100 Fathoms Below

CHAPTER EIGHT

While Lieutenant Commander Jefferson and COB Farrington were traversing the submarine inspecting the crew’s hands, Lieutenant Gordon Abrams was busy with first meal, making sure the hungry sailors who weren’t currently on their watch sections had something hot in their bellies.

Roanoke’s galley felt like home to Gordon in a way that almost nowhere else did, except maybe the house he had grown up in. When things were going right in the galley, every day was the same. Only the menu changed. And that was how he liked it. The banging of pots, the hiss and sizzle of the deep fryer, the noise of his culinary specialists cooking an all-you-can-eat buffet for 140 men—these sounds had become his constant companions, his comfort zone. He got nervous only when the noise stopped, because that meant something was wrong. Still, he had to admit, there were times when he envied the variety he was sure the other crewmen experienced each day. Keeping watch for Soviet boats, steering Roanoke through deep and enemy-infested waters, manning the torpedoes. But he knew he didn’t really have the temperament for it. This was where he belonged, amid the noise and controlled chaos of the galley, supervising the culinary specialists who cooked chow for the men; the bakers who were responsible for making fresh muffins, dinner rolls, and desserts; the dishwashers; and the team of stewards who brought the chow to the wardroom on one side of the galley and the mess on the other. Gordon took pride in his contribution, making sure his galley produced the finest food in the fleet.

But then some asshole had put his fist through a light in the mess, and now everything felt off-kilter. He couldn’t help taking it personally. That was his mess the culprit had vandalized. As much as he tried not to let it distract him from his duties, it was never far from his mind. He hoped they found the bastard soon and gave him a captain’s mast. Or better yet, left him on an iceberg somewhere and told him to go to hell.

Accompanying Gordon in the galley, at this moment cooking eggs, sausage, and hot cereal for the crew, were two of his newest culinary specialists: Seaman Apprentices Oran and LeMon Guidry. When the brothers had arrived for their section, they ribbed each other over the broken light fixture, blaming each other’s cooking for being so bad it drove someone over the edge. Annoyed, Gordon had put a stop to it right away and put them to work scrubbing dried blood off the table and floor. They were too young to understand how serious this was, and still too new to the navy to grasp how dangerous the urge for destruction could be on a submarine.

They hailed from someplace called Bayou Bartholomew—a couple of easygoing good old boys who grew up in the marshes on a diet of catfish, alligator, and dirty rice. Their hair was so blond it almost looked white, and they both had a deep tan that spoke of a youth spent outside in the sun. The first time Gordon met them, he thought they were twins, but Oran was actually two years older than LeMon. With a nose that had obviously been broken and reset at least once, he looked like a scrapper who had seen his share of fights. According to the story they told Gordon, right after both boys had graduated from high school they hitchhiked to Baton Rouge together and signed up with their local navy recruiter.

Even though their thick Cajun accents made them sound like a couple of backwoods stump jumpers whenever they opened their mouths, according to Oran’s personnel file he had scored a perfect 300 on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. That qualified him for any job in the Navy. LeMon had scored 283—too low to be an electrician’s mate or a machinist, but high enough to qualify him for pretty much any other enlisted man’s occupational specialty. The brothers weren’t exactly Naval Academy material, but they were prime candidates for the enlisted ranks.

As the story went, they had asked only two things of their navy recruiters. The first was that they stay together. LeMon had always wanted to travel the world, and Oran just wanted to look after his little brother. The second thing they asked for, even though they could have had just about any navy enlistment classification they wanted, was to be made culinary specialists. And Gordon thanked his stars that the navy had agreed to both requests, because the Guidry brothers could cook. Apparently, it had been a big part of their lives back home. They used spices in ways Gordon had never seen before, and earlier in the underway they had whipped up a special seasoning of paprika, pepper, salt, and dried herbs that could be rubbed on meat to make it both sweet and spicy. The crew had gone nuts for it. The Guidry brothers made an effortless team in his galley, and if they kept it up, Gordon was certain they had it in them to be culinary rock stars. That would take them far in the navy.

“Lieutenant, suh,” Oran said, standing in front of the burner and working a big pan of scrambled eggs with a steel spatula, “we got roas’ beef on the menu for tomorrow, but we best take it out of the freezer to thaw. You want, I’ll go get it, suh.”

