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The 4MC speaker crackled. Jabo knew that whatever was happening was about to start.

“Injured man in Machinery Two!” came Lester’s voice across the scratchy speaker. “Petty Officer Howard is unconscious!” He sounded winded, his breathing heavy.

“It’s the Freon,” said Jabo out loud. He grabbed the 1MC. “Injured man in Machinery two, Petty Officer Howard is unconscious! High Freon levels in Machinery Two, all hands in the missile compartment don EABs.”

He hung up the mike. He heard steps running below and around him as the crew responded to the alarm. Some of those footsteps, he knew, were the captain on his way to control. “All ahead one third,” he said, and the helm’s hand shot to the engine order telegraph, which soon matched the order with a ding of its bell.

“All ahead one third, aye sir. Maneuvering answers ahead one third.”

“Dive make your depth one-six-zero feet.”

“Make my depth one-six-zero feet aye sir,” said the diving officer, and he began giving orders to the helm and lee helm, bringing the ship shallow, ready to clear baffles and go to periscope depth, ready to ventilate. The change in bells and the depth change had already slowed the boat to under fifteen knots. The big rudder as they cleared baffles would slow them more, below ten knots so they could pop up, raise the snorkel mast, and get whatever bad air they needed to off the boat, bring clean air on. Jabo thought about the track on the chart, what this was gong to do to their speed of advance, but he quickly pushed it aside—that was not at all his priority at the moment. Making the ship safe was his duty. And he knew he was missing something…it gnawed at him.

Ensign Duggan stomped into control, started putting on the headphones by the white board on which they tracked casualties. The navigator was right behind him, he would take over making announcements to the ship and run the damage control efforts as Jabo brought the ship to periscope depth.

“Freon?” said Duggan to the navigator as he put his headset on. Jabo was concentrating on the green CODC sonar display, looking for any contacts to come into view that might impede their trip to PD. Things would start materializing now, the sounds of distant ships that had been masked by their own relatively high noise level borne of their high speed. Jabo could feel the up angle in his feet, the dive was aggressively driving up, pleasing him.

“Yes,” said the navigator. He spoke into the 1MC, announcing to the entire ship, “Rig for General Emergency.”

“Freon’s harmless, right?” said Duggan to the nav when he hung up the mike.

“Yes,” said the nav. Jabo could hear the annoyance in his voice, and he felt it too. Now was not the time for Duggan to either seek nor display knowledge; they were fighting a real casualty. “It’s harmless,” continued the nav. “But it’s heavy; it displaces air.”

Which means at the moment, in machinery two, it’s pretty fucking harmful, thought Jabo. He pictured it all pooling back there now as they took the up angle, collecting invisibly against the bulkhead and the wall of the diesel fuel oil tank. The up angle was good, the Freon would roll backwards, away from the berthing areas. Jabo wondered how the berthing check was going, wondered if they would soon hear about any one else unconscious. Depending on how much Freon was back there, it could be above the second level deck plates now, gathering like an invisible pool of water that Howard may have unknowingly descended into. Jabo pictured it, rising like floodwater up to the oxygen generators, the burners, the scrubbers…

That’s when it finally clicked.

He grabbed the 1MC, saw the nav raise an eyebrow at that, as did the captain, who was just entering control. Jabo almost shouted into the microphone.

“Secure the scrubbers!” he said. “All hands throughout the ship don EABs. There may be phosgene in the atmosphere!”

Everyone in control reached for an EAB, as did Jabo.

“Both scrubbers are secured,” said the navigator sourly, getting the report on the phones. He still didn’t have an EAB on, and Jabo fought the urge to snap back at him, order him to put one on. The captain also stared at him a little befuddled, but he pulled an EAB from the overhead and put it on, and the nav then followed suit.

Jabo stepped down to the CODC display, pulling on his own EAB; the trip to PD was suddenly more urgent. He remembered his pre-watch tour: both scrubbers were running for no apparent reason. There was no doubt that Freon had somehow filled Machinery Two, and with two scrubbers running at temp, it was more than enough to create Phosgene gas, just as the message had warned. It sounded like they had unlimited Freon back there and unlimited heat from the scrubbers; it was like they were running a fucking phosgene factory. They had to get up quickly and get clean air onboard. If the sonar screen was clear when they slowed down, Jabo was going to recommend to the captain that they emergency blow to the surface.

