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  Other Books by Steven L. Kent

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  The Clone Sedition

  The Clone Assassin

  The Clone Apocalypse

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  The Making of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

  The First Quarter: A 25-Year History of Video Games

  The Ultimate History of Video Games

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  Other Books by Nicholas Kaufmann

  Walk in Shadows: Collected Stories

  General Slocum’s Gold

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  Copyright © 2018 by Steven L. Kent and Nicholas Kaufmann

  E-book published in 2018 by Blackstone Publishing

  Cover and book design by Blackstone Publishing

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-5385-0762-9

  Library e-book ISBN 978-1-5385-0761-2

  Fiction / Horror

  CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Blackstone Publishing

  31 Mistletoe Rd.

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.BlackstonePublishing.com

  This book is dedicated to the memory of John Piña Craven, a Renaissance man and an authentic American hero.

  —Steven L. Kent

  PROLOGUE

  Naval Station Pearl Harbor, November 16, 1983

  USS Roanoke, SSN-709, sat moored to the dock, half submerged in the calm waters of the harbor. In the dim twilight, when colors and details began to fade to the same flat gunmetal gray, the submarine might have looked to an outsider like some gigantic sea creature, lashed to the dock by thick ropes and braided steel cables, its tower standing tall like a dorsal fin. But not to Warren Stubic, petty officer third class. To him, it looked like where he was going to call home for the next three months.

  Roanoke was scheduled to launch tomorrow at 1530 hours. After that, he was staring at an underway spent entirely at sea. Three months without the sun. Three months without liquor. Three months of hot-racking—sharing a bed with three other guys in six-hour sleeping shifts because there wasn’t enough room on a submarine to give every enlisted man his own rack.

  Three months without women. That prospect in particular struck him as intolerable.

  He had only one thing in mind for the night before the launch, and that was to have fun. But unlike other sailors, he didn’t see the fun in drinking until he puked. For Stubic, fun meant getting his dick wet.

  Waikiki, ten miles away, was the closest center of nightlife. By the time he got there, the last purple tinges were fading from the sky as darkness settled in. He was surprised to find the city hopping even on a Tuesday night. Servicemen from Naval Station Pearl Harbor, hard to miss in their flattops and buzz cuts, towered over most of the locals. The strip along the beach had been developed for tourists and people with money to spend, neither of which accurately described Stubic, although tonight he had enough cash with him to afford all the fun he wanted. On sidewalks as crowded as any in Tokyo or Hong Kong, he walked past fancy hotels with liveried doormen, sushi restaurants and fish houses, tacky gift shops, and kiosks selling oysters that supposedly had pearls in them, not that he’d ever been dumb enough to buy one and find out.

  There were girls everywhere, and the kind he liked: Polynesian, with long hair and short skirts. But they were local girls, and he had already discovered the hard way that local girls came to Waikiki looking only for local guys. His fellow servicemen had figured this out too, and now mostly had an eye out for tourist girls—of which there were always plenty at Spats, the popular dance club on the first floor of the Hyatt Regency. Gaggles of interchangeable blonds with sunburned faces and peeling skin. None of them interested Stubic the way the local girls did. Luckily, he had discovered a way to satisfy his appetite for local flavor without risking any more rejections from Waikiki girls or having to settle for some drunk American tourist.

  He turned off the strip and onto a side street, where the mega hotels gave way to smaller inns and apartment buildings—three-and four-story affairs that looked shabby compared to the beachside properties. He pulled a card out of his pocket and checked the address printed on it. A pretty Filipina—a dark-haired slip of a thing in a bikini top and denim shorts—had given it to him the last time he came to Waikiki. He had tried to pick her up on the strip, but she wasn’t interested. Instead, she handed him the card with a twinkle in her dark-brown eyes, telling him this was where he needed to go if he liked local girls.

  “Pretty girls for good prices,” she had told him in a detached, indifferent voice. Hawking different merchandise, the well-practiced catchphrase wouldn’t be out of place on a grocery store circular.

  He found the brothel at the far end of a quiet alley, illuminated only by the stars above and an aisle of lit candles along the floor. He looked around nervously to make sure no one was watching. Honolulu had plenty of brothels, especially near the naval station, but that didn’t mean it was legal. If anyone caught him, he would spend the night behind bars and face disciplinary action in the morning. But luck was on his side. The street was empty. He hurried into the alley and through the door.

  Inside was a large, softly lit waiting room decorated with erotic paintings and sculptures. A wizened old woman sat behind an ornately carved wooden table. She was Filipina too, like the girl who had given him the card. Stubic saw enough of a resemblance in the old woman’s face to wonder whether this was a family operation. When he closed the door behind him, she looked up and welcomed him, but that was both the start and the end of any small talk. No point in wasting time—they both knew why he was here.

  “What kind of girl are you looking for tonight?” the old woman asked. “She can be whatever you want her to be.”

