a nuclear submarine. Duggan had exactly zero days underway. But the most important difference between them was something unquantifiable, something not easily reduced to pay grade or days at sea. Jabo was hot shit. He was the Junior Officer all the enlisted men wanted to work for, the one the department heads wanted to mentor, the one the other JOs wanted to emulate.

“You ready?” said Jabo with his mild Tennessee twang.

“I think so,” he said, trying to sound somewhere between too nervous and too confident.

“You know the only requirement is that an officer close it out—you don’t need your dolphins. So you can go in alone if you want.”

Duggan hesitated for a minute, saw that Jabo was joking, and exhaled nervously.

“You’re lucky we’re doing this,” said Jabo. “This is a tough evolution to see. Impossible to get underway.”

“Yes,” said Duggan, squelching the urge to say, “Yes sir.” Even though Jabo did outrank him slightly, junior officers didn’t talk to each other that way. But Jabo had that kind of aura. It made Duggan mildly jealous, as the new guy, months away from having anybody respect him for anything. He also fought down the impulse to resent the fact that an ROTC guy like Jabo could rise to the top—he felt like four years of celibacy and eating shit at Annapolis should entitle an Academy guy to hold that role. That had been the promise, that the ROTC guys were barely competent part-timers, while their years of toil at Annapolis would make them military superstars. But despite getting his degree at a school with frat parties and pompon girls, Jabo was clearly an outstanding officer. And Duggan had seen Jabo’s wife, Angi, at the farewell party the night before, a redheaded, athletic knockout, the kind of girl he imagined would turn heads even at a school full of southern beauties. Another reason to resent his monastic life at the academy, another reason to be jealous. But, in spite of all that…Jabo was just impossible to dislike.

“He’s comin’,” said Jabo. Duggan heard it too. The gonging had stopped, replaced by footsteps on the iron rungs of the ladder that were bolted to the inside of the tank. Light from a flashlight grew in intensity as the petty officer neared, until his head popped out of the manway.

There was no graceful way to exit the tank. The petty officer handed Jabo his flashlight and rubber mallet, which Jabo placed on the deck before grabbing his outstretched arms and pulling him through. He got to his feet, took a deep breath, put his hands on his hips, and looked Duggan up and down.

“You the new guy? Sir?”

“That’s me,” said Duggan, trying again to strike a balance between confidence and modesty. He got the distinct impression that the enlisted man…Renfro, that was his name…was waiting for him to say or do something stupid that he could report back to an amused crew. Renfro had a pencil thin mustache and that muscular, small build that seemed characteristic of so many submariners, standard issue along with the hard, challenging stare. All three of them were wearing identical, insignia-free green coveralls for the occasion, not even a nametag among them. But no one observing the scene would have had any trouble picking out who among them was the respected lieutenant, who was the experienced petty officer, and who was the boot ensign.

“You an Academy guy?”

“That’s right.”

“Hmm,” said Renfro, nodding his head with disapproval. Renfro was “qualified,” a wearer (when in a normal uniform) of the coveted silver dolphins. This meant that despite the difference in their nominative ranks, Renfro outranked Duggan in an unofficial, but very important way. It would be months of non-stop work, study, and endless on-the-job training before the captain pinned dolphins on Duggan’s chest. (Closing out a tank was one of about two hundred “practical factors” he had to complete along the way.) Furthermore, Renfro was an “A Ganger,” a member of Auxiliary Division, the men in charge of the dirtiest, most important equipment on the boat: the diesel engine, the oxygen generators, all the ship’s damage control equipment. They made the claim, with much justification, that they were the Navy’s truest submariners.

“You ready?” said Jabo.

“Yes,” said Duggan. The dark tank didn’t seem all that inviting, but he suddenly wanted to get out from under Renfro’s hard gaze.

Jabo went in first, somehow effortlessly squeezing his considerable frame through the manway. Duggan followed him, while Renfro stood watch at the entrance.

“Don’t worry sir,” said Renfro as they descended. “I won’t let them start filling it up ‘til you’re half way up the ladder.”

“We appreciate it,” said Jabo.

Duggan climbed down the iron rungs, which were welded directly to the side of the tank. The side of the tank was also the concave side of the ship, making it tricky to reach the next slippery step as they curved outward, away in the darkness, most of his weight hanging from his hands rather than supported by his feet, until he was halfway down and the hull curved back.

