Chapter 2 - The Fire in Auxiliary One
The report had eighty-four pages, including the metallurgical analysis of the three-inch bypass valve on the auxiliary steam system of the USS Truxtun, DDG-103. I knew the page numbers because I had spent three months in the physical therapy ward at San Diego reading them until the blue cover fell off the plastic binding.
It had happened at sixteen-forty local time in the Gulf of Oman, seventy miles east of Fujairah. The sea had been running four feet, long, greasy swells from the southeast that made the ship roll five degrees to port and six to starboard with the rhythm of an unlubricated pendulum. We were running at twenty-four knots, trailing a carrier strike group whose planes were doing night qualification landings.
I had been in the log room, three levels above the shaft alley, checking the fuel consumption numbers from the four-to-eight watch.
The sound had not been a bang. It was a high, thin scream, like a wet finger circling the rim of a very large lead-crystal bowl, followed by the specific, hollow thump that an eighty-pound boiler casing makes when the internal pressure exceeds the yield strength of the four-hundred-series stainless-steel bolts.
Superheated steam does not look like the vapor coming out of a tea kettle. At five hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit, under six hundred pounds of pressure per square inch, it is invisible. It does not become white until it has traveled ten feet and dropped three hundred degrees, by which time it has already removed the skin from anything with blood in it. You do not see it; you hear the roar of a jet engine inside a locker, and you see the paint on the steel bulkheads blister and turn brown like burnt toast.
When the halon alarms went off, the watchstander in Auxiliary Machinery Room Number One—Fireman Third Class Daniel Ruiz, nineteen years old, from a town outside Lubbock, Texas—had been standing twelve inches from the secondary reduction gear casing.
The bypass line had parted at the flange.
The proper procedure, according to the Naval Ships’ Technical Manual, Chapter 505, was to dog down the watertight hatch from the upper level, isolate the compartment using the remote reach-rods on the main deck, and activate the halon flood system forty-five seconds after the warning siren to smother any secondary fire caused by the lagging catching the lube oil lines.
If you activated the reach-rods from the main deck, it took four minutes and twenty seconds for the valve stem to travel the eighty-four turns required to seat the gate.
In four minutes and twenty seconds, the temperature in Auxiliary One would have reached eight hundred degrees. Ruiz would have been liquefied before the second horn sounded.
I hadn't thought about my father. I hadn't thought about my promotion board to commander, which was thirteen months away. I hadn't thought about the way the Navy would look at a thirty-two-year-old woman whose service record was clean as a clean-room silicon wafer.
I had grabbed the Nomex hood from the emergency locker beside the ladder, pulled the leather fire gloves over my watch, and dropped down the three levels of vertical iron rungs into the steam.
The first three rungs had been ninety degrees. The fourth had been three hundred.
The heat had come through the palms of the leather gloves before my boots touched the deck plates. I couldn't see Ruiz. The compartment was an opaque, roaring white fog that smelled of scorched wire insulation and the distinct, almond-like smell of overheated zinc anodes.
“Ruiz!” I had screamed, but the sound had been swallowed by the jet-engine shriek of the six-hundred-pound line.
I had found him by the sound of his boots drumming against the lower bilge coaming. He had fallen between the sea chest and the lube oil pump, his fire-retardant shirt already charred black where the steam had found the gap between his collar and his neck. He was alive, but he wasn't breathing air; he was breathing steam, his hands clawing at the non-skid deck like a crab on hot sand.
The bypass valve was above his head, three feet into the blind white roar where the steam was clean and clear and hot enough to cut through a broom handle like a circular saw.
The reach-rod was jammed. Some contractor at Norfolk had painted over the universal joint with two coats of lead-based gray enamel three years before I took over the department.
I had climbed onto the lube oil cooler, wrapped both legs around the raw-water intake pipe, reached through the invisible jet with my right arm, and taken the handwheel in my bare hands because the leather of the gloves had already curled into hard, black charcoal that wouldn't bend around the spokes.
It took sixteen turns.
