100 Fathoms Below by Steven L. Kent

Author:Steven L. Kent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2018-09-12T21:24:13+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

A US Navy submarine didn’t have a brig. There simply wasn’t room. Most of the time, it wasn’t a problem. The navy was an all-volunteer service, after all, and highly selective, accepting only the best. It was why fights on submarines were a rare thing. Things could get tense, sure—it was inevitable when you had over 100 men crowded together with limited space—but between all the basic requirements and the psychological profiling, the navy screened out the hotheads. Which was why, no matter how hard he tried, Lieutenant Gordon Abrams couldn’t wrap his mind around the fact that Oran Guidry had killed his own brother.

LeMon hadn’t survived the attack. He died right there on the galley floor. Matson, who seemed to have made as miraculous a recovery as LeMon had, came up from quarantine to pronounce him dead. The corpsman ordered LeMon’s body transported to the torpedo room, where Gordon supposed he would lie in a body bag next to Warren Stubic and Steve Bodine. The thought of it made him shiver. He hadn’t canceled midrats—galley rule number one was that meals for the crew went on no matter what. But it was hard. He kept staring at the spot on the floor where LeMon had died.

If it was some kind of elaborate murder plot, if Oran had planned this all along like something out of an Agatha Christie novel, stabbing his brother while they were still moored in Pearl Harbor would have been the polite thing to do. Then Lieutenant Commander Jefferson could have assigned a couple of sailors to watch him until the MPs hauled him off to a real brig. If only Roanoke still had a working radio, they could have signaled for a surface ship to take Oran away. Aircraft carriers and battleships were floating cities, complete with brigs.

But Roanoke didn’t have a working radio, and even if it did, they were in Soviet waters and couldn’t risk alerting the enemy to their position. No surface ship could come to take Oran away, so Captain Weber had improvised and turned Jefferson’s now-empty stateroom into a makeshift brig.

Gordon decided he had to go see Oran. He had to find out why he had done such an unthinkable thing. When midrats were over, he went to Officer Country. A battle lantern had been mounted on the bulkhead to replace the broken overhead lights. Since Jefferson’s stateroom locked only from the inside, an ensign named Van Lente stood sentry by the door, a pistol strapped to his belt. Oran Guidry wasn’t going anywhere.

Aside from the guard and Oran, Officer Country was empty. The other officers had joined the boatwide manhunt for the three missing officers. Gordon suspected it was futile. They had already searched the submarine from bow to stern, so he didn’t know what they hoped to find by doing it again. He had heard old navy men talk about cursed missions—surface ships that encountered nothing but heavy storms in otherwise calm seas, submarines that sprang fresh leaks in new places every week—but never anything like this.

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