by J. S. Law
He set off down two-deck towards the pantry.
‘Don’t look, mustn’t look,’ she said quietly.
Aaron laughed. ‘In my wildest dreams, maybe,’ he said.
It was only a short distance to the pantry; in fact it was only a short distance to pretty much everywhere, the entire submarine being less than one hundred metres long, but Aaron’s broad frame in front of her made it difficult to see anything ahead.
As he leaned to the side to let someone pass, she caught a short glimpse of two people talking where the walkway doglegged past the pantry and Senior Rates Mess doors.
The Chief Stoker, still in his blue overalls, was hunched over another man, leaning into him.
Dan recognised the second figure immediately as Steward Roach.
The steward was backed up against the wall, his eyes wide and his face pale.
‘What’s going on there?’ whispered Dan.
‘Jesus,’ snarled Aaron, catching Dan unawares with the anger in his voice. ‘Give me a minute.’
She stood still and watched as he paced towards the two men, placing his hand on the Chief Stoker’s shoulder.
The Chief Stoker was the obvious aggressor and spun like lightning, squaring up to Aaron.
In this setting he looked small, smaller than Aaron anyway, narrower across the hip and shoulder, but Dan watched as, even when the chief had recognised who he had turned on, the man held Aaron’s glare and refused to back down. He seemed to have no fear of punishment, nothing to lose, and Dan recalled how he had seemed the same when he had squared up to John only a few days before.
Aaron was speaking, his words not audible to Dan.
She watched them, standing in the middle of the passageway, no one trying to pass her or them, as though they could all sense that this scene was best left undisturbed.
Aaron and the chief were whispering, their bodies faced off.
In the background, Ben Roach was standing and staring, completely still, like a terrified animal.
As Dan watched the scene unfold, her eyes were drawn to Ben’s.
He was looking at her, his face drained of colour and his mouth slightly open.
Dan felt as though he was trying to communicate with her, trying to pass an important message with his eyes.
A hand appeared from the Senior Rates Mess, tanned and slim, and touched the Chief Stoker’s arm. It was the Coxswain, and as the Chief Stoker spun to face him, he stepped forward and whispered into the man’s ear.
Dan watched the chief’s shoulders relax and the tension drain away.
Finally, the chief stepped back and looked around. He looked dazed for a second, as though unsure of what had led to this. Then he saw Dan and smiled his usual sneering smile. ‘Just can’t tolerate people who take more than one minute in the shower,’ he said to her, as if this was a reasonable explanation for his actions. ‘Can’t have too many clean-boys taking Hollywoods, can we?’ He tipped his head at her, nodded at Aaron. ‘Or clean-girls,’ he added, before he turned and sauntered away in the direction of the control room.
‘On you go,’ said Aaron to Steward Roach, loud enough for Dan to hear.
She walked to Aaron’s side, the Coxswain smiling broadly as she did so.
‘What was all that?’ she asked.
‘Boys being boys,’ said the Coxswain. ‘And some boys just won’t seem to learn any manners at all. The Chief Stoker has some issues at the moment that he’s needing to be working through.’
‘I think this is yours,’ Aaron said, picking up a warm bundle of tin foil from the pantry worktop. ‘Looks like Steward Roach has done you a steak sandwich, although it feels like there might be a portion of chips in there too.’ He lifted the foil package up and sniffed at it.
‘Jesus, it does smell lovely,’ said the Coxswain, reaching out for the package and taking it from Aaron. ‘What has he been putting in there? Mind if I take a look?’
Dan shrugged. ‘Be my guest,’ she said.
She watched as the Coxswain gently started to peel back one of the flaps of foil.
‘Feels like a full steak supper,’ he joked. ‘How did you go about getting Ben to do this?’ He peeled back the other side, but was stopped as Steward Roach stepped out of the pantry and closed the foil over with both hands.
‘Now, Coxswain,’ he said. ‘Can’t give away all my secrets.’
He took the package and handed it to Dan.
