FIRE ROOM THREE

BOOK THREE, THE USS ARIZONA SERIES

By: William Ferrier Jr.

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

“I expected a Pearl Harbor novel. What I got was something far more intimate and unsettling. This book stays with you long after the last page.”

“I’ve read a lot of WWII fiction. I’ve never read anything that put me inside survival the way this does. Claustrophobic, quiet, and devastating.”

“This book doesn’t shout. It whispers—and somehow that makes it hit harder than anything else I’ve read about Pearl Harbor.”

Six decks below the waterline, survival comes down to one breath.

December 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor is under attack.

While bombs tear through the sky, Petty Officer Mack McAllister is trapped deep inside Fire Room Three aboard the USS Arizona—a steel cage filling with water, smoke, and screaming men. The lights go out. The boilers flood. Escape means climbing six ladders through darkness while the ship dies around him.

Mack doesn’t survive because he’s a hero.

He survives because, as a child in a Kentucky coal hollow, he learned how to disappear—how to hold his breath, count the seconds, and make himself small enough to live.

Fire Room Three is not a traditional war novel. It is an intimate, claustrophobic story of survival—of trauma carried from coal mines to battleships, of brothers left behind, and of what it means to live when better men have died.

Told with spare, haunting prose, this novel takes readers inside:

• The flooded heart of the USS Arizona

• The psychological weight of breath-holding, silence, and survival

• A boyhood shaped by Appalachian coal mines

• A man forced to reckon with guilt, memory, and the cost of staying alive

There are no grand speeches. No cinematic heroics.

Just rising water.
Metal ladders.
Seventeen seconds of air.

And the question that follows every survivor:

What do you do with the life you weren’t supposed to have?

Perfect for readers of The Things They Carried, All the Light We Cannot See, and literary historical fiction that values emotional truth over spectacle, Fire Room Three delivers a powerful, unforgettable perspective on Pearl Harbor—one few novels dare to tell.

This Book Whispers—and Hits Harder Because of It

If you’re looking for action, this may not be the book you expect. But if you want historical fiction that lingers, that respects the people it portrays, and that stays with you long after the final page, this is absolutely worth reading.