Collapse Depth by Todd Tucker Page A

decided to ask.
    “So…moving?”
    Muriel looked down at the scratched table and nodded.
    “Are you guys going to your next duty station? Does Mark have orders for shore duty yet?”
    “He might,” she said. “I have no idea. But I’m going home.”
    Angi hesitated, knowing the rest of the story would come out. It certainly wasn’t uncommon—every patrol, a certain number of wives would just decide they couldn’t take it anymore, and head back to wherever they’d come from. Being a Navy Wife was hardest during deployment, and that’s also when leaving was the easiest. But it was still shocking, and sad, to see it happen to a good friend.
    “Can I ask why?”
    Muriel took a deep breath. “Honestly Angi…I think Mark is going crazy.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “There’d been little things, of course, but I just wrote it off to the stress. I mean, don’t they all have to be a little crazy to do what they do? But I really started to worry after his third patrol, Mario’s last. Mark had just completed all his command qualifications, and Mario had given him a stellar fitrep. Everybody is telling us he’s going to screen early for XO. And then—he doesn’t.”
    “Oh no!”
    “So he starts working even harder than normal, round the clock, all the time wondering how he failed the Navy. He’s pouring over old fitreps, looking for faint praise, anything that might have stopped him from screening early. Now keep in mind, it’s not like he’s been passed over— he just hasn’t screened early. But there’s no telling him that.”
    “I know it’s a really tough jump, from department head to XO.”
    “Even tougher now because they’ve gotten rid of so many boats—Mark’s year group has just been decimated. I understand all that. But I start to see changes in him. He stops eating, for one thing. He’s losing weight like crazy, and he didn’t have that much to begin with. And then the nightmares start.”
    “Nightmares?”
    “He starts moaning in his sleep, every couple of nights, really tortured sounds, sometimes bordering on yelling. I tell him to get to a doctor, you know, a psychiatrist, but he won’t hear of it, says that will be the end of it, that he’ll never screen if the Navy thinks he’s crazy.”
    Angi nodded, and didn’t say what she was thinking: that Mark was right. Nothing would end a career faster.
    “Here, look at this,” said Muriel, digging something out of her gigantic purse. She handed Angi a small black book.
    “A bible?”
    “Right about the time he doesn’t screen early, he starts reading two books constantly. Whenever he’s home, which is not that often, he’s sitting there reading either the bible, or
Rig for Dive
.”
    “
Rig for Dive
?”
    “Some old World War II submarine book. He’d sit there with both books, at the kitchen table with a highlighter in his hand, like he was studying them. Goes from one to the other…
Rig for Dive
to the Bible and back. This is a guy, keep in mind, who didn’t spend a Sunday in church the whole time he was growing up. Didn’t even want to get married in a church, I had to insist on it. Now he’s studying the bible like his life depends on it. Look inside.”
    Angi flipped it open. There were passages highlighted in a rainbow of colors. Muriel had been right; the density of highlighting increased rapidly near the back of the book, where nearly every word was highlighted. There were also densely written notes in the margins. Angi looked close. “What does this say?”
    Muriel nodded. “That took me a while to figure out too. They’re equations. Engineering equations. He’d write them all over the freaking bible while he was reading about Armageddon.”
    “Do you have the other one? The submarine book?”
    “No, I looked. I think he took that one with him. I guess he gave up on the bible.”
    Angi felt a deep sense of unease as she paged through it; it did look crazy. The juxtaposition of all the mathematical symbols