If he was an older man, we could drive him to a heart attack, as Cat Man and I had done with the former COB, but that was unlikely with Clueless. He worked out and ate as healthy as one could on a submarine. No, it would have to be insanity or UA with Clueless.
We cast off near the end of the watch, and everyone back aft waited patiently, hoping Clueless would lose what little he had in his stomach before we managed to dive.
The time a submarine spends on the surface is the roughest it gets. It's made to be steady as a rock underwater; but in all honesty, a submarine is little better than a bobber up top.
Once again, Clueless disappointed me, but at least I didn't lose any money on him that time. That bet was between Diamond Dallas and Lonnie, and Lonnie was none too happy about losing five on the nub, though Diamond was rolling in dough after two winning bets in the past twelve hours.
The fact that Clueless slept a portion of his down-time, ignoring his forward quals, and didn't eat added fuel to the fire. He was easier to rack out for the next watch, but he still wasn't eating...and he was looking more than a little pale.
Maybe, we should have seen something bad coming then, but who expects anything but what we see every day?
He took shit when he was still dragging the next day, but it was the third day that finally snapped me.
"What is wrong with you?" I finally demanded, not bothering with the 'sir' that we both knew was said with the highest disdain and distaste when I did bother with it.
Clueless pushed at his collar, fidgeting, brown eyes half hidden by the dark circles beneath them. The bruises on the side of his throat caught my eye, and I grabbed his collar, uncovering them.
"What is this shit?" I asked, more interested than frustrated now.
It wasn't a hickey. Not that I thought Clueless could get a hickey. No, this looked more like two fingertip bruises. The certainty that someone was testing out the Vulcan neck pinch on him brought a smile to my face. Now, would Clueless admit to it or not?
"She bit me."
"She? She who?" There were no women on submarines.
Maybe it worked. Maybe he's finally cracking, and we can get rid of him.
"The woman in port. The one I..." He darkened, yet more proof that he didn't belong on a submarine. "The one I picked up at the bar and took back to her room."
I pushed Clueless away. "Nice try. Why don't we try something believable, like aliens or the Loch Ness Monster?"
"You don't think I can get laid?" It was a petulant complaint at best.
"No, I don't." Might as well be honest, right? "What really happened? Did Diamond Dallas play Spock on your ass?"
"Can it, Len. I got laid, and she bit me."
I couldn't help it; I laughed. "No, really. What woman would—"
"A really gorgeous one, now can it. I wish I knew what the hell she did to me." Clueless wandered off, looking befuddled, murmuring something about seeing Doc.
A niggling of unease settled in my stomach. He'd sounded rational about the whole thing. My hopes that he was going over the edge sank. I'd seen more than a few men crack in ten years, and none of them went with such quiet confusion.
It was three days later when things started to get really weird. Clueless was looking healthier, but the COB was looking pretty rocky, not that the COB ever looked good, especially since his wife had left him a week into that deployment. Now, I probably don't have to note that I was no sadder to see the COB under the weather than I was to see Clueless there, but a COB in a foul mood is even more of headache material than a JO that thinks he knows what he's doing.
After little more than a minute's consideration, I decided that it was boat crud snapping at their heels. I grumbled at the COB to keep his distance and not give it to me, though I knew from long experience that no one escaped boat crud. With the air recirculation, it just kept circling and getting more virulent until it was a near-death sentence for the folks back home, but we became immune...after three or four passes with mutated strains.
Would that it had actually been boat crud, I wouldn't be writing this shit down now. Of course, no one ever said life was fair or boring, especially not on a submarine.
It moved quickly after that. Every three to five days, an increasing number of the crew came down ill, staggered cases appearing over a few days. The worst part was that those who'd been sick before seemed to only have a few days' reprieve before going downhill again. It was downright weird, like nothing Doc had ever seen.
As each man fell ill, he exhibited the same ugly bruising, some on their throats and some on their shoulders or wrists. Some were confused about how they got them, some royally hacked off that they'd managed to catch "the new crud." It was nearly always two bruises...sometimes four, about the same size and the same distance apart. Damn, it was spooky.
