“Yeah,” said Bobby. “Direct hit in the face.”
“Jesus Christ. What happened in there?”
Bobby glanced at the curtain, and I pulled it aside so we could both confirm the infirmary was still empty.
“Don’t tell me anything that’ll get you in trouble,” I said.
“It doesn’t fucking matter,” he said, and I was too afraid to ask him why not.
I returned to the stool and waited for him to say more.
“How much do you know about nuclear reactors?”
“Paul doesn’t tell me shit.”
“Yeah, well… there are these circuits that run coolant through the reactor.”
“Laura was telling us about them.”
He smiled at that. “She’s the one who should have gone to Nuclear Power School.” He was probably right. “The reactor’s just a bunch of fuel rods, sitting one right next to the other in the equivalent of a metal box. We call it the reactor core. These fuel rods produce a ton of heat, and they’d melt down if we weren’t constantly running coolant over them.”
I nodded, to indicate I was following.
“The coolant’s cycling through two circuits. A primary circuit, which is what’s cooling down the reactor core, and a secondary circuit, which is really there to cool down the primary circuit.”
“Okay,” I said, tentatively.
“It sounds fancy, but it’s just pipes. And all these pipes, they’re connected with a bunch of valves. Some are threaded, some are flanged. But they’ve all got gaskets and O-rings. Shit that rusts and rots and has to be replaced if you want to keep these circuits sealed up nice and tight.”
“Which I assume you do?”
“It’s ninety-nine percent of what we do in Nuclear Repair. The joke is we go to all this school, and we’re glorified plumbers.”
I laughed, which he seemed to appreciate, but then he bolted upright and gagged into the basin he’d been holding.
“Should I get someone?” I asked, but he told me to wait. So I let him finish, then I rinsed the basin in the sink and handed it back to him. Only then did I realize that maybe I shouldn’t have been anywhere near his body fluids.
“Fuck, I’m dizzy,” he said as he lay back down, the basin resting against his chest once more.
“Maybe just sleep?”
“I got to tell you this. In case something happens to me.”
This startled me. I’d never heard anyone talk this way, not even Lenny when he’d left for Vietnam.
“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” I said in a hurry, but he held up a finger and told me to quit bullshitting him, so I did.
156.
BOBBY EXPLAINED THATthe U.S.S.Senecahad been submerged and traveling at flank speed when it hit an uncharted seamount somewhere off the coast of Tunisia.Seamountsounds sort of innocuous, but it’s an underwater mountain that nobody knew about. The impact crushed the bow, ruptured the forward ballast tanks, and severely damaged the sonar dome, but miraculously, the inner hull remained intact, and the sub surfaced.
There were a number of injured men, and no one knew how long the sub would be able to remain on the surface before it started taking on water, so Vice Admiral Vaughan acted fast, dispatching a surface rescue ship that would evacuate the injured to Naples, and tugs that would—with any luck—be able to tow the sub to La Maddalena, where the damage could be better assessed.
“When did this happen?” I asked.
Bobby thought for a moment. “The accident happened almost a week ago, but the sub only showed up on Thursday.”
I thought of the protests down at the waterfront and how Bruno had told me that someone had tipped off the mayor’s office. “How’d Bertini know it was coming?”