‘Cutlery and napkin in there too,’ he said, and smiled, his lips moving up at the edge, but his eyes wide, pleading with Dan to take the package and go.
‘You’re a genius,’ said Dan slowly. She looked up at Aaron and then the Coxswain and managed a grin. ‘Looks like dinner is served,’ she said and headed back to the bomb-shop.
Dan unwrapped the foil slowly, unsure of what she might find. Why did Ben appear so urgent? Had he secreted a message? She checked the package, even peeling apart the two layers of foil and checking between them, but she found nothing. Picking up the whole parcel, she held it high and looked underneath: nothing there either.
She examined the meal. Steward Roach had done her proud again. There was a good-sized lump of well-done steak, far more than she could really eat, and a good sprinkling of what looked like freshly fried chips. Ben had also managed to add some salad again too, just a tomato and some cucumber, but Dan suspected that fresh supplies were rationed to make them last as long as possible.
She picked up the knife and fork that were wrapped, restaurant style, in a rolled up paper napkin and used the fork to jab at a chip. No salt or pepper, no vinegar or tomato sauce, but Dan reckoned it might be the best thing she’d ever tasted.
‘Oh,’ she said quietly, as a drop of juice ran down her chin. She picked up the napkin, unrolling it and bringing it up towards her face.
Something to show you. No.2 AMS at 02:00 tomorrow night.
Dan felt her hunger disappear in an instant as she read the words. She turned the napkin over to see if there was any more; there wasn’t. Then she cursed herself for not checking it first as she read the message again.
Steward Roach had something to say, she’d known as much. She knew she had to meet him, had to speak to him alone, but she had no idea at all what No.2 AMS was, let alone where it was.
Chapter 20
Monday Morning – 29th September 2014
‘You aren’t going to try and earn your dolphins, are you?’ asked Aaron with a grin. ‘The Old Man would shit a mermaid if the first ever submarine-qualified female came from his boat. I can just imagine the Dolphin ceremony now.’
Dan laughed and shook her head. She looked down at the overalls that he’d given her to put on. They were the smallest set of white ones that he’d been able to find in the tiny storeroom and she’d still needed to roll up the legs and arms to make them fit. They hung off her small frame as though she’d inherited an older sibling’s clothes ahead of schedule.
‘Hardly,’ she said. ‘The Coxswain’s been very efficient in getting the guys down for interview, but I’ve a few hours now where I can’t speak to anyone. And this is a unique experience. I don’t want to feel like I’ve been at sea on a nuclear submarine and not taken the chance to learn anything about it. Plus, I need to see back there anyway.’
She watched him shrug and followed him as he headed along two-deck, leading her towards the Tunnel and the large watertight airlock doors that led over the nuclear reactor and into the engine room spaces.
‘Some of the guys mentioned an “AMS”?’ she asked as they walked.
‘Really?’ he asked. ‘Why?’
‘It just came up and I didn’t know what it was. I write down all the acronyms if I don’t recognise them, but it’s no biggie.’ She tried to look as though she’d already moved on and forgotten about her question.
‘Well, they’re Auxiliary Machinery Spaces,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘When you go down onto three-deck, next to where you stole the Coxswain’s stool from, go left and follow it all the way around.
There’s two hatches that lead down into separate compartments; that’s them. They house machinery and we sometimes put luggage and other stuff down there. Some of the lads go down there to read, I think – it’s relatively quiet – but you’re not really supposed to do that. They’re out of bounds to all personnel at the moment, so you can’t go down there anyway.’
‘How come they’re out of bounds?’ she asked, trying for nonchalant.
He seemed to think about that. ‘We’re storing some chemicals down there that should have been returned to stores before we left,’ he replied. ‘So we’re keeping everyone out for good old health and safety reasons.’
Dan looked back down the ladder and tried to picture the place. She’d rarely strayed from two-deck, except to steal the fold-up stool, but was sure she could get as close to No.2 AMS as she would need to.
‘Steal seems like a very strong word,’ she said, trying not to seem like she was thinking too hard about what he had said.