If we'd been on a carrier, we'd have had the ability to check CBC or other blood tests that might have given us insight into what the problem was, like Doc itched to. Of course, if we were on a carrier, there would have been other ways to find out precisely what was going on.
But, Petty Tyrant hadn't given up on his power trip yet, so there we were, cruising around the North Atlantic while the crew fell ill, one after another...after another after another.
People started getting edgy. Everyone was watching their backs. Rack assignments were switched around. Those who were well refused to hot rack with those who were sick. In short order, they had separated sick from well and shuffled all the sick into nine-man berthing. When the affected overran nine-man, then twenty-one man and moved into forward berthing, things really got tense...mutinous tense.
Planning a mutiny on a submarine isn't usually what civilians imagine it to be. Normally, it falls into the sanity-saving column of aberrant behavior. Every once in a while, someone gets bored and just a tad over the whole 'Petty Tyrant' routine and blocks out how he could best accomplish taking over the boat, getting it to port and getting the hell off...or he plans how he would take out all but a dozen or so of the crew and go smuggler with the sub. Your shipmates might even look over your shoulder, offer hints and move on. If it's a really bad cruise, the Chiefs might get in on the fun.
It's when things start getting serious that you should worry about it. It got serious pretty quickly. It wasn't just me planning a mutiny anymore. It was every man left in aft berthing, and since none of us were hot racking it, that made about a hundred and twenty guys down from a crew of just over a buck-fifty...and thirty or so planning not to go next, planning so hard that we'd welded the door between us and forward berthing shut. It had only been a little over a month since Clueless had gone sick, so we were understandably concerned about being next.
Luckily, Rosenbloom, a stand-up A-ganger worth his weight in approved leave chits, had been cross- trained as a Naviguesser, so figuring out where we were and where we wanted to be wasn't all that difficult. Unfortunately, we were far from anywhere we could find shelter once we'd escaped the boat. That complicated things.
Diamond Dallas suggested that we had one more possible ally, someone we hadn't brought into our little mutiny scam thus far, someone that could make our flight to freedom a hell of a lot easier, if he stopped playing Petty Tyrant long enough to do it. As it was, it was likely that the CO was only healthy because of his state room; the seclusion probably saved his ass...and the lock on his door.
Appealing to his non-existent concern for his men was a waste of time. That was evidenced by his refusal to tell SUBLANT about our medical mess, his refusal to seek port and medical aid, his refusal to ease off on our 'mission' in any way. The only thing left for us was appealing to his common sense.
Unfortunately, Petty Tyrant, or PT for short, had no common sense. That's probably how he reached the position of CO in the first place.
"What is it now, Petty Officer Leonard?"
Oh, yeah. Did I mention that I got the shit duty of trying to talk the Tyrant down? Probably not. To this day, I don't know if Diamond Dallas honestly thought I could do it, or he hoped I'd snap and kill the son of a bitch.
"I think something very wrong is happening here, sir." Hell, yes, I said sir! I was pulling out all the stops on this one. I'd play to his vanity if it got me off the damned boat.
He sighed. "For instance?"
"The Mess Decks has used one-fifth of the usual rations for the last three days." We were getting ready for the next batch of ill, and based on the progression, there wouldn't be a single man well when that time came.
"And this is news? Every time you start planning a mutiny, people stop eating." He didn't even snap it. Didn't the man have the... Okay, everyone knew he didn't have the sense God gave a goose, but it was his ass on the line, here.
"It's not that simple, sir. Some of these people haven't eaten in the last month."
"They must have found some great hideaway," he mused.
I could tell he was replaying the drawings of the sub in his head, trying to figure out where anyone would hide a month's worth of food.
I shook my head. "No, I don't just mean they aren't eating Gorilla Head. I mean...they aren't eating at all."
"That's impossible," he dismissed me.
"Oh, it's possible. To top it off, some of the men aren't sleeping." Mainly, it was Clueless and the COB, those that were afflicted longest.
