100 Fathoms Below

by Steven L. Kent

  “But it doesn’t make sense,” Jefferson said, though his words held far less conviction this time. He thought a moment, then said, “All right, Guidry, White, come with me. Lieutenant Abrams, let me know if you see Ensign Penwarden.”

  “Where we goin’, suh?” Oran asked.

  “To the torpedo room. You both think you saw Bodine, but Matson told me he’s dead. I intend to put this matter to rest and, with any luck, get to the bottom of whatever the hell is happening on this boat.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Jerry climbed down the main ladder, following Oran Guidry and Lieutenant Commander Jefferson to the bottom level. Jefferson was already walking up to the torpedo-room hatch when Jerry reached the bottom. He hurried to catch up. Oran, hanging back behind Jefferson, looked nervous. He kept chewing his lip and staring at the door as if he expected floodwaters to come surging through.

  “You okay?” Jerry asked him.

  Oran nodded, though not very convincingly. “It’s just that I get a real bad feelin’ down here. Felt it earlier this mornin’, and I got it again now.”

  “What kind of feeling?” Jerry asked.

  “Like we better off keepin’ that hatch shut tight.”

  Ever since they found Stubic’s dead body in the freezer, Jerry had felt something too: an unease lurking like a shadow in the back of his mind, making him feel like an animal that could sense a predator hiding in the tall grass but didn’t know exactly where it was. After discovering the smashed lights and mirrors in the head, the feeling had only gotten worse.

  Jefferson stood in front of the torpedo-room hatch. “You’re both certain it was Bodine you saw?”

  “Sir, I know it sounds impossible, but I would swear to it,” Jerry replied. “I sat right next to the man in the control room for every one of my watch sections. I’d recognize him anywhere, sir.”

  “What about you, Guidry?” Jefferson asked.

  Oran shrugged. “I didn’t see hide nor hair, suh. Was Ensign Penwarden who saw Bodine. I only know what I heard. The ensign called out Bodine’s name twice. When I left the auxiliary engine room two shakes later, they was both already gone, suh.”

  Jefferson shook his head. “It can’t be him. There’s no way.” He banged his fist on the door and called, “Matson? It’s Lieutenant Commander Jefferson. I have some questions I’d like to ask you.”

  When there was no answer, he knocked again. A few seconds later, the door opened, swinging outward. Senior Chief Sherman Matson poked his head out. He looked pale and groggy, his hair tousled and sweaty. Jerry knew that Matson had quarantined himself just to be on the safe side, but now he wondered whether prolonged exposure to Bodine had made him sick.

  “Lieutenant Commander?” Matson said, squinting at Jefferson. “Sorry. I—I must have fallen asleep.” He rubbed the back of his neck as if he had slept on it wrong. “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “Did you or did you not inform me several hours ago that Steve Bodine had passed away from his illness?” Jefferson said. “Because I’ve got two men here who say they saw Bodine not long ago, up and walking.”

  Matson frowned. “Saw him, sir? No, not possible. His body is still here.”

  “Is it safe for us to come in and see for ourselves?” Jefferson asked. “I’d like to put an end to any speculation.”

  “See for yourselves, sir?” Matson asked. Jerry thought he seemed really out of it. “Yes, yes, of course. It should be safe, sir. With the host body deceased, the virus likely died with him.”

  “So you’ve determined it’s a virus?” Jefferson asked.

  “That’s my best guess, sir.”

  Matson stepped aside so they could enter. Jefferson walked right in. Oran and Jerry paused and exchanged a worried look. Jerry knew why Oran didn’t want to go in—that bad feeling of his—but Jerry had more concrete concerns. Matson claimed it was safe, but it was only speculation, and besides, Matson himself didn’t look healthy. If he had contracted the virus, or whatever it was, from Bodine, would it spread to them too? Maybe they were better off staying out of the torpedo room.

  “Come along, gentlemen,” Jefferson called from inside.

  Damn. The XO wanted him inside, so that was where he had to be. He and Oran reluctantly stepped into the torpedo room. As Matson sealed the hatch behind him again, Jerry saw a second black body bag on the floor, next to Stubic. The tag read bodine, steven.

  “Keeyaw,” Oran muttered, crossing himself.

