The Pit Sword Room
Percussive clangs of the ship’s alarm reverberated off of every metal surface. Cates dropped his wrench and covered his ears. He stood in the bowels of the USS Colossus covering his ears. It was like having a garbage can over his head while somebody pounded it with a five-pound sledgehammer. He yelled, “Fuck you and your drill.” His voice carried up through the hatch toward the loudspeaker mounted in the overhead. Beneath his feet was the ship’s hull, under which the ocean raced. He was in the middle of calibrating the ship’s speed indicating sensors. All seven feet of the pit sword were retracted into the ship so he could get to its boot with the sensors. It looked like a vertical, stainless steel airplane wing. This device was designed to stab through a watertight valve built into the ship’s hull and into the ocean as the ship steamed in deep water. If the ship was thought of as a huge bathtub, this valve was the plug. The only difference was the way the water flowed. One loose lug on the valve flange could conceivably flood the entire ship.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
The Pit Sword Room was nothing more than a watertight cube. Cates’s elbows rubbed against the flaking metal around him, leaving rust stains on skin made pale by a long winter in Norfolk. His back pressed into a bulkhead, his hip into a beam. It was just after morning chow on the third day at sea. He wiped sweat from his temples on his damp T-shirt and looked up through the open hatch. He had fifteen minutes of work left. If he left, he’d have to come back down to the lowest recesses of the ship and start all over.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
He breathed in a mouthful of air that tasted like rusted iron mixed with the shit-on-a-shingle he’d eaten earlier. He leaned a palm on the raised pit sword as he waited for the alarm to stop and to hear, “Belay my last,” or, “This is a drill! This is a drill!” over the 1MC announcing system, but there was only a narrow shaft of light above him.
The heat in the Pit Sword Room was moist. His face, arms, and back were sweat-slick. His socks and pants were soaked to the shin from water that had shot up through the valve as he’d raised the pit sword fifteen minutes earlier. Now, this water sloshed around the valve basin and in the uneven parts of the rusting deck. It looked like the metal was bleeding.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
Standard operating procedure dictated that he leave the Pit Sword Room and report to his Battle Station. But Cates knew how insistent the captain was about having his “full complement of knowledge” at all times, ship’s speed being part of that.
Lowering the pit sword now would require a further delay in reporting to his Battle Station and then having to come back to this shithole after securing from GQ and repeat the whole damn process. He had no patience for doing twice the work. Backtracking. “This is fucking bullshit,” he said, tossing his multi-meter leads into the valve basin. “Fuck, fuck. Fuck!”
He wiped more sweat from his forehead with the stretched sleeve of his wet shirt. All the while, Clang. Clang. Clang.
“All right, goddamnit,” he yelled, and then picked up the heavy lug wrench from the special bulkhead holster welded near the crank handle. With a few mighty tugs of the wrench, Cates loosened the valve just enough to create space for the pit sword to penetrate. Then he stood, extended his arms, gripped the handle, rocked his torso forward from the balls of his feet and leaned into the handle. The mechanism gave way with moisture-stiffened protest as the gears cranked, performed their task. Successive cranks grew easier and, in a moment, the pit sword was fully extended. Only an additional inch of water had trickled in around the loosened flange bolts in the process.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
With no announcement having been made, Cates realized something really was wrong. Otherwise, an announcement would’ve been made with instructions. But there was nothing, except the alarm. His throat constricted and his heartbeat throbbed in his ears. This was no drill. His intestines felt like a swab being wrung out. The excitement made him move faster. As the ocean rushed beneath the hull and the alarm clanged, he torqued each brass bolt quickly. He then dropped the lug wrench and left it with all his other tools in the valve basin and climbed the ladder. After securing the access hatch behind him, he ran up ladders, taking the treads two at a time, the chains rattling beneath his sweaty hands as he sprinted aft to his battle station in Repair Locker 3.