“No, Guidry, I’ll take care of it. You two stay put. When the stewards come back, I want another platter of sausages sent to the mess, okay? They’re running low.”

“Yessuh,” Oran said. He nudged LeMon, who was minding the sausages while they roasted in the oven. “You hear that, Monje? Get your head out the clouds and make sure them sausages ready.”

LeMon sucked his teeth and said, “I ain’t Grandpa Zephirin. I hear just fine.” Then, to Gordon, “Sausages be ready in two shakes, suh.”

“Good,” Gordon said. The two of them could be a couple of clowns sometimes, but he didn’t mind so long as they continued to perform their duties well. In addition to their culinary skills, they handled the galley like pros. The other day a grease fire had started on the burners, and the Guidrys had calmly and quickly smothered it with a sack of flour before Gordon even noticed. He would have been tempted to call them old hands at this if they weren’t so young.

He went to the pantry and glanced up at the bare spot on the ceiling, where one of the two light fixtures had been removed to replace the broken one in the mess. It rankled him how much of the room was in shadow.

The walk-in freezer was at the far end of the pantry. He put on the jacket, wool cap, and thick gloves that hung from a peg on the stainless-­steel door. The freezer was kept at a steady minus-five degrees, cold enough to suck away a man’s body heat awfully fast if he wasn’t wearing protection.

He went in and let the door close again behind him. For safety, the door wasn’t lockable and had a handle on the inside as well as the outside. The twenty-by-six room reminded him of an old narrow-gauge boxcar, with inventory packed as tight as books on a library shelf. The metal shelves were sturdy as hell; they had never once buckled on him, even loaded with hundreds of pounds of food. It was a tight squeeze between those shelves. He had to turn sideways to make his way down the length of the freezer, picking through the shelves as he looked for the roast, already feeling the subzero chill. He found it ironic that so much energy went into warming a submarine when they were running at five hundred feet below, while even more energy was spent keeping the freezer below zero.

Other than the soft noise of frigid air coming in through the vents, the room was as silent as the Arctic tundra in midwinter. His breath clouded in front of him. He had been inside less than a minute, but the cold was already turning his nose numb and stinging his sinuses as he inhaled.

He turned his head to the rear of the freezer, alerted by something he had noticed out of the corner of his eye. Something on the floor that looked out of place. It took him a second to register what he was seeing.

“What the hell?” he gasped, the words coming out in a puff of con-

densation.

A dead man lay on the freezer floor.

Gordon rushed over to him. He was curled in the fetal position, hands tucked between his legs as if he were trying to keep them warm. Jesus God, Gordon thought. How did this happen? Had the man gotten trapped in the freezer somehow? But the door didn’t lock. There was no way to be accidentally stranded inside. Gordon shook his head in horror. He couldn’t think of many worse ways to go than freezing to death in this tiny, cramped space. How had it happened? When had it happened? Oran had done a routine inventory check in the freezer just yesterday, and there sure as hell hadn’t been a corpse in here then.

The man’s face didn’t ring a bell, but he was dressed in the same blue coveralls that all the enlisted men wore. The body was covered head to toe with white, crystalline frost. He was pale, as if all the color had drained out of him, except for the dark semicircles below his eyes—eyes still open and staring at Gordon. No, not at him, he realized, but at the freezer door behind him. The man had died only twenty feet from safety. Had he fallen and been unable to move? Had someone trapped him in the freezer on purpose, blocking the door from the outside to keep him there until he succumbed to hypothermia?

The thought was so horrible, Gordon tried not to think it. He grabbed the dead man by the rigid, icy legs and tried to drag him out of the freezer, but he had frozen to the floor. Gordon rocked the corpse back and forth until it broke free with a sickening pop. Then he pulled the body again, stiff as a board, to the freezer door. He used his elbow to knock the door open, then pulled the body out of the freezer and into the pantry.

“Get the corpsman!” he yelled. “Somebody get the goddamn corpsman!”