But the screen wasn’t clear, not even close. Surface contacts were everywhere. Blowing to the roof might add a collision and flooding to the list of shit going wrong. The captain leaned over his shoulder as he stared at the congested sonar display.

“Phosgene?” His voice sounded distant coming through the built in mouthpiece of the EAB.

“Yes sir, there was just a message about this a few days ago—the new refrigerant can mutate into Phosgene at very high temps, and both scrubbers are running back there.” “Both scrubbers are running?” said the captain with a raised eyebrow.

“Not sure why.”

“Noise isolation exercises last watch,” said the navigator, with his back turned to them. He was somehow eavesdropping even with the headset on and a dozen people jabbering in his ear. “We were determining the TIMS baseline.” TIMS was a system of noise meters on virtually every machine on the boat. Originally designed to aid in sound silencing efforts, they’d learned to use it for maintenance. A baseline for every connected machine was established, and if the noise level went up, it could mean something was going wrong with the machine and someone needed to take a look. They periodically had to run equipment to gather baseline data.

“And that might create phosgene?” asked the captain.

“Yes—we received it in a safety flash last week.”

“I don’t remember that.” Jabo saw him file it away. They both were focused on the grainy green sonar display in front of them, where several bright white bands indicated that they were not alone in their patch of ocean.

From sonar: “Conn, Sonar we have six contacts…”

“We see them,” said the captain. He was touching them on the screen, he stopped on the brightest one. “What do you hear at two-one-zero, the contact designated Sierra Two?”

There was a pause, and then Petty Officer Leer, the sonar supervisor, appeared at the door to control. What would normally be a five second walk took a minute as he unplugged his EAB, walked to them, and replugged in the manifold by the CODC in control, the look of concern evident even through his plastic mask. “These guys just came out of nowhere when we slowed. We’re effectively surrounded by them. Maybe a fishing fleet, maybe squid boats.”

“Distance?”

“I’ll need a TMA maneuver to be sure, but we can hear the screws turning, clear RPM counts—they’re close. Probably within two thousand yards. I thought I could hear chains rattling on one of them.”

“So fishing boats. Very close fishing boats.”

“That’s right.”

“Danny, give them a TMA maneuver.”

“Helm, right full rudder.”

“Right full rudder, aye sir! My rudder is right full.”

“Make your course zero-one-zero.”

“Make my course zero-one-zero, aye sir.” Leer took a deep breath, unplugged his mask, and trotted back to sonar.

The ship began turning immediately, and the white bands shifted radically on the screen. Assuming that the contact’s course and speed remained constant, the ship could change course like this and calculate with a fair degree of accuracy the distance and course of the contacts: it was the art of Target Motion Analysis. Performed skillfully, this would allow them to choose a safe place to arise to periscope depth. But turning also unveiled the section of ocean that had been behind the submarine, its acoustic blind spot, or baffles. As they turned, two more white bands emerged.

“Wonderful,” said the captain.

Leer was back in sonar and on the mike. “Conn Sonar, two new contacts coming out of the baffles. Eight now in all.”

“We see them,” said the captain.

“Sonar, conn, we’ll take two minutes on this leg an then do another maneuver.”

“Aye sir.”

Jabo looked away from the console and saw Lieutenant Maple standing there with a green book of all the ship’s piping diagrams. He was breathing heavy, the mask of his EAB was fogged from perspiration.

“Are you here to solve the mystery of the Freon?” said the captain.

Maple nodded, and opened the book to the page he’d saved. “Right here,” he said. “Freeze seal piping. It’s the only Freon pipe anywhere down there. Yaksic went down there and the valve was wide open. He shut it, but it probably dumped the whole system.”

