Having nothing to do only made the waiting worse.
Jeffrey and Bell were talking, no, arguing, and Bell sounded angry. Jeffrey dashed aft. But wasn't Bell, the XO, supposed to go to the fire? Has Jeffrey's hero-playing gone completely over the top?
Ilse started to panic. We can't get out, not here. Suddenly the deck tilted steeply down, and Challenger's depth began to mount, though her forward speed was low. In terror Ilse turned toward COB and Meltzer. It looked like the ship wasn't sinking, yet — they were taking her deep on purpose.
Ilse glanced at Kathy Milgrom. Amid the lurid shadows cast by emergency battle lanterns, Kathy gave Ilse a determined, reassuring smile through her mask. But Kathy's eyes were worried, very worried. And Kathy was experienced; she'd been in action on Dreadnought since the very start of the war. Diego Garcia was Challenger's first-ever taste of battle. How then must the young men around Ilse feel?
Bell's voice sounded again, tough, completely in control. He was ordering Kathy to find the U-boats. The battle wasn't over yet, but Ilse was amazed how reassured she felt just to hear — and see — Bell so confident, in charge. The bow sphere pinged, tuned to cut through the reverb and roiling ocean.
All right! Two separate clouds of metal fragments, falling through three thousand feet. The U-boats were dead. Their last torpedoes were running off to the south somewhere, no longer a threat.
Several men cheered, but Ilse just sat there numb. What about the fire back aft? What of other damage to the ship? And what about the men on Texas? Challenger might still die too.
Bell ordered flank speed. The ship sped up. Jagged vibrations began, all wrong, and they had to slow down right away.
The phone talker said something was wrong with the propulsion shaft or the pump jet. He relayed more status reports to Bell: The engine room fire had spread to oil that leaked in the bilge…. The number of wounded was mounting…. They'd destroyed the U-boats, yes, but at what price? Wasn't the rescue mission enough for Jeffrey Fuller? What could he have possibly been thinking?
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER
In the engineering spaces, Jeffrey surveyed the dripping turbogenerator. The charred casing was off now, the wiring melted and fused. The bulkhead behind it, and the overhead, were blackened and blistered from flame. The lubricant injector section smoldered. The deck nearby was covered with slippery fire-fighting foam, and waterlogged piles of torn heat insulation lay everywhere.
Lieutenant Willey, in his plug-in breather mask, stood next to Jeffrey on the narrow catwalk, leaning on a cane; Willey's left leg was still in a cast from the recent mission to Durban. Emergency lights cut harshly through the gradually clearing smoke. Jeffrey's air pack was heavy against his shoulders and hips — he'd need a new tank soon. He was very hot and sweaty under the firefighter's coat he'd borrowed from an injured man. Just then Lieutenant Bell appeared; he'd gone from breather outlet to outlet, drawing air as he worked aft. 'Lieutenant Sessions has the deck and conn.' With his foot Bell nudged a foam concentrate can into line with a dozen others, making the pile of empties a little neater.
'Total loss for this piece of equipment,' Willey said, looking at the auxiliary generator, one of two that gave power for everything but main propulsion.
'No way to just rewire it?' Jeffrey said. He liked the tall, straight-talking Willey—
Jeffrey had been an engineer on his own department head tour, right before the Naval War College, right after the Pentagon.
Willey shook his head. 'Too much damage, sir…. We also lost the main desalinators, Captain. We'll have to go to the backup system.' The old-fashioned way: boiling.
'Water rationing, then,' Bell said. 'The crew won't like it.'
'No,' Willey said. 'They never do. It'll be much worse, with an extra hundred people aboard from Texas.'
'How badly will this wrecked turbogenerator affect our operations?' Jeffrey asked.
'Not by that much,' Willey said. 'The port-side unit is fine, and we can help meet a heavy domestic load from the main propulsion turbogenerators.' Challenger had allelectric drive. 'That should be okay, since we won't be doing flank speed anytime soon.'
'How bad is it?' Bell said.
'The propulsion shaft is okay,' Willey said. 'I think the pump jet rotors are okay, too. That leaves the fixed blades at the back end of the cowling. They're probably bent, from that nuclear near miss.'
'It seems all right now,' Jeffrey said.
'The vibrations start at thirty-two, thirty-three knots.'
'What if we need to make flank speed again?' Bell said. 'To outrun another torpedo, once we find the Texas or, God help us, before then?'
'Keep your fingers crossed,' Willey said. 'The propulsion power's there. The question is, what will the pump- jet do? It might just vibrate a lot, but that would cost some speed. It might break apart if we push it too hard….'
Jeffrey looked down past the edge of the catwalk. He could see crewmen with tools and mops and machinery wipes, beginning to clean up the lower engine room level. Jeffrey turned to Willey. 'We'll make do. Good job fighting the fire. How long to get the air cleaned up?'
'Six to eight hours 'til we can stop using masks, twenty-four 'til it smells good, using air scrubbers alone. We can't exactly snorkel to refresh the atmosphere, can we now?' Jeffrey chuckled. 'No, probably not a good idea.' Then he realized Willey was being sarcastic. 'Keep me posted on the repairs.'
Jeffrey and Bell went forward, out of the vast but crowded engine room spaces and through the maneuvering room. The reactor operator and throttleman looked up as they passed. Jeffrey eyed the instrument reading's — nothing wrong there. They squeezed around enlisted men, busy rolling up hoses. They walked into the reactor tunnel, then reached the watertight door. The crewman posted by the hatch lifted the canvas smoke curtain, so they could clamber through more easily.
They came out near the enlisted mess, stepping over gear and supplies mustered there for the Texas mission. Jeffrey waited while Bell drew fresh air from the overhead pipe. Some firefighters rested in an eating booth, recovering from heat stress, heads in their hands, their hair all shiny and curly, soaked with sweat. Assistant corpsmen tended the wounded, ranging from bad sprains or bruises to concussions and deep cuts and burns. The cost of Jeffrey's victory had been very high indeed.
Jeffrey and Bell visited with the men briefly, offering encouragement, thanking them for their efforts. The men seemed listless, tight-lipped, distant, or dazed, several of them in very obvious pain.
The chief corpsman came out of the kitchen area, drying his clean hands with a wad of sterile gauze. He pulled on a fresh pair of surgical gloves. There was fresh blood on his rolled-up sleeves.
A cook-paramedic helped another wounded man stumble from the wardroom toward an open mess booth, where
he lay down flat on the table, his eyes scrunched closed. His head was half concealed in bandages, already leaking more blood, and he breathed from a small oxygen bottle instead of a regular mask.
'Twenty-seven stitches,' the corpsman said. 'That's a new record for me.' He began to examine the next waiting crewman, reading the latest vital signs scribbled on a tag clipped to the patient's jumpsuit, and testing his reflexes.
'Will they recover?' Jeffrey said. He cast his eyes around the mess space.
'Yeah,' the chief corpsman said through his air pack mask. 'Eventually. Yeah. It'll be much worse on Texas.'
Bell took another good breath from the overhead pipe, then he and Jeffrey walked forward.
When they were out of earshot of the mess, Bell said, 'Skipper, we need to talk.' Jeffrey and Bell sat in Jeffrey's stateroom, both using plug-in masks now, their faces inches apart. Their air valves hissed and whooshed repetitively. The stateroom door was closed.
'Permission to speak frankly, sir,' Bell said.
Jeffrey tried not to bristle. When he was XO himself, he'd always encouraged his department heads to speak their minds freely in private. Since the reshuffling from Captain Wilson's being injured, Bell, as acting executive