Aaron laughed. ‘I think the Coxswain’s forgiven you. He said something about you being a “gutsy bitch” for even contemplating it. Not many people on a boat go out of their way to piss off the Coxswain. It’s a high-risk strategy – he’s in charge of the duty watch bill, the shitty jobs list – and Jago’s been around for a very long time.’ He looked back at her as he walked. ‘Although, it may have paid off for you; he said you can keep the stool for the time being. But you’re not supposed to be snooping around on your own, so don’t do it again or the Old Man will find out for sure.’
Dan followed him up towards the control room and then along and underneath the main access hatch. Looking up now it was hard to believe that it was just water above there now, metres and metres of dark, cold water.
‘How deep are we?’ she asked, not sure she really wanted to know.
‘Couple of hundred metres, I think,’ he replied, as though that was perfectly normal and nothing to worry about. ‘We’ve found a nice cold layer and we’re heading out into deeper water for some checks. We’ll stay fast and deep now until we come back up to safe depth for the heave, but we’ll head back into the Southern Exercise areas for a little while again, before we start the transit proper.’
Dan looked up at the hatch again, expecting to hear it creak at any moment, or maybe see a small stream of water start to leak through.
‘I’ve only got a little while,’ said Aaron as he pulled back on the hydraulic lever that opened the airlock door. ‘The reason you don’t have any interviews is because we’re heaving soon.’
She watched him as he crab-stepped into the airlock, climbing in after him and waiting as he operated the interior lever to close the door before he opened the next identical one.
‘In the old days we used to leave these doors open while we were at sea,’ he said, with a tinge of sadness. ‘It was called “happy doors” – it saved time and cut down on noise.’
Dan nodded and pursed her lips in disappointment, as if she shared his frustration and longing for the ‘happy doors’.
He laughed.
‘They were the good days, eh?’ she added. ‘So who knows we’re having a heave?’
‘Worst kept secret on a submarine,’ he chuckled. ‘We stage a damage control exercise: a pretend fire, some electrical losses, or a problem with the nuclear plant. Then we drill the crew and see how they react.’
‘Ship’s company,’ Dan corrected with a waggle of her finger. ‘Fishing trawlers have a crew, MEO. Her Majesty’s submarines have a ship’s company.’
‘Of course, ship’s company, how terribly crass of me,’ Aaron agreed. ‘Today we’re doing a few serials: collision with submerged object, fires forward and aft, culminating in a casualty on the engine room lower level. Come on, I’ll show you.’
They passed through the second airlock door and walked through the Tunnel. Dan immediately spotted a large, circular sealed door mounted flush into the bulkhead. She nodded towards it.
‘That’s the plug,’ Aaron said in response.
Dan groaned.
‘No, really. That’s what we open when we need to access the reactor compartment. It’s all sealed when we’re at sea.’
As if to prove it, he bent down a few paces further on and lifted a small round trap door in the floor, revealing a round pane of scratched glass. He pointed down into a room filled with shiny metal pipes and huge lumps of equally shiny equipment.
The room looked clean, scarily clean, like it was made predominantly out of steel worktops from a hospital kitchen.
‘There,’ he said, pointing to a lump of metal, indistinguishable to Dan from all of the others. ‘That’s the reactor.’
Dan stared down through the viewing window and nodded. There were lumps and bumps, metal jutting out from all sides, and the floor was like the metal grating used in prisons. ‘Takes a bit of practice to recognise all the individual bits though, hey?’ she said, not really sure what he was pointing at. ‘Is that the flux capacitor next to it?’
He laughed. ‘Yeah, I suppose it does take some practice and yes, if you want that to be the flux capacitor, then that’s what it can be, but we’ll just go on calling it a valve, if that’s OK?’
‘Have it your way,’ she said.
They passed through the second airlock, two more heavy, hydraulically operated watertight doors with a small standing space between them, and Aaron led her past some more valves and heavy machinery.
