Sixty men, three hundred feet down, and one passenger whose orders are sealed even from the captain.
In the spring of 1944 the American submarine USS Grayling slips out of Fremantle on a patrol into the South China Sea, carrying a full load of torpedoes and one passenger whose orders are sealed even from the captain. Halfway to the patrol area those orders are opened, and the mission changes into something none of the crew volunteered for. With a Japanese destroyer hunting above, the air running thin and the crew starting to whisper, the boat's officers have to decide what they owe their orders, their passenger and each other.
5 roles. You take one; your friends take the rest, and the narrator plays any left over. Anyone can bring a character of their own into a role instead.
The Grayling's commanding officer, a Naval Academy graduate on his fourth war patrol, who has never lost a man and is beginning to feel the weight of the streak.
The Grayling's executive officer, an ambitious Bostonian who believes he should have the boat and that the captain is too careful to win the war.
A soundman from Brooklyn with the best ears in the Pacific Fleet, who can tell a destroyer from a whale through three hundred feet of water.
The Grayling's cook, a former Navy boxer from San Antonio who keeps sixty men fed and sane in a galley the size of a closet.
A civilian with a doctorate, a sealed envelope and an accent that changes slightly when they are tired, whose purpose aboard the Grayling is known only in Washington.