***
The air had been thick as Navy coffee the day the Colossus had pulled out of her home port of Norfolk. Through a gray mist, throngs of women and children had stood on the pier and along the jagged rocks of the jetty. People huddled in groups, while others stood on their own, but hardly an inch of concrete was visible beneath their feet. Some cheered and waved signs. Others held babies and cried. As the ship cast off to begin a six-month cross-Atlantic deployment, those left behind acted as if their lives depended on some sailor in dress blues seeing them from their positions manning the rail.
Cates’ sea and anchor station was on the bridge, at the ready to change a light bulb if it blew on the rudder order indicating panel or if there were any malfunctions with the WSN-5 navigation unit. It wasn’t glamorous, but he liked access to fresh air and watching the horizon getting farther away. After a cursory check of his equipment, Cates stood out on the fly bridge along the rail, near the signal shack.
A good five stories below him, Gabby stood on the pier. She was looking up at Cates. She had an aversion to bright light and wore sunglasses all the time. This, as well as her limp, was the result of a drunk driver knocking her off her bicycle four years ago. She used a cane to conceal the stiff leg. During the winter, she used an aluminum crutch she’d picked up at the Walgreens in the mall. She shouldn’t have known where to find Cates, but there she was, waving and sobbing, not caring who saw. Unstable Gabby. Mad Gabby. Impossible to take his eyes off of her. Cates fell in love with her all over again.
Whenever he was with her, at a table in a bar or on the beach, he was just a guy sitting with a hot chick. She had this way of smiling over her sunglasses that was natural and effortless. Anytime she got up to pee, the mahogany cane appeared. She always gripped the anatomic handle and mindlessly throttled it as if she were riding off on a Harley.
Cates leaned his forearms on the top rail, his elbows out wide.
The chief signalman came out of the signal shack just then. “Great day to be heading out to sea, Cates.” The chief’s face was round and red. His doughnut holder hid his belt and strained the buttons on his khaki shirt. “You bet your ass. Every day is a fine fucking day to be hitting the high seas.”
Cates continued staring at Gabby as he half-listened.
“I said, ‘You know?’” the chief said.
Cates pushed off his elbows and stood up tall, facing the chief. “Exactly,” he said.
The chief looked toward the crowd on the pier, and then sideways at Cates.
Gabby should have throttled her cane and left, but as the mooring lines splashed into the harbor, she lifted the black frames of her sunglasses and dabbed a tissue under each eye.
“Underway,” called the boatswain’s voice over the 1MC.
The chief returned to the signal shack for his routine duties, but Cates took another moment at the rail.
At the last possible moment, Cates raised a hand slightly to wave. He wanted Gabby to see the erection hiding beneath the denim of his dungarees and to know that he’d missed her ever since he’d broken it off with her. Part of him had wanted to jump overboard and swim back to her so they could be alone together for days on end.
***
Cates was covered in sweat when he reached Repair Locker 3. His heart was hammering in rhythm with the percussive alarm, which seemed like it would never stop. The air in the passageway felt cold and still despite a dozen guys busying themselves with the work of uncoiling hoses to fight fire or siphon floodwater. The hair on the back of Cates’s neck rose and his sphincter tightened, but that only made him feel alert. Agile. He was calm, as if he had Freon in his veins.
“What do you suppose is going on?” his buddy Kephart said, breathless, half in and half out of his Nomex coveralls. Kephart was a stocky farm boy, not at all bright—except when it came to fixing communications equipment and playing cribbage. Kephart was some sort of savant at the game. He came from West Virginia, but spoke in a quiet voice devoid of any accent, as if he had been schooled by monks. His skin had the leather coloring of being out in the sun too long in summer, and out in the cold too long in winter. He and Cates were opposites in size and complexion, but they were both twenty-two years old.
“Probably some bullshit drill,” Cates said. His heart raced with the knowledge that it was anything but a drill, however, there was no use in freaking out Kephart. “This is probably just some cluster-fuck.” After five years in the Cold War Navy, Cates wanted to come under fire, wanted the decks awash with blood. He’d been hoping the ship would fire missiles and blow some shit up. The closest they ever got was sitting off the coast of Lebanon for forty-nine days with all weapons armed and active. He was envious of the guys on the Iowa and the Stark and even of the crew aboard frigates that received medals for pulling Cubans off rafts near the coast of Florida. He didn’t care what it was, he wanted some action.