The whole place looked alien, as though someone had installed the systems in no particular order, running pipes and cables wherever they pleased, and Dan began to wonder how any of the sailors ever told one component of the submarine from another.
The temperature began to rise as they walked further aft and Dan saw another watertight bulkhead door, the last of the bulkheads splitting the submarine into four watertight sections. This one was a single door, similar to the one they called twenty-nine watertight bulkhead, not a double airlock type, like the ones either end of the Tunnel. Through it, she could see the engine rooms, a darkened landscape of twisted pipes, more lumps of metal and dirty corrugated decking plates. It was almost recognisable from some of the crime scene pictures that she had seen in the police files.
‘Hang on,’ said Aaron as he stepped into a room on his left. Turning back, as if it were an afterthought, he said, ‘This is the manoeuvring room. This is where we, God’s own offspring,’ he gestured to himself and then out around the engine room spaces, ‘control the nuclear power plant and bestow upon Command the gifts of both propulsion and power.’
He stepped out of sight and she heard him talking to the manoeuvring room team for a moment before he came back out.
‘Through here,’ he said and stepped through the door.
Dan followed.
The heat hit her like a hammer blow. It was like walking out of her air-conditioned apartment during her holiday in Greece, when the oppressive heat, at the height of the Greek summer, had engulfed her as soon as she crossed the threshold and caused an instant sheen of sweat over her whole body.
‘Jesus,’ she gasped.
‘Yeah,’ Aaron agreed, shouting to be heard. ‘It gets hotter when we’re in shallow waters or, obviously, as the water temperature rises. It can hit fifty degrees back here during heaves.’
He led her onwards.
‘When we heave later, the first thing we do is crash-stop ventilation. When that happens the temperature can really fly up and we need to be careful with the lads being in here. Dehydration can be a problem, especially during something like the casualty exercise that’s physically really tough. Also, the heat can lead to a higher risk of fires.’
Dan looked at him closely; he wasn’t joking.
She ducked as they passed by a huge metallic lump that he pointed out as the ‘aft escape tower’ and then took her down a short ladder.
‘This is called the starting platform,’ he shouted. ‘You can follow this walkway all the way around the main engines and gearbox. We can control the propulsion syste
m remotely from here.’
He gestured to two large metal steering wheels and then pointed out the main engines and turbo-generators in turn; Dan forgot each one as quickly as she heard him name it.
‘Down there is the lower level.’ He pointed to a short ladder behind Dan.
From where she was standing, Dan could see that the ladder he was pointing at ran down to an intermediate platform. She followed him down and turned back on herself. This platform was filled with more equipment. As she turned again, she saw a gap in the equipment and immediately took a step back. In front of her now was a slim ladder that ran straight down to a metal walkway at the bottom. The route was made more tortuous by the jutting pipes and machinery that were present almost continuously on the way down. There was no safety rail to be seen, just rung after rung of metal disappearing into the belly of Tenacity.
Dan thought about Walker and how he would have felt, climbing down into this dimly lit, dirty space as he moved towards his death.
‘That’s where Walker hanged himself, isn’t it?’ she asked, recognising the place from both the pictures and the name.
Aaron nodded. He pointed to the side of one of the pumps where people had written short messages and memories in black pen, all addressed to Whisky.
‘It’s odd,’ he said, leaning in close to her. ‘We all just carry on. We miss him and we’re sad, but it’s like in our business, we’re just used to moving on. We’re like sharks, always having to move forward. It’s when one of us finally has to stop that the problems seem to catch up.’
He pursed his lips as he moved away from her.
‘Did Whisky have problems?’ she asked.
Aaron looked around the engine rooms. ‘Doesn’t everyone have problems?’
‘Not everyone takes their own life,’ offered Dan, watching him carefully. ‘Even after the death of a spouse.’
‘Maybe he’d lost control of his problems and they were catching him up. I know he missed her when we were away; he loved Cheryl. She was why he put up with all this.’
‘You found him, didn’t you?’ Dan asked.
