First, Duncan and Penwarden went missing, and now Jefferson too? At least, Farrington couldn’t blame this one on Jerry.
In fact, it looked as though Farrington had forgotten all about Jerry. He told the sailor, “Take me to the XO’s stateroom.”
Jerry watched the two men walk off toward Officer Country. More broken lights almost certainly meant someone else had the fever now. But what about the three missing officers? It was like Bodine all over again. Had the three of them broken the lights themselves, then gone into quarantine with Matson during a lucid moment when they realized they were sick? He hoped that was the case. Nothing else made sense. You couldn’t just walk off a submarine in the middle of an underway.
He left the mess, not feeling very hungry after Farrington’s questions. In the corridor, he saw Oran Guidry help a very haggard-looking LeMon Guidry out of the galley. Oran had one arm around his brother’s shoulders to help keep him upright. Jerry hurried over to them.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Monje’s sick,” Oran said. “Too sick to work in the galley. Lieutenant Abrams wants him out before he make everybody else sick too. Said he don’t want a Typhoid Mary. I don’t think that’s very funny.”
LeMon drooped in his brother’s arms. He was pale and sweaty, dark around the eyes. It was the fever. There was no doubt in Jerry’s mind.
“We have to bring him down to quarantine,” Jerry said. “I’ll help.”
“No,” LeMon moaned as Jerry got on his other side and helped shoulder his weight. “No doctors.”
“Yes, Monje,” Oran told him gently. “You need to see the corpsman. No complaining, now.”
They started carrying him toward the main ladder, but LeMon resisted. For someone weak from illness, he had a surprising amount of strength left. He planted his feet on the deck and refused to move any farther.
“No doctors, Oran,” LeMon said again, his head lolling weakly on his neck. “You know what Papa always said. You either sleep it off, or you die in your sleep the way God intended.”
“Then you’ll sleep it off, but you’ll do it down in the quarantine with Matson,” Oran insisted, yanking him forward.
Jerry and Oran carried him to the ladder. That was hard enough, but getting him down the ladder was a lot trickier. Oran went down first. Then Jerry held LeMon under his arms and gently lowered him to Oran, who took his legs and helped ease him down to the bottom level. LeMon was weakening fast and didn’t resist at all. But he did talk a lot in his delirium. While Oran kept LeMon balanced upright, Jerry came down the ladder and heard LeMon muttering.
“Penwarden—I dreamed about Ensign Penwarden,” he said. “He—he was in the berthin’ area with a funny look on his face. He caught me lookin’ at him; then suddenly he was right in front of my rack. Moved like a flash. Then I woke up.”
Jerry paused, remembering how he had seen Bodine in the berthing area.
“That’s one crazy dream, Monje,” Oran said. He shot Jerry a worried glance. “The fever playin’ tricks on his mind. Ain’t no one seen Penwarden in hours. The man’s up and disappeared.”
“I heard,” Jerry said. “Lieutenant Duncan and Lieutenant Commander Jefferson too. Something tells me they’re in quarantine with Matson.”
“No,” LeMon moaned. “No doctors.”
They managed to maneuver LeMon to the torpedo room. Jerry held him up while Oran banged on the hatch.
“Chief Matson!” he shouted.
“Never seen anyone move so fast,” LeMon said again. “He was like lightnin’.”
LeMon laughed deliriously, and his head tipped forward, chin to chest. Near the back of LeMon’s neck, Jerry noticed two small red welts. He was about to lean in for a closer look when the torpedo-room hatch clanked open suddenly, startling him. Matson stood in the doorway. He was still pale, but otherwise he looked strong and sturdy again—quite the opposite of how he looked last time.
“It’s my brother,” Oran said. “He got the fever!”
Matson stepped forward, took LeMon from them, and escorted him back into the torpedo room. It had taken two men to support LeMon’s weight in his delirium, but somehow Matson managed it with no help. He must be stronger than he looked.
“You’ve made quite a recovery, Matson,” Jerry told him. “Did you find a cure for the fever?”
In answer, Matson slammed the torpedo-room hatch.
Jerry and Oran looked at each other.