The darkness of the tank and the geometry of the ladder made it impossible to see how far he had to go; it was deeper than he imagined. He felt himself growing tense as he went further, thought about the single valve handle and the listless watchstanders that were the only things standing between him and thousands of gallons of diesel fuel. As he got deeper, the air in the tank grew thicker, harder to breathe, the smell a combination of diesel fuel and the sea, a more concentrated version of what permeated the entire ship. He kept his eyes on the manway above him, his only escape. It got smaller as he descended, like a full moon in a black sky.

Jabo had navigated the steps deftly and waited at the bottom, swinging the flashlight on its lanyard, making the shiny walls of the tank seem to sway.

“Okay, you know why we’re here?” said Jabo. His voice echoed metallically. Duggan realized that he still clung on to the bottom rung, afraid to lose contact with it in case Jabo dropped his light, or the batteries died. He forced himself to let go.

“Duggan? Why are we here?”

“To close out the tank.”

“You know what that means?”

“Make sure there’s nothing left down here?”

“Like tools and stuff? Sure. Good answer. And?” He held up the mallet.

“Sound shorts?”

“Sound shorts, anything loose. We’ll bang on everything, make sure it’s all squared away. Because if there’s something rattlin’ around down here, it will be impossible to fix at sea. And remember, we’re a submarine…we don’t like making noise. Any time we empty a tank like this and do work, before we’re done, a qualified enlisted man closes it out, then an officer verifies. Do you know why this tank is empty?”

“We did some maintenance, right?”

Jabo nodded, and pointed his flashlight to a corner of the tank, where a pipe rose like a stalagmite, extending the full height of the space. The walls of the tank gleamed like glass in the beam, the steel preserved pristinely by the blanket of fuel that normally covered it. “We had to fix that: the level detector. You know how that works?”

Duggan nodded. “No…sorry.”

“That’s okay…hell, you just got here. The tank is always full. As we burn diesel fuel, we let in water. The fuel, being about fifteen percent less dense, floats atop the water. The sensor floats atop the water-fuel interface. So as the tank empties of fuel oil, the sensor actually rises. Keeps the tank full of something all the time, which helps shield the people tank from the reactor.” He knocked his flashlight against the aft wall of the tank.

“Cool,” said Duggan.

“Yeah, those fuckers think of everything. One more question: how much fuel does this tank hold?”

“Thirty-five thousand gallons,” said Duggan, proud of himself for knowing the answer. Right before coming down, he’d seen the tanker truck on the pier, the hoses already extended, ready to send the cargo gushing into the tank where he stood.

“Good job. You have any idea why we carry that much diesel fuel?”

The question surprised Duggan. He hadn’t thought it was based on anything…it was just how much the tank held. He was struck by how many things there were to know inside an empty tank…and they weren’t trivial, either, they were actually important, capacities and specs developed by some of the finest engineers in the world. He contemplated how many hours he would have to spend at sea before he knew everything he was supposed to know about this giant boat.

“I’ll give you a hint,” said Jabo. “It’s based on a theoretical casualty in which we lose all power except the diesel engine, and this much fuel would allow us to steam for a certain number of hours at a certain number of knots, enough hours to get us out of harm’s way. The theory goes.”

“I’ll look it up.”

“Then get back with me and I’ll sign your book. Will that be your first signature?”

Duggan nodded.

“Holy shit! What an honor. You owe me a beer when we get back.”

Far above them, Renfro stuck his head through the hatch and yelled down. “Hey, topside wants to know what’s taking so long. Are you guys blowing each other?”

“Yeah,” said Jabo. “But we’re almost done.”

He handed Duggan the mallet. “Here, start banging on shit.”

•   •   •

The navigator sat huddled over a chart in a darkened corner of the submarine’s control room, frantically making revisions during the last few hours of the
USS Alabama’s
refit. He was a small man burdened with many secrets.

For example: he knew the combination of the inner SAS safe, the safe-within-a-safe that held the sealed authentication codes that would allow the launch of a nuclear missile. That series of four double-digit numbers was so secret that he was not allowed to write it down, and he had nightmares about being summoned to radio at the start of World War III and being unable to remember it, his faulty memory removing
Alabama
from strategic service as surely as an enemy torpedo. And, as navigator, he knew the exact locations of their patrol areas, the vast swaths of ocean where Ohio-class submarines maintained their vigils, within missile range of their targets in China and eastern Russia. That kind of targeting information was so secret, classified beyond Top Secret, that even the name of the classification was unutterable to the vast majority of the ship’s 154 man crew.