“Freeze seal,” said Jabo. “Fuck.” He cursed himself for not thinking of it. Whenever maintenance was done on a high pressure water system, the water had to be isolated from the work, lest the workers be sprayed by water that was high pressure, high temperature, or, in some cases, radioactive. Good practice required that the work, and the workers, be protected by at least two closed valves. But sometimes, by virtue of the location or other unusual circumstances, two valves weren’t available. In these cases, flexible tubes of Freon could actually be wrapped around the pipe, and freeze a slug of water in place, a frozen chunk of ice that could seal a system amazingly well—Jabo had seen them perform hydrostatic pressure tests with 1000 psi against freeze seals. So throughout the ship ran purple pipes linked to the central Freon reservoir, in case this kind of work was necessary.

Yaksic had appeared in control at Maple’s side.

“Yaksic, any good reason that valve may have been operated?”

“None sir, not even by accident. It’s out of the way, just above the deck plates in lower level.”

Jabo’s internal clock ticked—enough time had gone by, they needed to make another maneuver, he didn’t want to waste a second getting to periscope depth. “Sonar, conn, turning to port for TMA.”

“Aye sir.”

“Left full rudder, aye sir, my rudder is left full.”

“Make your course two-three-zero.”

“Make my course two-three-zero, aye sir.”

The ship swayed again, and Jabo watched the CODC display. Thankfully, no new contacts appeared, although the eight they had to track now presented a daunting enough challenge. The picture was starting to form in his mind of the ocean over their heads, the relative position and size of the fishing boats. He’d chosen the course two-three-zero because it looked like it might be a safe path to PD, and because it kept them generally on track, although they were so slow he didn’t see how they could ever make it up on their voyage to Taiwan. Jabo started thinking about periscope depth, the preparations to ventilate, calculated how long it might take them to replace the ship’s bad air with good: fast with the blower, faster with the diesel, fastest with both. Petty Officer Hurd, the fire control operator, had appeared at the side of the conn—it would be his job to plug and unplug Jabo’s EAB as he spun around on the scope. There was a lot of chatter in control, rigs being reported, people looking up facts about Freon and Phosgene. Jabo forced himself to focus on the CODC. His job at the moment was to get the ship up to the roof, so they could get the bad air off and the good air on. Everyone else would take care of everything else, but his job was to get the boat up if the course was good.

It was not.

Leer came into control, without his EAB so he could hustle faster.

“Put that fucking thing back on,” ordered Jabo.

“Turn right!” said Leer. “We are driving bearing rate on Sierra Six!”

The captain came over to the CODC, he and Jabo both saw that Leer was right. The Sonarmen could actually listen to the contacts with their headphones, didn’t have to wait for the data to accumulate in visual form on the screen, and what Leer had heard was very, very close. By “driving bearing rate,” Leer meant that the Alabama’s own motion was causing the change in bearing rate, as opposed to any motion by the contact—which meant they were dangerously near.

“Right full rudder!” said Jabo.

“Right full Rudder aye sir…my rudder is right full…”

The big ship swung right, and the bright band of Sierra Six’s noise bent away from them, but it was so close now…

“We’re going right under them,” said the captain calmly. “Rig the ship for collision.”

“Rig for collision!” said the navigator into the 1MC, and the chief of the watch sounded the collision alarm. Not even the hull of a giant freighter could hit them at a depth of 160 feet—that’s exactly why that depth was chosen to prepare for periscope depth. But these were fishing boats, and there were a lot of things they might be dragging: nets, chains, maybe even an anchor. And that’s if they’d correctly guessed about the nature of the surface boat. It could be even worse if it was dredging, laying cable, trawling…there were a great many reasons to avoid driving your submarine underneath a surface ship.

“Go deep, captain?”

He shook his head. “No point now. We’re already under them.”

They continued to swing right, but the noise of sierra six was a bright band that had consumed the display. The captain toggled one of the display’s switches, changing the scale so they could see more. Jabo was amazed at his calm.

As they passed under Sierra Six, they could hear a pinging through the hull, a watery, high pitch ping as regular as a metronome.

“Their fathometer,” said the captain, still watching the display. Sierra Six was behind them now. The captain waited… “steady here.”

“Steady as she goes!” ordered Jabo.

“Steady as she goes, aye sir,” said the helm, as he swung the rudder left to steady the ship on the bearing at which the ship was heading at that moment. They were pointing almost due north. “Sir, ship is steady on course zero-zero-five.”