“He musta’ found a cure,” Oran said, more to himself than to Jerry. He nodded resolutely. “Monje gonna be okay. I know it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
When Oran returned to the galley, Lieutenant Abrams, seeing how distraught he was over his brother’s illness, offered to give him the rest of the day off. Oran refused. “I want to work, suh. Cookin’s what I do, and cookin’s what’ll take my mind off things. If I got nothin’ to do, I’m liable to drive myself crazy with worry. So unless that’s a direct order, suh, I’d like to stay.”
Abrams nodded. “Very well, Guidry. But if it’s too much …”
“Thank you, suh,” he said, tying on his apron. “I’ll be jus’ fine once I’m back to it, suh.”
He lost himself in the work, in the familiar heat and noise of the galley. Each vegetable he chopped, each bowl he stirred, each mix he poured took his mind off LeMon—but only for so long. He had never seen his brother so sick before, and with the same fever that had resulted in two sailors’ deaths. What was he going to do? What could he do? He had always protected his little brother, but how could he protect him against this?
LeMon always hated it when Oran tried to protect him. He thought it was his older brother’s way of saying he was weak or helpless, but nothing could be further from the truth. Oran protected LeMon because you were supposed to protect your loved ones. That was just the way it was.
LeMon didn’t see it that way. When he was in sixth grade, he had gotten in a fight with some other kids in their parish. One afternoon, in the dry grass of the schoolyard, those kids surrounded LeMon and started throwing punches. Oran didn’t remember what the fight was about—probably nothing all that important, but when you were that young everything, no matter how small, was a big deal. The kids had LeMon outnumbered, but he put up a good fight. Gave at least one of them a black eye, as Oran recalled, and was handing out fat lips like Mardi Gras beads. But the numbers weren’t on his side, and soon they overpowered him. They took him down to the ground and pounded on him. That was when Oran found them.
Spotting Monje in trouble, Oran hadn’t even hesitated. He jumped into the fray and started throwing elbows and knees into the other kids. He managed to make his way through the pile of squirming bodies, tossing them aside until he reached LeMon. His little brother was swollen around the eyes, and his nose and lip were bleeding. Oran helped him to his feet, then turned to the other kids with an angry war cry. They turned tail and ran, unwilling to take on both Guidry brothers.
Oran had expected at least a thank-you, but LeMon was furious. He could have handled them, he said, and he didn’t need his older brother fighting his battles for him. Oran was perplexed at the time. Even now, so many years later, he remembered LeMon’s righteous indignation as he scolded Oran for helping him, while the blood and tears were still streaming down his face.
“I jus’ wanted to help,” Oran had said in his own defense. “And look, they ran away. They gone.”
“They gone now, but I still have to see ’em in school tomorrow,” LeMon pointed out. “What you think they’ll say then, Oran? That I’m a couillon who needs his older brother to fight for him, that’s what! You can’t be there to protect me all the time. You have to let me protect myself.”
Oran knew that his brother was right, but that never stopped him. In the years that followed, Oran got into a lot of scrapes, about half of them in LeMon’s behalf.
“Even now, we grown men and you can’t stop thinkin’ of me as a little brother you got to protect, can you?” LeMon had sai
d after Oran flattened some trucker in a parking lot.
He was right. Monje would always be his little brother, and it was still an older brother’s duty to protect a younger brother. But how could he protect LeMon against an illness? You couldn’t whip the fire out of a fever. You couldn’t bloody its nose and send it packing. He had never felt this helpless before. His little brother needed him, and there was nothing he could do.
Oran worked through lunch and then supper, and then, when the cooks and bakers came to relieve him, he insisted on staying and helping the incoming staff with preparations for midrats. It went against navy custom for someone to work two sections in a row except in an emergency, but Abrams took pity on him and let him stay.
Oran was standing at the counter, chopping carrots with a chef’s knife, when he heard Lieutenant Abrams say, “Hey, Guidry, look who’s here!”
Oran turned toward the galley doorway, and there was LeMon, good as new, walking into the galley as if nothing had happened.
“Monje?” Oran said, rushing over to him. “Monje, you’re okay! I knew Matson could fix you. I knew it!”
He touched LeMon’s arm, and LeMon turned to look at him, squinting against the bright lights. Oran backed away in horror. Those eyes. Those weren’t Monje’s eyes.