  Jefferson stared at the bag a moment, his jaw set, his face unreadable. Finally, he said, “Open it, Matson.”

  “Aye, sir.” Matson crouched over the body bag and slowly unzipped it. He took his time, and Jerry just wanted to grab the zipper from him, yank it down, and get this over with. When the bag was fully unzipped, Matson spread it open to reveal the head, neck, and shoulders of the body inside. Jerry’s throat tightened.

  Steve Bodine was pale and waxy, as ashen as he had been in the berthing area earlier—if that had indeed been Bodine creeping through the space. What the hell was going on? He approached the body for a closer look, all thoughts of contagion forgotten. Bodine’s eyes were closed. He looked peaceful now after suffering through the illness that had killed him.

  Jefferson’s face, which had been so stoical just a second ago, was suddenly overcome with emotion, to the point where Jerry worried that he was going to break down. The XO pulled himself together quickly, though, resuming his air of professional detachment, but that fleeting moment of vulnerability stuck with Jerry. It was easy to forget sometimes that officers were human beings too, when all he’d ever seen them do was bark out orders or reprimand enlisted men for speaking without being asked or forgetting to say “sir.” That was especially true of the higher-ups: the captain and the XO. As he watched Jefferson pull himself together, he thought maybe the XO wasn’t such a bad guy. There was definitely more to him than Jerry first thought.

  “I trust this is enough to put the matter to bed,” Jefferson said.

  “Yes sir,” Jerry said. “I’m sorry, sir. I could have sworn it was him.”

  “It was dark in the berthing area,” Jefferson said. “It could have been anyone.”

  But it hadn’t been “anyone.” Jerry had been certain, but how could it have been Bodine if Bodine was already dead?

  “Aye, suh,” Oran said. He looked as confused as Jerry felt. “Like White, I’m awful sorry for the confusion, suh. I woulda’ swore on my mama’s life Ensign Penwarden was talkin’ to Bodine, suh.”

  “Penwarden?” Matson said. He blinked and rubbed his neck again. “Did you say Ensign Penwarden? He was … he was just here, wasn’t he?”

  “You saw him?” Jefferson asked.

  “I think so, sir.” Matson leaned back against the machinery. He looked dizzy and distracted. “Or maybe I dreamed it. I fell asleep for a while there. I mean, I must have. I don’t remember much after calling you on the circuit, Lieutenant Commander.” He frowned. “Or much of what I was doing before you knocked just now, for that matter.”

  Jerry, Jefferson, and Oran exchanged worried glances. Jerry knew they were thinking the same thing he was: Matson had the fever now too. But they didn’t leave right away, as Jerry would have preferred. Instead, Jefferson crouched down beside the body bag. He opened it as wide as he could, and peered in, as though looking for something. Then he closed it again and zipped it up.

  “Did you see Ensign Penwarden or didn’t you, Matson?” Jefferson asked, straightening.

  But Matson only shook his head, looking down at his feet. “I don’t know, sir. I—I can’t remember. I can’t seem to remember anything.”

  “Bodine told me he was having the same problems with his memory,” Jefferson said. “He couldn’t even remember breaking one of the ceiling lights. He told me he felt like some part of him was slipping away.”

  Matson looked up at them. There was genuine terror in his eyes.

  “You have to leave now, sir,” he said. “It’s clear to me I’ve con
tracted whatever Bodine had, which means all of you are at risk of contagion just by being here. You have to go.”

  “Damn it, Matson, you knew this would happen,” Jefferson said softly. “You knew you’d get it if you locked yourself in here with him.”

  “You really should go, Lieutenant Commander,” Matson insisted. “Before it’s too late.”

  Jefferson nodded. “Take care of yourself, Matson. We can’t afford to lose you too.”

  Jerry was all too happy to follow Jefferson out of the torpedo room, and from the look on Oran’s face, so was he. When they were back in the bottom-level corridor, Jefferson closed the heavy hatch behind them.

  “White, you were right,” Jefferson said. “I think that was Bodine you saw in the berthing area. And I think he was in the head too.”

  “Sir?” Jerry asked, confused. “We just saw his body, sir, how could it be him?”

  “When I looked in that body bag just now, I saw cuts on Bodine’s hands,” Jefferson said. “Matson had already patched up his old cuts; I saw it. These were new cuts, the kind you’d get from broken glass. There was blood on his hands too. New blood.”

