The XO saw that the captain’s lack of imagination might kill them.
“We have to blow to the surface,” said the XO. “Now.”
“I’m not sure that will save us,” said the corpsman.
“Well it will make us easier to find at least.”
The captain looked up at him, his eyes wide with as much confusion as fear. He’d made a career out of diligently following procedures, but now, when he needed one the most, there did not appear to be any doctrine to help them. He went back down to the list of pandemics and resumed reading.
The XO turned and started walking to control; somebody had to do it. He would throw the emergency blow actuators himself. They could court martial him if they wanted. As he turned, though, the captain began coughing.
The corpsman had his hand on his back as the coughs turned into spasms. The captain’s head fell on an unhelpful description on Ebola as he passed out.
Well now I’m in charge, thought the XO, as he started to sprint to the control room. He was half way up the ladder when the coughing began. He tried to pull himself up but the coughing was debilitating, consuming him. He fell face first onto the ladder as he passed out, knocking out two teeth.
By the time the XO died, there were just a dozen men left alive on the boat. The only surviving chief, Chief Cassidy, secured all the cooking equipment in the galley as he fought to hang on. He died turning off a deep fryer.
By then there were four men left. Two were in the engine room.
Lehane grew up poor in a decaying steel mill town in the hills of western Pennsylvania. His mom had a fondness for abusive boyfriends and he’d honed an instinct for survival that would have served him well in an infantry battalion, fighting from building to building or cave to cave. The military had been impressed by his sky-high ASVAB scores in high school, however, and had sent him into the nuclear navy instead, where he had excelled. He was one of those kids common in the military a generation or two earlier, a kid for whom barracks life was a distinct improvement in lifestyle: three guaranteed meals a day, occasional hot showers, and most of all some predictability about what each day would bring. The military of the United States had always been the surest path into the middle class for kids like Lehane, and while he shared in the communal bitching about the navy that they all did, to his core he was grateful for what the navy had done for him.
But his love of the navy had not erased his intuition for self-preservation, and from his watchstation deep inside the engine room, he could tell something was seriously wrong.
It started with the 1MC announcements about injured men, all over the ship. The voices in the announcements were tinged with confusion; he could tell things were unfolding that were frightening even to the most experienced men on the boat. Between announcements he could hear coughing from the other watchstanders in the engine room, violent, painful coughing that he could hear even over the chugging of the nearby air compressors.
Then it all stopped. The announcements, the coughing: it all stopped.
Quietly, he drifted aft, to the most remote part of the ship: shaft alley.
While in port, he’d read an incident report about a Freon casualty onboard a Trident submarine. Some dumbass had dumped the entire contents of one of the big refrigeration units. Because of the actions of some other dumbass ashore, that Freon had recently been replaced by a variant that, when it came in contact with the ship’s high-temperature atmosphere control equipment, actually mutated into Phosgene gas: nerve gas. One man had died and the whole ship had been in danger.
It had been a pretty spectacular incident.
He hadn’t been required to read it but he did anyway, fascinated by the chain of errors made, and by the improvised actions of the crew that had saved the day. Equally fascinating, as always in these incident reports, was what was unsaid. Who lost their job? Who went to jail? What did they do with the dead body? He’d asked around and had it on good authority that the boat was the