“No,” Oran murmured. “No.”
“What’s the matter with you?” Abrams demanded.
Oran continued backing away, refusing to tear his gaze from the impostor in the galley. He bumped into a crewman washing dishes, who growled, “Watch it, Guidry,” but Oran wasn’t listening. The other two enlisted men in the galley stopped their work and stared at him in confusion.
“I thought you’d be happy to see LeMon back so soon,” Abrams said. “You’ve been so worried about him.”
“Suh,” Oran said softly, “that ain’t Monje.”
“What are you talking about?” Abrams said.
“I know my brother, suh,” Oran insisted. “That’s not Monje. His eyes. Somethin’ wrong with his eyes.”
Abrams looked at LeMon, who stood still as a statue, glaring past the galley staff as if they didn’t exist, focusing on Oran.
“Rougarou,” Oran said in barely a whisper.
Abrams turned back to him. “What did you say?”
Oran looked down at his hand. He was still holding the chef’s knife. He knew what he had to do. Gathering his courage, he walked back to the thing that wore his brother’s face and drove the knife into his gut. He stabbed him just above the waistline and drove the blade upward.
“Oran, no!” Abrams cried, rushing forward. “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ!”
He grabbed Oran and pulled him away from LeMon. Oran struggled against him, but Abrams had him in a strong bear hug from behind.
LeMon looked down curiously at the knife protruding from his gut. Then he crumpled silently to the floor, falling on his side.
“Rougarou!” Oran yelled. “Rougarou!”
He continued to struggle, but Abrams refused to let him go. Oran stared at the creature on the floor of the galley. It was pretending to be dead, but he knew full well that it wasn’t. It refused to move, refused to show Gordon and the others what it really was.
“Rougarou!” Oran continued to yell until four men from the galley staff piled on him and brought him to the deck.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A US Navy submarine didn’t have a brig. There simply wasn’t room. Most of the time, it wasn’t a problem. The navy was an all-volunteer service, after all, and highly selective, accepting only the best. It was why fights on submarines were a rare thing. Things could get tense, sure—it was inevitable when you had over 100 men crowded together with limited space—but between all the basic requirements and the psychological profiling, the navy screened out the hotheads. Which was why, no matter how hard he tried, Lieutenant Gordon Abrams couldn’t wrap his mind around the fact that Oran Guidry had killed his own brother.
LeMon hadn’t survived the attack. He died right there on the galley floor. Matson, who seemed to have made as miraculous a recovery as LeMon had, came up from quarantine to pronounce him dead. The corpsman ordered LeMon’s body transported to the torpedo room, where Gordon supposed he would lie in a body bag next to Warren Stubic and Steve Bodine. The thought of it made him shiver. He hadn’t canceled midrats—galley rule number one was that meals for the crew went on no matter what. But it was hard. He kept staring at the spot on the floor where LeMon had died.
If it was some kind of elaborate murder plot, if Oran had planned this all along like something out of an Agatha Christie novel, stabbing his brother while they were still moored in Pearl Harbor would have been the polite thing to do. Then Lieutenant Commander Jefferson could have assigned a couple of sailors to watch him until the MPs hauled him off to a real brig. If only Roanoke still had a working radio, they could have signaled for a surface ship to take Oran away. Aircraft carriers and battleships were floating cities, complete with brigs.
But Roanoke didn’t have a working radio, and even if it did, they were in Soviet waters and couldn’t risk alerting the enemy to their position. No surface ship could come to take Oran away, so Captain Weber had improvised and turned Jefferson’s now-empty stateroom into a makeshift brig.
Gordon decided he had to go see Oran. He had to find out why he had done such an unthinkable thing. When midrats were over, he went to Officer Country. A battle lantern had been mounted on the bulkhead to replace the broken overhead lights. Since Jefferson’s stateroom locked only from the inside, an ensign named Van Lente stood sentry by the door, a pistol strapped to his belt. Oran Guidry wasn’t going anywhere.
Aside from the guard and Oran, Officer Country was empty. The other officers had joined the boatwide manhunt for the three missing officers. Gordon suspected it was futile. They had already searched the submarine from bow to stern, so he didn’t know what they hoped to find by doing it again. He had heard old navy men talk about cursed missions—surface ships that encountered nothing but heavy storms in otherwise calm seas, submarines that sprang fresh leaks in new places every week—but never anything like this.