  Stubic was surprised by her perfect English, a stark contrast to the terse, clipped pidgin that so many of the Filipino immigrants spoke. He told her what he wanted—petite, long hair, young but not jailbait young—and realized he was describing the girl on the strip who had given him the business card. The old woman’s expression remained stoical as she picked up the phone on the table and spoke into it in a language Stubic didn’t understand. It didn’t sound like Ilocano or Tagalog, the two main Filipino languages spoken in Hawaii. Something about it sent an unexpected chill down his spine.

  “It will just be a moment,” the old woman said, hanging up. “Please make yourself comfortable.”

  While he waited, Stubic looked at the art on display around the room. He felt himself particularly drawn to the only figurine that wasn’t of a naked woman or a sensually embracing couple. It looked like a mask of some kind, composed of feathers, or maybe they were flames. The features were human but also not, in a way he couldn’t quite pinpoint. Its lips were peeled back in a terrible, angry grimace.

  As the seconds ticked by, he became uncomfortably aware that he was the only customer in the waiting room. He didn’t hear anyone elsewhere in the brothel, either. He’d been in enough of them to know that usually you could hear men’s voices talking or, if it was their first time, laughing nervously. This place
was dead quiet.

  To fill the awkward silence, Stubic pointed to the strange sculpture and asked the old woman, “What is this?”

  “Aswang,” she said.

  “Aswang,” he repeated. “What does it mean?”

  But the old woman just smiled at him and pointed to a door in the wall behind her. “She is ready for you now.”

  He walked past her table to the door, uncomfortably aware of the old woman’s eyes following him, watching him closely. Stubic opened the door and stepped through into the next room, which was lit only with the soft, warm glow of candles. And, like a dream, there she was, the girl from the strip. She had traded in her bikini top and shorts for a beautiful silk kimono. Her jade-green eyes sparkled. Stubic paused. He didn’t remember her having green eyes before, but when she smiled and took his hand, her skin soft and warm on his, he didn’t care anymore what color her eyes were. More titillating art decorated the walls of the room. Off to one side, a hallway, dark as a cave, led deeper into the building. She sat down on a red plush couch against the wall and patted the cushion beside her.

  “I can’t believe it,” he stammered, sitting beside her. “It’s … it’s you.”

  She looked even more enticing than when he first saw her. He was already imagining doing everything with her that his money could buy.

  “You’re from the naval station?” she asked.

  “I am,” he said, sliding closer to her. “I’m sailing out on a submarine tomorrow and thought I’d give myself one last hurrah.”

  “All those men on the submarine,” she said in a wistful tone. “It must get very lonely without any girls.”

  “You have no idea,” he said, putting a hand on her kimono-draped leg. The silk felt smooth and alluring under his hand.

  “So much time in the middle of the ocean, deep underwater, surrounded by the dark,” she said. Her green eyes flashed. The top of her kimono drifted open just enough to reveal the curve of her breast. “Don’t you ever get scared?”

  “Of the dark?” he asked.

  “Of everything that could go wrong on a submarine,” she said. Her hand traced lazy circles across his chest.

  “There’s … there’s nothing to be scared of,” he stammered, growing more aroused at her touch. “We train and we drill. We know what to do if anything goes wrong.”

  “So, nothing scares you?” she asked.

  He could tell from her smile that she was teasing him. “Not a thing,” he said.

  “Good.” She stood up and walked into the adjoining hallway, disappearing into the inky darkness. “Aren’t you coming?” she called back to him.

  He stood up and went to follow her, but something made him pause at the mouth of the hallway. The darkness that filled it was absolute. Not even a glimmer of ambient candlelight filtered in from the room. It was like staring into a black hole. Then, farther down the hallway, two eyes glowed, like a cat’s eyes reflecting the light—except that there was no light to be reflected, only the stygian darkness around them. For a moment, he thought he was dreaming.

  “Baby …?” he called.

  The girl didn’t answer.

  “Baby, is that—is that you?”

  He took a step forward into the hallway, then another, and then the darkness swallowed him whole.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Without a doubt, the most insidious dangers were the ones that hid in plain sight, camouflaging themselves inside the minds of rational men. Petty Officer First Class Tim Spicer of USS Roanoke knew this all too well. He had seen men—good men, strong men—who thought they were equipped to handle life on board a submarine discover otherwise after being crammed into a three-hundred-foot tube in the depths of the ocean with over a hundred other men. Most underways lasted three months, some longer, and in that time even the sharpest minds could crack under the pressure.

  Case in point, Roanoke’s previous planesman. Petty Officer Second Class Mitch Robertson had been fresh out of BESS, the Basic Enlisted Submarine School, which had opened just a year before in Groton, Connecticut. He thought he was ready for everything the ocean depths could throw at him, but his first underway had been a long one—nine months escorting a carrier group around the tip of South America and into the Atlantic. Robertson had lasted only the first three months, growing more frantic and disheveled as time passed. In the mess, he kept to himself, eating less and less until he stopped altogether. In the control room, his response to orders became sluggish. Not seeing the sun for months, not breathing fresh air or seeing any new faces had driven him to the edge. But nothing went unnoticed on a submarine. As a matter of course, the officers kept a close eye on the crew, watchful for signs of fatigue. They had to. Everyone’s lives depended on their recognizing it in time, and they caught it right away in Robertson. On long underways such as that one, Roanoke would visit port every three months to stock up on food, since she could only carry a hundred days’ worth at a time, and Captain Weber had decided to swap Robertson out at the next port. When Robertson found out, he went to his locker and got his toilet kit, went into the head, and slit his wrists with his shaving razor in one of the stalls. Maybe he was ashamed that he didn’t have what it took, or maybe something deeper and darker inside him drove him to it. Tim never knew. It was he who found Robertson there, slumped over in the stall, blood from his wrists pooling on the floor—more blood than Tim had ever seen, so much that his gorge rose at the sight. He had rushed to get the hospital corpsman, who, fortunately, had been able to patch Robertson up in time. Afterward, Roberston was transferred to one of the carriers, where they had the doctors and medical facilities to look after him, and Tim got a lot of pats on the back from the crew for saving the man’s life.

