Collapse Depth

“I’m doing the investigation…can I take a look at the logs?”

Renfro nodded and took them off the hook.

The sheet was creased and dirty. Each sheet of logs held twenty-four hours worth of information, four full watches, so the sheet on the clipboard was the same one Howard had used. Jabo could tell they’d hit the deck when Howard did. Looking it over, nothing jumped out as unusual, other than the oxygen generator drifting out of spec. If anything, they were sharper than a normal set of logs, they were written more precisely, each number and word written cleanly in the center of its block, the notes on back more detailed and thoughtful than the norm. Based on the logs only, Howard didn’t seem like a guy getting ready to murder the entire crew…he looked like a petty officer trying to impress his chief.

“You notice anything weird?” he asked Renfro.

“Not really,” he said. “I can’t believe he tried to kill us all.”

“We don’t know that yet. We may never know. The whole thing is hard for me to understand too.”

“No sir, I mean I really don’t believe it. I knew Howard, he wasn’t a nut case.”

“I liked Howard too, but isn’t that what everybody says after somebody has gone off the deep end? That’s the nature of being crazy, I guess, it’s unpredictable.”

“You really think Howard was crazy, sir? Then I guess your investigation is pretty much over.”

Jabo was stung by that. “You’re right. We still don’t know exactly what happened, and I’ll try my best to find out.”

Renfro nodded skeptically. “No sir, it’s okay. It’s just…I mean, if Howard wanted to kill everyone from back here, there would have better ways to do it than with Freon, for fuck’s sake. I mean, did he even know about the nerve gas shit? I sure as fuck didn’t. I asked around…nobody else in the division did either.”

Jabo nodded…it was a good point. That message had just come out. He was startled to remember that even the captain hadn’t seen it.

“And if I was going to try something crazy like that…I’d start right here,” he said, slapping the gray metal side of the oxygen generator. “You could flood this space with pure hydrogen in about five minutes. The alarm would be going off in control, but it would be over before anybody could get down here to do anything. Light your cigarette lighter and this thing would blow so hard it would crack the ship in half.”

Jabo nodded. It would be a much more efficient way of destroying the ship than dumping a few thousand pounds of Freon and hoping that it would mutate into a deadly gas like it was supposed to. And nothing and no one could prevent the watchstander in machinery two from doing it.

“Bring me a copy of those logs when your watch is over,” said Jabo, pointing. “I’ll be on the conn.”

“Aye, aye sir,” said Renfro, still a little surly. Clearly his loyalty to Howard as a shipmate and a member of the same division had trumped the suspicion that he may have tried to sabotage the ship. But even putting a shipmate’s loyalty to one of his peers aside…Renfro had made some valid points.

Jabo climbed the ladder down to lower level: the scene of the crime. He knew that none of the chemical compounds that had so alarmed them, Freon or phosgene, had any odor, but he still inhaled deeply, and smelled only the vague odor of diesel fuel and amine from the scrubbers above. He stepped across the space to the purple-handled Freon valve.

It was one of thousands of valve operators he’d seen thousands of times without ever touching, or even given much thought to. He had been involved in freeze seal maintenance in other areas of the boat. He wasn’t sure if that particular valve had ever been operated during his time on Alabama. A red DANGER tag hung from the operator now, hung there at the OOD’s order after the casualty had abated. It seemed superfluous now, since Jabo was fairly certain that there wasn’t an ounce of Freon left in the system.

He pulled the Polaroids that Master Chief Cote had given him from his pocket and looked them over.

He winced at the image of Howard’s dead body, rendered harshly in the electric flash. He was sprawled on the deck, his clipboard in front of him, the log sheet that Jabo had just reviewed on the deck behind him. There were three photos in all, of the same scene, taken from different angles. The quality was not great, and the light was poor, but overall the master chief had done an admirable job of preserving images of the scene. Howard seemed to be reaching for the valve handle; his whole body was oriented in that direction. But that didn’t make a lot of sense; it had taken a while for all the Freon to dump from the system, Howard wouldn’t have collapsed right after turning it. Maybe he’d turned the valve and then had second thoughts, but been overcome before he could save himself.