One mystery at a time, though.
“How’s it going, Van Lente?” Gordon asked clumsily. He didn’t know what else to say.
“The prisoner’s been quiet, sir,” the ensign reported. “Hasn’t tried to get out.”
The prisoner. God, how had it come to this?
“Can I see him?” Gordon asked.
“I’m not supposed to let anyone in,” Van Lente said. “Seaman Apprentice Guidry is considered dangerous.”
Gordon had seen with his own eyes just how dangerous Oran was, but he was still having a hard time understanding what had happened. Taking LeMon down to quarantine earlier, he had been out of his mind with worry. There was no question how much he cared about his brother. That was what Gordon didn’t get. Why would a man who loved his brother that much turn around and coldly, brutally murder him? It wasn’t the fever. Oran wasn’t delirious and out of control like Stubic or Bodine. So why had he done it? Gordon needed to know. He needed to understand.
“I hear you, Van Lente, but I have to see him,” Gordon insisted. “Please.”
Van Lente shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. My orders are to keep everyone out for their own protection.”
“Please,” he said again. “I’m his DivO. I just … I need to talk to him. You know me, Van Lente. How many ops have we been on together? You know I’m no fool. I wouldn’t go in there if I thought he was a danger to me. Just give me five minutes with him. That’s all I ask.”
It would have been so much easier if he could have simply ordered Van Lente to let him into the stateroom. He was a lieutenant, after all, well above an ensign, but security orders couldn’t be countermanded by anyone outside the security division. The only way he was getting in there was if Van Lente did him a favor. Luckily, it appeared that Gordon had gotten through to him.
With a sigh, the ensign stepped aside. “You’re goi
ng to get me in trouble, Lieutenant.”
“This whole damn boat’s already in trouble,” Gordon said.
He stepped past Van Lente and opened the stateroom door, walked in, and closed it behind him. A single battle lantern hung from the bulkhead in the otherwise dark room, casting a cone of light onto the center of the floor. Oran sat on the foot of the fold-down bed, just beyond the edge of the light, half his face veiled in shadow. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t even look in Gordon’s direction. He kept his eyes down, pensive and melancholy.
“Your brother is dead, Guidry,” Gordon said. “I don’t know if anyone told you yet.”
Oran didn’t respond.
“Did you hear me?” Gordon pressed. “LeMon is dead. You killed him.”
Oran shook his head. “That wasn’t my brother, suh. And I tell you now, he ain’t dead. He’ll still be alive long after the rest of us are gone.”
Christ, he had lost his mind. From the guilt, probably. Gordon moved to stand across from Oran. He leaned back against the bulkhead and crossed his arms. “Why’d you do it? Why kill LeMon? I thought you two were close.”
“Suh, I didn’t kill LeMon,” Oran insisted, finally looking up and meeting Gordon’s eye. “I stabbed that thing in the galley so I could show you.”
“Show me what?” Gordon asked.
“That it wasn’t him,” Oran said.
“By stabbing him?”
Oran fell silent again.
“Guidry, I’m here as your friend, all right?” Gordon said. “Not your DivO, not your boss—your friend. I’m trying to understand what happened, but if you’re just going to give me riddles, I might as well go.”
“Do you believe in God, suh?” Oran asked him. “Jesus and the Holy Mother, all that?”
Gordon hadn’t expected such a question, and he didn’t know how to answer it. His mother was Catholic, kind of. He didn’t remember her ever taking Communion or attending mass, but she was baptized, and she’d had him baptized as a baby. She always wore a little silver cross on a silver chain around her neck, so it must have meant something to her once. Maybe it was her work at the psychiatric hospital that had put her off religion. All that suffering, all those bent and broken minds, for no reason other than that God had willed it so. Gordon’s father was Jewish, but about as Jewish as his mother was Catholic. He never saw him go to synagogue. Gordon had been raised without much in the way of religion, somewhere between lapsed Catholic and lapsed Jew. No confirmation, no bar mitzvah, just the occasional Easter service with his mother’s family, or Passover Seder with his father’s. He gave Oran the only honest answer he could.
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