  Oran moaned and crossed himself again. “What does it mean, suh?”

  “It means Bodine was our man,” the XO said. “He’s the one who wrecked the head—and the one you say Penwarden was talking to earlier, Guidry. He must have died shortly after.”

  “But, sir, you said Matson called you hours ago to report Bodine’s death,” Jerry said.

  Jefferson glanced back at the torpedo room. “He’s not well. He’s clearly ill and possibly delusional. In that state, he could easily have hallucinated or dreamed that Bodine was dead and called me to report it. I just hope Matson’s the last one, and no one else gets sick. If we’re lucky, he’ll ride it out until we can get to a navy base. If we’re not …” He trailed off, as if realizing he’d said more than he intended to a couple of enlisted men. “You’re both dismissed.”

  Jerry and Oran climbed back up to the middle level while Jefferson continued up the main ladder to the top level, presumably to give the captain a report on his investigation and discuss Matson’s condition. Oran pulled Jerry aside into the mess.

  “Do you believe the XO?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” Jerry asked.

  “His theory about when Bodine died?”

  “I don’t know.” Jerry looked down the corridor. He saw an auxiliary tech come out of the head with a full garbage bag. Light was coming through the doorway now. Either they had taken fixtures from other parts of the sub to replace them or they were using battle lanterns as replacements. Either way, it was good to know he wouldn’t have to relieve himself in pitch-black darkness. “I guess what the lieutenant commander said makes a kind of sense.”

  Oran shook his head. “Nothin’ makes sense in this boat, White. Somethin’ been wrong from the start, I can feel it. Back in the bayou, some folks still practice the old religion. They say everything’s got a soul—even things that ain’t alive. Sometimes I think they’re right. And if Roanoke’s got a soul, it ain’t a healthy one. Somethin’ bad got inside her, and now she’s rottin’ away from within.”

  “You sure you don’t have the fever too, Guidry? Because you’re talking crazy.”

  He laughed, but Oran didn’t. His eyes stayed narrow, sharp, and serious.

  “Mark my words, White,” Oran said. “There’s somethin’ very wrong in this boat.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  After Lieutenant Junior Grade Charles Duncan’s watch section was finished and he’d had something to eat in the wardroom, he got to thinking about Jerry White, Frank Leonard, and fate.

  He had known Lieutenant Commander Leonard—or, he supposed, just Frank, now that the man’s navy career was over—for four years, having served under him on the USS Batfish, a Sturgeon-class sub out of Charleston. This was after Operation Evening Star made Batfish a navy legend in 1978, when she detected a Soviet Yankee-class ballistic missile submarine in the Norwegian Sea, a couple hundred nautical miles above the Arctic Circle. Batfish had trailed the sub for 50 days without ever being detected, all the while gathering valuable intelligence on how Soviet subs operated. Although Duncan and Leonard hadn’t been part of that op, when they were assigned to Batfish they found a sense of camaraderie among the crew that stemmed from the sub’s impressive legacy. Everyone on Batfish knew it was a special boat, and as a result the crew was tighter than any other he had known.

  He and Leonard remained friendly even after they were transferred to new submarines, calling each other regularly when they weren’t underway. Duncan had felt terrible when he heard Leonard had been passed over for promotion a third time, thereby ending his career with the navy. But his sympathy had turned to anger when he learned why Leonard had been passed up. An official complaint by some pissant PO2 named Jerry White.

  Did Frank Leonard have problems? Of course he did. Everyone had problems. Was it true Leonard had a weakness for nose candy and pills? Sure, but it sounded a lot worse than it was. He did it only when he was off duty and off base. And besides, he assured Duncan—one of the few people who knew about his habit—that he had cut way down and was in the process of stopping altogether. He promised he had it under control. Then Jerry White went and screwed everything up with that damn complaint. And the kicker? It hadn’t even been about the drugs. It had been about the way Leonard treated some PO who shouldn’t have been allowed in the navy in the first place—a faggot who’d lied about being a faggot so he could join the submarine service. Frank Leonard had been a good, loyal navy man, and the fact that he’d lost his career over the way he treated a goddamn homo had made Duncan furious.

