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“Thanks,” said Duggan. He watched him walk away, and a few seconds later heard the clank of the engine room watertight door. Morgan was gone, and Duggan felt the full weight and loneliness of being the sole officer in the engine room of a United States nuclear submarine. He reached below his small desk, where copies of all the reactor plant manuals and casualty procedures, thousands of pages of documentation, were kept. He pulled out one of the thicker books, opened it, and began to review the procedures for steam generator water level casualties.

• • •

As Jabo walked aft he was aware of the throbbing in the deck plates beneath his feet — it was the feeling of the boat moving very fast, a harmonic that ran through the very hull caused by both the friction of the cold sea against the ship and by every piece of machinery on the boat running at maximum speed. He’d never been on the boat when they ran so fast for so long. Or, for that matter, so deep for so long, the depth dictated by the submerged operating envelope. The boat was designed to operate at that speed indefinitely, of course, but it was just so unusual, after a few days it was unnerving, a feeling that the boat was frothing like an overworked horse, begging to catch her breath.

As he walked, he thought again about the nav, and all that had happened that patrol. That business about him stabbing himself in the leg; the talking to himself in the officer’s study, all the general weirdness. And now…a missing message hidden in his desk.

Jabo was glad he’d kept the folder with him, lest the message disappear again before he got a chance to talk to the captain. The word ‘evidence’ floated through his mind, and he thought again about another odd place the nav’s name had come up: on Howard’s yellow sheet of paper, where the sailor had been trying to compile evidence (that word again) to exonerate himself.

Jabo arrived in Machinery Two, nodded at Renfro, who was exhausted and trying to stay awake by the oxygen generators.

“You doin’ alright, Renfro?”

“Fuck no, sir. You ever been port and starboard this long? It kinda sucks.”

He pointed to the deck. “Anybody down there?”

Renfro nodded. “No, all that exercise shit is still tagged out. Not that anybody has the energy or the time to work out right now anyway.”

Jabo climbed down the ladder into the lower level.

The treadmill was silent, a red DANGER tag hanging from its switch. Jabo walked over to it, read the tag. Signed by the corpsman, which was unusual, within hours of Howard’s death and the Freon casualty. He checked his watch; the navigator wanted to meet him in the captain’s stateroom in about two minutes. Jabo’s confidence was building, and he didn’t want to get their meeting started by arriving late.

He hesitated at the treadmill, and then on impulse flipped the switch to ON, in violation of the danger tag. All the lights on the console came on, and then the readout began to scroll. WORKOUT COMPLETE….10.0 MILES….WORKOUT COMPLETE…

He stepped off the treadmill and thought it over. Kincaid was right…he was the only person on the boat that would put those kind of miles on the treadmill in one workout. Certainly the navigator hadn’t devoted that kind of time to running in his pristine running shoes. So Kincaid had been the last person to run before the Freon casualty and the treadmill got tagged out. And yet…the navigator had been down there, in his workout gear, right before the Freon casualty. His presence down there had seemed notable enough for Howard to write down in the logs. And now it seemed the navigator hadn’t even exercised while he was there. Which begged the question…what had he been doing in Machinery Two?

Jabo suddenly felt the clipboard in his hands again, and he opened it up to the Freon message. He noticed for the first time that there was another message on the page behind it. He read the subject line: NOTICE TO MARINERS, and got about halfway though the body where a chart number was highlighted: JO90888. Jabo remembered the faded pencil line of their track on the chart, and the slight adjustment the navigator had made for no apparent reason.

He lunged toward the 4MC against the starboard bulkhead, lifted the handset and shouted into it.

“Rig for collision!” he shouted. “Kincaid, get shallow now!”

He ran forward, as fast as he could, his feet pounding heavily on the lower level deck plates. He now understood why the navigator had wanted him to wait ten minutes.

• • •

Duggan was stooped over, returning the casualty procedures to their place beneath his desk, when the amplified voice of Jabo came across the 4MC speaker behind him.

“RIG FOR COLLISION! KINCAID, GET SHALLOW NOW!”