He pulled the dead man away from the freezer and left him there, dropping his legs—they made a loud crack as they hit the floor—and slamming the freezer door shut. In the dim light of the one remaining pantry fixture, the crewman’s body looked even more horrible. The dark circles around his eyes became black pits, the empty sockets of a death’s head.

Oran and LeMon came running into the pantry. As soon as he saw the body, Oran pushed LeMon back out, shouting, “Monje, go get the corpsman! Now!”

Gordon yanked off his protective gloves and jacket and crouched down over the body. “He… he was in the freezer—I don’t know for how long.”

Oran shook his head. “Poor fella. How he get in there?”

“No idea,” Gordon said. “Do you recognize him?”

Oran shook his head again. “No, suh. Seen a lot of faces in the mess, but they don’ all stick. But looka this, suh.” He pointed to one frozen hand.

Gordon leaned forward for a closer look. There was frozen blood on the dead man’s hand—dark red icicles from the lacerations in his skin.

“The light fixture, suh?” Oran asked.

“Jesus,” Gordon said. “A smashed light, a dead body in the freezer—what the hell is going on?”

Sick bay abutted the mess, so it didn’t take long for LeMon to run back with help. Roanoke’s hospital corpsman, Senior Chief Sherman Matson, hurried into the pantry with LeMon. Like most corpsmen, Matson wasn’t a doctor, but he was the only medically trained sailor on the boat. He could tend a broken arm, take care of a crewman with the flu, hand out painkillers, or run a physical, but if something life-threatening occurred, his job was to stabilize the sailor as best he could until they reached the closest medical facility. Not that there was anything even the most gifted doc could do for the poor frozen son of a bitch at this point except lay him to rest.

Gordon and Oran backed away while Matson knelt down to inspect the corpse. He felt for a pulse in the dead man’s neck, then yanked his hand back from the frozen flesh. He listened for breath passing between the icy blue lips, but the look in his eye said he knew it was futile.

“What happened here, Lieutenant?” Matson asked, straightening again.

“I found him in the freezer,” Gordon said. “He was just lying there.”

“How long was he in there, sir?”

“Hard to say, but it can’t have been more than a few hours. Do you know who he is?”

Matson looked down at the frozen corpse and sighed. “Yes, sir, I know him. His name was Stubic. Warren Stubic.”

Gordon heard a sudden murmur of shocked voices and looked up. Over Matson’s shoulder, he saw the faces of every sailor in the mess, crowding in the pantry doorway. Damn. Now there was no way to keep word from spreading to the rest of crew, along with all the rumors and innuendo that sprang up whenever two sailors spoke.

“What are we going to do with him?” Gordon asked. There was no morgue on board, no medical ward. Even sick bay was little more than a supply closet full of bandages, medicine, and a few basic surgical instruments.

“I’m afraid we don’t have a lot of options, sir,” Matson replied. “It’s recommended that a dead body be kept on ice until we reach the closest medical facility.”

“He’s already frozen solid,” Gordon said. “Besides, I don’t want to put him back in the freezer if that’s where he died. It doesn’t seem right, you know? There’s got to be someplace else we can put him.”

Matson thought for a moment. “It would have to be someplace private, sir. Someplace removed from the rest of the crew. The problem is, there’s no place private on a submarine. The only place that even comes close is the torpedo room. No one goes in there except the torpedomen. Stubic was one, you know—a torpedoman. Maybe the others would be willing to have one of their own down there until we reach the nearest base.”

Gordon nodded. “Okay, Matson, sounds good. Go get a body bag out of sick bay, and we’ll take him down there ourselves.”

“Aye, sir.” Matson stood up and left the pantry, squeezing past the crowd that had gathered in the doorway.

“Suh, we can take him down ourselves,” Oran said. “You don’ have to—”

“No. I’m the one who found him. I should go with him.” He looked at the sailors crowding the doorway. “Now, get those people out of here. Then one of you go get Lieutenant Commander Jefferson. He has to be informed.”

Oran Guidry went to the doorway. “You heard the lieutenant, now. All y’all go on back to the mess. Galley personnel only.”

Gordon looked down at the corpse again. His gaze went to the injured, bloody hand, then the staring eyes that held an expression somewhere between terror and madness. Why would a torpedoman break a light fixture in the mess? How had he wound up in the freezer? What the hell was going on?