“On the double,” Master Chief Holland’s voice bellowed from behind them. “Where the fuck have you been, Cates?” The command master chief, a salty old guy with twenty-eight years in the canoe club, was the repair locker leader. He spoke with an accent Cates placed between Georgia and Arkansas. The master chief was snaggle-toothed and had slicked back hair. He drank tar-black coffee, but looked tired all the time. He said, “It’s about time you joined the fucking party. Suit up. We might be getting some action on this fine day.”
Cates pulled his Nomex coveralls from their hook in the repair locker. “Don’t tease me, Master Chief.”
***
As he grabbed his helmet and oxygen breathing apparatus from the repair locker, a row of OBA canisters stared at him from their rack, each with a copper foil seal that resembled a Cyclops eye. In that instant, he grabbed two. He came from a firefighting family and got involved in damage control the day he arrived aboard his first ship. He couldn’t trust anyone to save his ass more than himself.
After holstering one in his OBA, he jammed the other into a beam in the left corner of the repair locker. He couldn’t risk some panicking boot camp pansy sucking up the last bit of clean air in helpless fear while he could be in the hell spot battling flames.
“Help me out, would you, Cates,” Kephart said, holding the back of his Nomex coveralls in one hand and his OBA in the other. He wobbled back and forth as he spoke.
For the past couple days, the Atlantic air lacked the chill they’d left behind in Norfolk, but the skies were cloudy and the sea chopped almost to the hull number. By now, most of them had their sea legs, but Kephart was slow and stupid on his feet, like one of the new foals he talked about on his family’s farm back in West Virginia.
Cates stuffed Kephart’s ham of an arm into the gaping sleeve, wedging his torso into the Nomex suit. “If you’d ease up on the biscuits and desserts at chow this wouldn’t be so fucking difficult,” Cates said, securing the straps of Kephart’s OBA.
“That’s the least of my problem,” Kephart said. “You know the way Gabby feeds me.”
***
Gabby and Kephart had been married for all of a year when Cates met had met them.
To that point in his life, Cates never approached women wearing a ring, but this one was different. She was into him. They had heat and she never hesitated. He would have been a fool to deny himself. If it wasn’t him, it would be somebody else. So he maintained a yearlong affair with Gabby that grew out of companionship at Kephart’s insistence. The Kepharts rented an apartment in the bad part of Tidewater and Kephart didn’t like her being there alone. “Come on, man. She doesn’t know anybody here. I want to know she’s safe when I’ve got duty,” he’d said. So on every fourth day when Kephart was sequestered to the ship for duty, Cates filled in. That first time, Cates took her to a movie and then crashed on their couch. The second time he’d stayed over, she woke him up by standing at the edge of the couch, naked except for her sunglasses.
In the beginning stages it was so easy. She was hot and he was lonely. In those early days, he didn’t know if Kephart knew, but he found it hard to believe that anyone could be that oblivious. Then he got to know Kephart better.
***
In the passageway, shipmates ran in and out of watertight hatches in various stages of donned equipment. The ship rocked in vibration and then rolled them all to the starboard side. Most of the gear was secured in the repair locker, but a dozen sailors in the passageway, Cates among them, slammed into the bulkhead with force enough to crack ribs.
“We’ve been hit,” the master chief said, holding the frame of the watertight door in the repair locker. Though Cates wanted to believe him, no “brace for shock” command had been issued from the bridge. Cates thought then of the Stark: they had taken an Exocet missile out of the blue.
They braced for a second blast. Gripping an angle iron for support, Cates imagined a missile tearing into the ship. Perhaps the bridge crew was incinerated from a direct hit before they could warn the others aboard. Perhaps the boatswain was crisp at the helm and the captain ripped in half, or launched over the side by the blast.
Word finally came over the 1MC. “Fire, fire, fire. Class Bravo fire in Engine Room Two.”
