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Soldato shook his head. “I doubt it, those orders are secret to the crew, only the officers know.”

“You think maybe an officer…”

“No,” said Soldato, cutting him off. But the thought chilled him. The boat’s equipment had been designed by some of the most brilliant engineers in the world. But none of that mattered without the right men in charge, from the newest enlisted man all the way to the captain, with whom all the responsibility ended up. Admiral Rickover, the patron saint of naval nuclear propulsion, had personally interviewed every officer in the program, knowing that strong men would be the fleet’s greatest asset. And if somehow the wrong guy made it into the wardroom of a nuclear submarine…

“I’m glad they didn’t put anything about sabotage in the message…we’d have NIS banging down our door right now.”

“If that’s what it is, they’ll need to figure out for themselves what’s going on inside the Alabama. The NIS can’t help them where they are now.”

Bushbaum walked to a large map on the wall and took note of the approximate position of the Alabama. “We’ll need to figure out how to let the families of the crew know about the death when the boat hits Taiwan. At least we’ve got a week to figure that out.”

“They’ll find out before then,” said the captain with a sigh. “They always do.”

• • •

Here’s how they found out.

Lieutenant John Knight was Engineering Duty Officer who had recommended the change to the new refrigerant — he was the cocksucker EDO that Captain Soldato had fantasized about finding and beating. He was a Naval Academy graduate who’d dreamed of being a submarine officer himself, but at his pre-commissioning physical, he’d learned to his shock that he was colorblind. Submarine officers need to be able to distinguish the red and the green of port and starboard running lights from the periscope; colorblindness was a disqualifying disability. Knight became an EDO because it was as close as he could get to being on a submarine.

He was in charge of a group of engineers, both civilian and military, who were charged with understanding every facet of the submarine fleet’s air conditioning and refrigeration plants. The switch to a new refrigerant, designated R-118, was the result of an exhaustive two year-long study that he and his team had conducted. They’d approved the new Freon because it was more stable in transport, it was more efficient within refrigeration machinery, and yes…it was cheaper. And many different varieties of Freon can, theoretically, break down into other possibly dangerous by-products under various conditions. But the studies they’d done, in conjunction with the manufacturer, had indicated that the amount of R-118 and the amount of heat necessary to cause the transformation into Phosgene were enormous. Like good engineers, they’d decided that the advantages of the change outweighed the potential risks. And, in reading that terse message from the Alabama, Knight realized that they’d made a disastrous miscalculation.

He knew that there would be possibly career-ending consequences for his mistake, but decided quickly that, while he was still in a position to do something about it, he would make sure that no other boat suffered from his error. Rather than try to cover his ass by arguing that R-118 was still safe, or that the men of the Alabama must somehow be at fault for the casualty, Knight quickly drafted an emergency safety flash message, explained it to his chain of command, and had it approved and transmitted. By midnight, R-118 was banned from US submarines.

Knight then worked to prepare for a hastily scheduled 0800 meeting with Admiral Patrick Cheever, NAVSEA-08, the man charged with all the engineering on all the navy’s nuclear submarines, the heir to Rickover’s throne. Banning R-118 had been easy; the details would be hard, and the details were what Knight worked on all night. The meeting was convened precisely on time with Cheever at the head of a table crowded with officers, every one of whom outranked Knight. It was held in a spartan conference room dominated by a scarred table and mismatched chairs; all of Naval Reactors took pride in their no-frills environs. It was yet another vestige of the reign of Admiral Rickover, who bragged that he had designed the Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear submarine, from an office that was a converted women’s restroom.

Despite the array of heavy brass that stared back at him. Knight was so exhausted, and so determined to right any wrong that led to a tragedy, that he was beyond intimidation. He was also certain that however badly he might have fucked up, no one else in the world understood the refrigeration plants of US submarines better than he. He began his brief.