  So when Captain Weber summoned him to his stateroom shortly before Roanoke was set to pull out of port, Tim thought maybe it had something to do with Robertson. A personal meeting with the captain wasn’t something most petty officers ever experienced, especially with Captain Weber, who was notoriously standoffish with his enlisted men. The summons had sounded urgent, and Tim double-timed it, worried that the captain would tell him Robertson had tried to kill himself again—or, worse, had succeeded this time.

  Roanoke was a 688, a Los Angeles–class nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine, outfitted with three levels that housed the crew’s living spaces, weapons systems, and control centers. Captain Weber’s stateroom was on the top level, forward of the control room, in a short corridor known as the captain’s egress.

  When Tim got there, he found the stateroom hatch open. The space inside was small and cramped even though it belonged to the captain. There just wasn’t enough room on the boat for anything larger. Inside, Senior Chief Farrington, chief of the boat and highest-ranking enlisted man aboard, was deep in conversation with the captain. Farrington was a no-nonsense career sailor, an aging senior chief petty officer with scant hope of making master chief before retiring. Word on the boat put him at fifty, maybe even fifty-five. Old enough to have grandchildren back home, and certainly the oldest man aboard Roanoke. As COB, Farrington was the primary liaison between the commissioned officers and enlisted men such as Tim, which meant that he too had to be present for this meeting with the captain.

  Captain Weber, a short, roundish man in his forties, sat at the desk that folded down from the wood-paneled wall. A calendar had been pinned up, the days X-ed off up to today—Thursday, November 17, 1983.

  “You sent for me, Captain?” Tim said, standing at attention in the doorway. Saluting was never done indoors, not even for the captain.

  “Come in, Spicer,” Captain Weber said, barely looking up from the papers strewn across his desk.

  Not the warm-and-fuzziest commanding officer Tim had ever seen, but not the kind who spent the entire tour yelling at crewmen, either—even though he did have stringently high standards, which he expected his men to meet. He was more the strong-and-silent type, like John Wayne, only in Barney Rubble’s body. Tim stepped into the stateroom, then waited to be address
ed before speaking. A file folder was open in front of the captain. Tim read the name across the top, upside down: White, Jerome: Petty Officer Second Class.

  “Have you met your new planesman yet, Spicer?” Captain Weber asked. “PO2 White?”

  “I’ve seen him, sir, but we haven’t spoken,” Tim replied.

  “What have you heard about him?”

  “Nothing yet, sir.”

  Senior Chief Farrington, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, said, “What if I were to tell you our new planesman suffers from a bad case of CRIS, Spicer?”

  CRIS was seaman’s jargon: cranial-rectal insertion syndrome.

  “Sir?” Tim asked the captain.

  Captain Weber sighed and leaned back in his chair. “What Farrington is trying so colorfully to say is that it appears White comes with some baggage. There was an incident on his last boat, USS Philadelphia.”

  Philadelphia was a Sturgeon-class sub, Tim knew. Sturgeons were real workhorses, but they were old. They were already being phased out in favor of Los Angeles–class subs like Roanoke.

  “White lodged a formal complaint against his XO, an officer by the name of Frank Leonard,” Weber continued. “I don’t know the details of the complaint, but it wound up costing Leonard a promotion.”

  “Permission to speak frankly, sir?” Farrington asked.

  The captain nodded. “Of course, COB.”

  “I know men like White, sir,” Farrington said. “They don’t respect authority, they’re lazy, they don’t want to perform their duties or run their drills, and as soon as an officer gets tough on them for it, these mama’s boys run off to lodge a complaint.” He turned to Tim. “White got what he wanted, and the lieutenant commander was passed over for promotion. Unfortunately, it was the third time he got passed over.”

  Tim winced. When an officer was passed over for promotion three times, his career with the navy was over. Whatever had happened on Phildelphia, it cost the XO everything.

  “Except that we don’t know for sure that’s the kind of man White is,” Weber cautioned. “He also happens to be responsible for singlehandedly saving Philadelphia from catastrophe. Something went wrong in the auxiliary engine room—some aging piece of equipment failed and a fire broke out. According to the report, White didn’t even hesitate. He grabbed a pair of fire extinguishers and charged into the room while everyone else was running away from it. He spent the next month in a hospital being treated for burns.