***
The thick Nomex firefighting suit he’d donned swallowed him like a straitjacket. It made him sweat more, which added to the wetness of his boots, socks and pants. Standing there, hugging his oxygen breathing apparatus like the baby Jesus, he was ready to fight fire when given the order.
“I don’t want no fire on board,” Kephart said.
“Tough shit, Kep. It’s here.”
“No.”
“You smell that burning fuel? Whatever’s on fire is burning a lot of it.”
In front of the engine room hatch, heat radiated over Cates’s neck and face. His body, clad in Nomex, felt nothing.
“If anything happens to me, promise me you’ll take care of Gabby,” Kephart’s muffled voice said, the OBA mask creasing into the doughy flesh of his obscured face.
“Nothing’s going to happen,” Cates said, tightening the back straps of Kephart’s OBA.
“I got it from here,” Kephart said. “Go do what you got to do.”
Heat radiated from the fire below. Cates’s Nomex suit was now a Dutch oven, cooking him with heat produced from within and without—cooking there in the passageway outside Repair Locker 3.
At that moment, the master chief said, “Remember that conflagration footage y’all saw as new recruits? That nasty motherfucker aboard the Forrestal a number of years ago as planes exploded on the flight deck?”
No one said a word.
Cates remembered guys being burned alive.
“Well, tie a knot in your tampon strings, ladies, because this thing we got here ain’t nearly as severe.”
All thirty sailors within earshot laughed in response, presumably from the relief. Sweat rolled the length of Cates’s spine, beneath the waistband of his boxer shorts and into his ass crack. He wanted to unzip and swab out the moisture with one of his insulated gloves resting in the bowl of his upturned firefighting helmet, but there was no way to get past the Nomex suit and OBA straps—or the master chief who was now telling a story about how he refused his teenage daughter braces because there was no way he’d “put that kind of money in her teeth just so some guy could come along and rake his dick across them.”
They all laughed and waited.
For ten minutes, they stood snuggled up against the bulkhead in the passageway. It got quiet. All they heard was a cough here and there or Hanson at the other end spitting Skoal into a Pepsi can. The master chief said, “Put on your damn mask, Hansen.”
***
Cates had only one hundred eighty-four days and a wakeup left on his enlistment, and it looked like he’d be taking his honorable discharge without having seen any action.
Then, in his post-Navy, landlubber days, he’d live amongst the warm beaches and cabbage palms of southwest Florida. His buddies back home were going to college near the beach and he planned to join them. He was looking forward to morning classes, afternoons on the beach and tending bar at night. “Hurry,” his buddy, Eddie, had written in his last letter. “You wouldn’t believe the tail down here.” He also mentioned wet T-shirt contests and nickel beer nights. Cates had already arranged admission into business school at that beachside college back home. He thought he’d have no war stories to tell in business meetings when he got to the corporate world, but at least his travels would impress the chicks back home, and he definitely wanted a crack at them and those nickel beers.
***
Outside the aft engine room, Cates held his uncharged fire hose and waited.
The smell of twenty men sweating buckets in their Nomex suits crept around him like the smoke on the other side of the watertight door.
Kephart lumbered down the narrow passageway. He turned the wrench on the first fire main valve and heaved the heavy iron as if it were a toy. Cates felt his hose charge until it was heavy in his hands. How could Kephart not know Cates had slept in his bed, shared his wife, drunk his coffee, stared at his “me wall” of plaques and certificates outside the kitchen on those mornings before returning to the ship to relieve him of his duty there as well.
To break it off, Cates had invented a girlfriend who attended Old Dominion University. And as far as Kephart had known, she was five feet ten and blonde, with legs up to her throat. Cates had told Kephart that she was none too big on the idea of him staying with another woman, married or not. “You know how insecure these young chicks are.”
“Say no more,” Kephart had said, and they’d never spoken of it again. Whenever the notion of getting together or double dating had come up, Cates brushed it off with excuses of his girl having mid-terms or finals or it being that time of the month. Kephart never asked questions.