"What do you mean? They have insomnia? That is a concern for Doc, not—"
"Again, I mean...at all. I charted out what Clu... I mean, I charted out what Lieutenant Cluze has done in the last three days. He's either been on watch, getting quals or attending meetings twenty-four-seven for the last three days. Not an hour of down time anywhere in there."
And not a shower or head break that I could verify, though he didn't smell it. The two good things about this whole situation were no prima donnas hogging the shower and no lines on the Mess Decks.
"Good man. Maybe I'll put him in for a commendation."
I bit back the urge to throttle him. "Don't you think that's just a little weird, sir?" I inquired.
"What? You've never gone a few days without sleep. I seem to remember, when the TG went—"
"In an emergency," I conceded. "This is no emergency."
It was usually the Nukes who got screwed in an emergency, hence the old adage: "One ship, one crew, one shaft, back aft." Nukes got the punch line of that ditty in every possible meaning of the word.
Nukes learned to hate the Navy quicker than most rates, at least on a submarine. The worst possible thing you could taunt the average Nuke with was drinking him to death and putting 'lifer' on his gravestone.
Don't let anyone fool you with stories to the contrary. The truth is that the only reason for SRBs is to avoid paying to educate a whole new batch of Nukes every six years. You have to appeal to the base interests of the Nukes. Better than most, they realize they are prostituting themselves, selling body and soul for a few bucks.
The lure of money works once. Maybe twice. After that, sanity kicks in and most of them dive for the door rather than sign on. Who can blame them?
Right about then, I was cursing myself for re- enlisting the second time. The multiple had been stellar, but the payoff had ceased to matter about the time that deployment had been moved up by three months.
The PT's voice broke through my exhausted musings.
"You're right. It's not an emergency." His raised eyebrow let me know that he considered the matter closed.
Again, the need to throttle him rose up, stronger than it had been when he'd decreed the food poisoning on the last deployment was the fault of E-Div for the sanitizer being two degrees low and not the fault of the cooks for leaving food in the warmer for eight straight hours, stronger even than it had been when PT had announced that sending mail home from a port was a threat to National Security. As if 'I love you' would be the loose lips that would sink us, but I'm off topic again.
I managed to nod and made my way down to the Mess Decks again. After all, since they obviously didn't eat, it was relatively safe.
Cat Man looked up, a cup of the paint thinner that passed for coffee in hand. We'd run out of the good stuff we'd brought on board with us some time earlier; Navy fare was all we had left, but it would keep us awake, and that was the important thing. We slept in shifts, never all of us at once and never leaving a sleeping crew unprotected in aft berthing.
The Navy had trained us well for this, since the rules state that they only have to give us one meal and one hour of sleep in every twenty-four. I'd been short-changed on that more than a few times in my life, and so had every man I trusted.
"So?" Cat Man queried, though I could tell he already knew the answer I had for him.
"Asshole," I grumbled.
Diamond Dallas snorted in mirthless laughter. "Did you kill him?"
"If I had, I'd already be in the weapons locker, don't you think?"
"Guess so. What now?"
My silent musing that I only needed three minutes to crack the weapons locker was cut short by Garibaldi barreling toward us, wide-eyed and pale for a man with an olive complexion. "I saw... I know..."
He gasped it out, making me raise an eyebrow in disbelief. The semi-annual brush with death required a mile and a half run, and there was nowhere on a sub that you should be able to wind yourself.
Garibaldi wasn't my favorite person on the best of days. I respected him, because he could take an order, he did his job well and he was one of the best for looking the other way when someone had to break a few safety protocols along the way. If he'd just keep religion out of the engine room, I'd probably like him a lot more, but I've come to appreciate a little religion over the last few weeks.
"Cat got your tongue," Cat Man taunted.
Garibaldi turned beat red then rushed into the galley and grabbed a plastic shaker the size of his forearm, knocking over several others in his haste. He ignored the crank's shout of protest and returned to us, opening the cap and sprinkling the powder over himself...then us.