With every turn, the flesh on my right shoulder and the back of my neck had pulled away from the muscle like roasted pork. I had felt the heat enter the periosteum of the clavicle, the bone itself aching with that deep, vibrating hum that means the calcium is losing its water.
I didn't let go of the wheel until the gate hit the seat with a dull, iron clink.
Then I had dropped onto Ruiz, grabbed the collar of his life jacket with my teeth because my right hand had curled into a claw that couldn't open, and hauled him up the vertical ladder with my left arm and my knees.
We had cleared the hatch four seconds before the halon discharged.
The medical officer on the Truxtun had been twenty-eight, a lieutenant who had spent his residency doing sports medicine in Bethesda. When he cut my undershirt off with the trauma shears, the wool of the fire-retardant weave had come away with the fat layers over the scapula, leaving the pink, glistening muscle of the trapezius twitching in the cold air of the sickbay like an open heart.
“Don't look at it, Valerie,” he had whispered, his hands shaking so hard he dropped the silver silver-sulfadiazine jar twice.
“I’m not looking at it,” I had told him, my eyes fixed on the gray vinyl bulkhead. “Did Ruiz clear the suction?”
“His lungs are intact,” the doctor said. “He’s going to live.”
“Then give me thirty milligrams of morphine and tell the captain the auxiliary line is isolated,” I said. “The ship can keep her speed.”
Two days later, they had flown me off the flight deck in a COD to Bahrain, then to Landstuhl, then to San Antonio. My father had not met the plane at Kelly Air Force Base. He had sent a Western Union telegram to the patient administration office: Acknowledge receipt of casualty report. Inform officer that family expects full recovery and return to duty.
When he finally came to the burn center six weeks later, I had been in the whirlpool tank, four corpsmen using sterile nylon brushes to scrape the necrotic yellow slough off the new skin grafts before the scar tissue could lock the arm to the rib cage.
He had stood in the doorway of the tank room, his khaki garrison cap tucked under his left arm, his uniform shirt pristine with the three rows of ribbons he had earned in the A-6 Intruder, and he had looked at the raw, red meat of my shoulder for three seconds.
“You should have used the remote reach-rods,” he had said.
“They were jammed, Dad,” I had said through the mouthguard they gave me so I wouldn't bite through my tongue during the debridement. “With paint.”
“Then you should have inspected the linkage during the pre-underway checks,” he said. His voice had been very calm, the voice he used when debriefing an ensign who had missed the wire on the carrier deck by four inches. “A Chief Engineer is responsible for the state of the gear, Valerie. Entering a high-temperature casualty compartment without protective clothing is an act of indiscipline. It reflects poorly on your training.”
He had left after twenty minutes to catch a flight back to Norfolk for a retirement dinner.
He had never mentioned the Truxtun again. When the physical evaluation board in Washington determined that my right arm had only forty-five degrees of abduction—not enough to climb an escape trunk in sea boots—he had signed the paperwork as my next of kin with the flat, emotionless signature he used on his car insurance policies.
To him, an officer who was survey-boarded out of the fleet before her twentieth year was simply a bad investment.
And now, Judith Carrow was standing between him and his dinner plate, her four stars gleaming like ice under the chandeliers, her eyes boring into his face until the old man’s breath came in thin, rattling wheezes through his nose.
“I asked you a question, Captain Alden,” the Admiral said. Her voice didn't rise; it had that heavy, hydraulic weight that made four hundred people hold their breaths until their ribs hurt. “Did you read the citation I sent to your house in Virginia Beach in November of twenty-one?”
My father’s lips moved against each other. They were dry, gray at the margins, like old tallow.
“Admiral,” he whispered, his eyes flickering toward the tables where the commodores were watching him with the flat, unblinking curiosity of birds on a wire. “The citation... it was forwarded to my office. I assumed it was the standard administrative summary for a medical separation.”
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“It was the Navy Cross,” Judith Carrow said.
The silence in the ballroom didn't break; it shattered into tiny, jagged pieces that you could feel in the soles of your shoes.