***
It was a Bravo class fire in Engine Room 2. Cates confirmed this with the master chief who added, “The chief engineer cut off the fuel supply and the sparkies got the power secured. Now get down there.”
With a trickle of water falling from the closed nozzle in his hands and landing on the toe of his steel-toe boot, Cates felt his feet chaffing from the wetness of his socks from the water in the Pit Sword Room. He pushed the discomfort out of his mind and hefted the brass nozzle to the side and lit off his OBA.
“You ready, Cates?”
“Let’s rock, Master Chief.”
As Hernandez undogged the engine room’s watertight hatch, a body tumbled out and sprawled limp and lifeless on the deck. This is it, Cates thought. This is the real deal. He recognized the spider web tattoos on the fallen shipmate’s elbows, but couldn’t recall his name. He activated the nozzle, spraying a fan of water as he stepped over the unidentified man and advanced into the space. The charred remains of another engineman clung to the ladder as if still trying to escape. Cates climbed over him, as did his hose team.
In the ineffectual glow of helmet lamps and the orange blaze of flames, Cates saw the bodies of other dead enginemen scattered about the compartment. Reinforced-steel bulkheads had buckled from the blast. The portside bulkhead was concave and filled with an expanding cloud of dense smoke. Engine parts were scattered like shrapnel. Cates heard, as though from a great distance, the shouts of his hose team behind him yelling up the ladder for more slack in the hose. Water pounded forth from the nozzle he gripped in his hands. The taste of enamel filled his mouth as he grit his teeth and charged forward amongst the burnt bodies with T-shirts melted to their flesh, their once capable bodies now resting on heat-warped deck grates and charred ladders. He opened the nozzle all the way and sprayed side to side and up and down as he advanced the hose team deeper into the space. Black smoke enveloped them. In front of him was the blue and orange glow of fire. Cates wasn’t even sure if Thompson was still behind him, but there was slack enough in the hose to maneuver.
Cates advanced, spraying water until the fire was completely extinguished and he was lost in a cloud of white smoke void of orange and blue flames. In a voice so hoarse he didn’t recognize it coming out of his mouth, he called back, “Engine Room Number 2 is secure.” This message was relayed to the top of the ladder.
The next step in his training required appointing himself firewatch as numbers two, four and six hosemen rotated out. He thought about that hidden canister in the repair locker and rested the ten-pound brass nozzle on his knee. His facemask was partially fogged, but he was still getting good air inside his OBA. His heart pounded from the exertion and from adrenaline and from the fact that he’d finally done what he’d been trained to do.
***
A month after he’d broken it off with her, Cates had seen Gabby in the commissary, at the end of the bread aisle. He’d felt a flutter then, unlike any he’d had before, but tamped it out before it had a chance to make him call out to her. He hoped he could get by without being seen and avoid any badgering he might take for breaking it off with her.
She hadn’t seen him yet. She was busy chatting up a hook-nosed deck ape from one of the minesweepers. Neither had rings on their fingers. He knew he should’ve walked away, but he stood there until she noticed him. He nodded as casually as he was able, then walked toward her as she ended the conversation with the guy, who pushed his cart in the opposite direction. Gabby’s cane was resting parallel to her shopping cart’s handle.
“Hey there, Cates,” she said, stopping an inch from his left foot. She picked up a loaf of multigrain and pretended to read the nutrition panel. Angry as he was, he wanted more than anything to play it cool.
She dropped the bread. He didn’t lunge to pick it up for her. He stood there and watched her. She looked at the bread and then slowly up at him, but she never made a move for it. She adjusted her orange-tinted sunglasses and looked back to the bread, then tossed her hair back as she looked at Cates again, over the rims of her sunglasses. He’d heard rumors that Gabby was getting around to all the ships on base. Poor Kephart never found it odd that his wife knew so many guys from so many ships, or wondered why “they” had so many friends.
***
Cates emerged from the engine room soaked through to his underwear with sweat, and seawater from the Pit Sword Room, but he was surprisingly energized. He removed his mask, swallowed a clean breath and hollered, “Yeah!” He held up his hands for various high fives until he saw Doc and Baby Doc attending to a corpse, and obviously waiting to assess the others.