  The day he saw Jerry White’s name added to the crew roster for Roanoke, it was as if fate had played a hand. He called Leonard from Pearl to tell him the news, and Leonard had made him promise to make White’s life on the submarine a living hell. He didn’t need to twist Duncan’s arm. If fate was giving him a chance to avenge his friend and fellow member of the esteemed Batfish crew, who was he to say no? White had destroyed an executive officer’s career, and yet White’s rank was intact, his record unsullied. It was an injustice so outrageous, Duncan felt justified—no, duty-bound—to make White wish they had thrown him out on his ass. If the navy had been too much of an institutional pussy to teach him the lesson he needed, Duncan was happy to pick up the slack.

  But there was only so much Duncan could do to him, especially knowing White’s affinity for filing complaints about officers. If he harassed White too brazenly, Duncan would get gigged, and that demerit would stay on his record permanently. If he got violent with him, he would get thrown out of the navy faster than if he’d been caught diddling some boy during a stopover in Bangkok—and with just as much dishonor. He had to walk a fine line, which left him with only one option: dressing White down at every opportunity, preferably in front of as many other crewmen as possible. He had almost slipped up in the control room a couple of watches back, when they shook the Victor off their tail. In his jubilation, he had very nearly high-fived White along with the other men. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. Before this underway was through, he intended to make White feel about as lucky to have transferred to Roanoke as a black cat breaking a mirror on Friday the 13th—make him think about putting in for another transfer the second his feet were back on dry land. It would be a petty victory, smaller in scale than that shit-heel White deserved, but the thought of it still felt pretty damn good.

  He made his way to the officers’ staterooms at the forward end of the middle-level corridor. He had some downtime ahead of him and wanted to catch up on his reading. He opened the door to his stateroom, slipped inside, and closed it behind him. A triple-decker bunk sat behind a curtain on one side of the stateroom. The other walls were taken up by a couple of dressers, a standing wardrobe, and a few built-in cubbies with pull-down doors. Remembering that he’d left his book in his rack, Duncan crossed the thin grass-green carpet to the
curtain. He pulled it aside, and there on the middle rack, his rack, lay Ensign Penwarden, eyes closed, body curled into a fetal ball.

  It took a moment for the astonished Duncan to find his voice.

  “Ensign Penwarden,” he said loudly. When the man didn’t stir, he shook his shoulder roughly. “Penwarden.”

  The ensign roused himself as if from a deep sleep. He blinked up at Duncan. “Lieutenant, sir?”

  “Ensign Penwarden,” Duncan said, “would you mind telling me what the hell you’re doing in my rack, in a stateroom that doesn’t belong to you?”

  “What, sir?” Penwarden looked around himself, confused. “Sir, how did I get here?”

  “You don’t know?”

  Penwarden put up an arm to shield his eyes from the overhead lights. He sucked in a breath and grimaced in pain.

  Duncan nearly gasped in shock. “Ensign, what—what’s wrong with your teeth?”

  Without warning, Ensign Penwarden grabbed Duncan by the collar and leaped out of the rack. Duncan fell onto his back. Penwarden straddled him, pinning him down. Duncan tried to throw him off but couldn’t. Penwarden was unbelievably strong.

  “Ensign, what—”

  That was all Duncan had a chance to say before he got another look at Penwarden’s teeth, up close.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Lieutenant Commander Jefferson sat down for dinner at the wardroom table with Captain Weber and seven other Roanoke officers—a touch of normality at the end of a day that had been anything but normal.

  The stewards entered with platters of food fresh from the galley, but he found himself preoccupied, his mind spinning in different directions. He couldn’t get the sight of Steve Bodine’s dead body out of his head—or the bloody cuts on his hands. It made him think of the broken lights all over the boat. It was as if the submarine were being purposely thrown into darkness. But why? Bodine had said the lights were hurting his eyes, and Jefferson would wager that Stubic had the same complaint. It had to be a side effect of the fever—but it couldn’t be just that. He would have bought it as an explanation if only the lights in the head had been smashed, but the mirrors had been broken too. Mirrors didn’t give off light. At best, they reflected it, but why attack a reflection when you could just as easily destroy the light’s true source? There was something more going on; he was sure of it. Some piece of the puzzle that he was missing.