for the longest time, she couldn’t drop off to sleep. Her brain held her there, suspended in the feeling, not, for once, of solitude, but of…togetherness. And Sean Riddick—of all people—had given that to her after so very long.
Dani waited for the feeling of shame to wash over her for so enjoying it, but it didn’t come.
And then she was able, finally, to fall asleep.
Chapter Fifteen
It started the way it always did, with the bells.
Sean hadn’t been asleep for more than fifteen minutes. He’d just racked out after a fourteen-hour shift when the constant buzzing went off and he was up again.
But that’s how it was when you were a Damage Controlman. There wasn’t anyone else, and it was your home that was burning down. Fire was one of the biggest threats sailors faced at sea, which made firefighting—just one of the controlmen’s jobs—among the most important.
The question was, what kind of fire waited for him? He wouldn’t know that until they were standing in front of the beast itself, heat blasting them in the face, smoke threatening to crawl down their throats. The haze of it already hung in the air.
In less than a minute he was in the DC Unit Locker Room and gearing up.
As the fire marshal, Senior Chief Ortez had already donned his bunker gear and protective equipment. “Tonight, Chief Riddick is our on-scene leader and Petty Officer Roberts our team leader. I’ll see you down there,” he said, heading out first to make an initial assessment.
“Did you feel it?” Emerson asked when the senior chief departed.
Sean frowned as everyone began recounting what they felt and what they’d been doing when they felt it. The long and short of it was that a big-ass shudder had rocked through the destroyer seconds before the bells sounded.
“Shit, seriously? I was out cold,” Sean said.
“Damn, Chief, you could sleep through World War III,” Westover said.
“Hey, it takes a lot of shut-eye to look this good,” Sean retorted, glad for the joking and camaraderie. Tension was clear on the faces of the new guys who had joined them only three weeks before. Of course, they’d been trained within an inch of their lives and had run countless drills, but you never knew how anyone would react until they were in front of the fire with flames shooting out at them. Even with all the training, you couldn’t fully know the heat of the real thing until you were in front of it, and you couldn’t know who might panic when the chips were down.
Petty Officers 1st Class Roberts and Khan double checked that all the newbies were kitted-up correctly and gave Sean a nod when they were satisfied.
“Good. Now let’s go put the wet stuff on the hot stuff, boys and girls,” he said before securing the face shield to his oxygen breathing apparatus. They double-timed it through the ship’s narrow decks and hatches, the general announcing system blaring a warning about the fire, until they finally reached the aft engine rooms.
And that’s where they found the enemy.
Sean’s mind cleared of everything except fighting the fire. He turned to his team. “It’s showtime, people,” he said through the voice amplifier on his mask. “We find and evacuate victims, analyze the nature and spread of the fire, remove any combustibles, and get it nice and wet. Heads in the game. Let’s go.”
He and his team poured into one of several connected compartments where the main propulsion systems, boilers, generators, and auxiliary machinery were located, the first of the DC-men fanning out to conduct search and rescue, the ones coming in next continuing on. The smoke was thicker here but at least the fire hadn’t spread this far.
Leaving a few of the others to complete a sweep of that space, he led a group into the next compartment. Sean nearly tripped over a sailor sprawled across the floor. “We’ve got a vic here,” he called, stepping out of the way so that the others could clear the hatch while he knelt to assess the sailor, who had burns on his face, arms, and hands. At Sean’s touch, the guy’s eyes rolled open and he mumbled something Sean couldn’t make out. “Hang in there, seaman.” Sean peered over his shoulder. “Keaton, over here.”
Flames crawled through the far hatch and up the bulkhead.
Ah, so there it was—the boundary of the fire. Now they just needed to keep it there. I’m coming for you, motherfucker, he thought.
“What do you need, Chief?” Keaton asked. He was