There were fewer guys than there were supposed to be. “Where’s master chief,” he asked. “Where’s Kephart?”
Hernandez spoke up first. “Flooding team got sent forward. There’s a report of water coming in the Pick Sore Room.”
“The Pit Sword Room?” Cates asked.
“Yeah. What is that, anyway?”
Cates ran forward, past the mess decks, and down the first series of ladders. He slipped on the second and slid down feet first, crushing himself beneath the weight of his OBA.
Two decks down, he saw the master chief in the vestibule below him, one deck above the Pit Sword Room. “What’s going on?” Cates hollered.
The master chief looked up from the vestibule and said, “Flooding alarm in the Pit Sword Room. Kephart went down to check the valve. We’re waiting. It’s been a while.”
Cates took another step down the ladder. “You let him go down there?”
“It’s his equipment. He’ll fix it.”
Cates gripped the chain beneath his fingers. “He’s too big. He’ll never find the wrench,” Cates said, doffing his OBA. “I have to go down there.”
“Ain’t enough room for two men down there.”
“There’s no time to debate it, Master Chief.”
Cates stripped off his Nomex coveralls and yelled, “Open the hatch.”
“Don’t fuck around down there. Secure the leak and get Kephart out. You hear?”
“Aye, Master Chief.”
The hatch closed over Cates’s head as he held onto the ladder leading into the Pit Sword Room. Dark water oozed up to Cates’s neck as he abandoned the last ladder rung. He inhaled, his ribs aching. The taste of wet iron air filled him, made him heavier so he could sink down. Kephart was submerged in a ball to the right of the valve.
The rust and salt-stained water was as opaque as the smoke-filled engine room had been. Kephart didn’t move as Cates groped around the valve basin to find the lug wrench.
Cates surfaced and tugged at the ladder. He hollered for them to get Kephart out of there, but the hatch was closed above him. This was standard operating procedure. If the Pit Sword Room flooded, it was better to isolate it than risk flooding the entire ship.
After another breath and submerging himself again, Cates slid into position and went about his task of obtaining the wrench. He couldn’t reach all the way around the valve at first because Kephart’s boot was in the way, but he groped until he found the big wrench where he’d left it.
With the wrench fixed on one of the hex nuts, Cates shoved the heavy metal handle, hoping to squeeze it down at least another turn, but the bolt turned easily and the wrench slammed into Kephart’s leg. Kephart made no move. Cates repeated the maneuver, determined to secure the bolt he’d failed to secure earlier. He repeated this nine more times until he was pushing the wrench with every ounce of his body weight.
He then sprang from the bottom and took a deep breath. He beat the hatch with the wrench. In that moment, he wished he knew Morse code. He would bang out her name. Gabby. Gabriella. Gabriella Kephart. Again and again if he had to, to make his shipmates hear and know. The sound would carry through the ship and through the hull into the water where whales and sonar techs on Russian subs could hear. “G” was “Gulf” which was dash, dash, dot, he knew that. “A” was dot, dash, but beyond that he had no recall for the rest of the letters he’d need.
The wrench fell from his hand. He dove to retrieve it and rechecked the valve’s bolts in a series of attempted turns; the metal haft of the tool slugged into Kephart’s soft, motionless leg.
Cates again climbed the ladder and rapped randomly on the hatch with the wrench. He persisted until the hatch finally opened, flooding his eyes with bright light. “Kephart needs help. Get him out of here,” Cates said though temporary blindness. “We need a corpsman, ASAP.”
Instead of waiting, the master chief sent a couple guys down with a line to secure around Kephart’s torso and pull him up.
“Get Kephart out of there,” Cates said to the first guy, Schaffer. “I think he’s hurt bad.”
It took seven of them to pull Kephart out.
***
Cates sat on the deck trading the smoke and water in his lungs for air. The master chief cradled Kephart’s head in the vestibule. A corpsman leaned over with a swollen arm in his hands, checking for a pulse he’d never find. The three of them forming a bloodless pieta.