Collapse Depth (13 page)

Suddenly intrigued, Jabo leaned back in his chair to hit the switch. The XO clicked a few keys on his laptop and projected a grainy image onto the movie screen pulled down at the front of the room. It was a black and white satellite photo of a two submarines at a pier, tied along side each other, head to tail. He instantly recognized it as a Soviet design, the long, blunt conning tower being distinctively Russian. It took him just a moment longer to identify the specific class.

“Anybody know what these are?” he asked.

“Russian,” said Jabo. “Kilo Class.” There was a murmur of admiration among the other JOs at Jabo’s acumen. The short squat body of the enemy boats and the somewhat blocky lines of the hull made them look at the same time primitive and yet seaworthy, as indeed they were. Kilos were one of oldest and largest classes of submarines made by the Russians and the Soviets before them.

“You’re sorta right, smart ass. They’re Soviet Kilos, but these particular boats belong to our friends the Red Chinese. Our friends in intel tell us that these are a particular version of the Kilo called a Project 636 boat. Jabo, do you know what that means?”

“They call it the ‘black hole,’” said Jabo. “Because it disappears from sonar.”

“Correct again. Running on its battery, it’s one of the quietest submarines in the world. We’ll have training on it tomorrow night in the wardroom after dinner. Danny, I think you just volunteered to give it. So study up tonight while you’re on the midwatch. Teach us what we need to know: max speed, sound signatures, armament, etcetera. Got it?”

“Aye, aye sir.”

The XO cleared his throat and turned to the captain. All were silent, waiting to hear why they suddenly needed to understand the specs of this particular Russian submarine.

“On the broadcast, about an hour ago, we received a message from SUBPAC saying that these two boats have departed the Chinese submarine base at Ning-bo. Heading for the open seas. Anybody want to guess what they’re doing?”

No one said anything.

“Me neither,” said the Captain. “But we’ve been reminded by SUBPAC, who has been reminded by the national command authority, about how important our mission is. And we’ve also been reminded that China considers the seas we are entering to be their sovereign, territorial waters. So if they were to identify an unknown submerged contact in those waters…let’s just say we’re not going to let that happen.”

For a moment they all just stared at the screen, absorbing the fact that the boats depicted in the grainy, aerial image were now their adversaries.

The captain continued. “We have to get to Suao in time, and we have to get there undetected. This is the mission we’ve been handed, and I intend to complete it successfully. So follow the navigator’s track, and memorize every angle of the submerged operating envelope. If we stay inside it then the best minds in the Navy assure us that we’ll remain undetected and safe. Be smart. Any questions?”

“No sir,” they all said in unison. Jabo glanced at the navigator, the only other man not staring at the movie screen, perhaps lost, he thought, in a mental calculation of how far they’d come, and how far they had yet to go.

•   •   •

Every junior officer on his first tour had two major duties: he was both a watch officer and a division officer. As a watch officer, he would routinely stand six hour watches, either as Officer of the Deck or the Engineering Officer of the Watch. The OOD, in control, was the captain’s direct proxy, responsible for everything that happened to the ship during that period. Approximately three hundred feet aft of control, in the small sealed cube inside the engine room that was Maneuvering, resided the EOOW. He reported to the OOD, and was responsible for the numerous complex systems and procedures inside the nuclear propulsion plant. His mission, it was often summarized, was to keep, “the lights burning and the screw turning.”

The division officer role was in a sense the junior officer’s “day job.” He was in charge of a division of enlisted men with specialized training responsible for some specific area of the ship’s operations. While officers on the boat were generalists, expected to know everything, enlisted men were specialists. There was a division of men responsible for the sonar system, another for the missiles, yet another for cooking all the crew’s meals. These divisions each had a chief or first class petty officer with many years of experience who really ran things. But he reported to a junior officer who generally signed the forms, approved leave, assigned responsibilities, and, when necessary, administered discipline.

Jabo’s division was Radio; his title was Communications Officer. He reported to his department head, who happened to be the navigator, one of three department heads. The other two were the engineer and the weapons officer. Department heads, on their second sea tours, would occasionally stand watch, but their lives largely revolved around the department that they ran. Communicator on a Trident Submarine was an especially sensitive role on a normal patrol, because of the strict requirements that the sub had for staying in constant communication while on alert—ready within seconds to receive authorization and launch nuclear missiles should the order be issued.

In one sense, the extraordinary nature of their patrol made Jabo’s job as communicator easier: he no longer had the unending stress of worrying about the depth of floating antennas, the vagaries of sunspots on low frequency radio waves, and the fear that a few seconds of lost communications would make for a black mark on an entire patrol. But now, the ship had to download its entire day’s message traffic in a single burst, with each trip to periscope depth, so Jabo had to process a great many messages at once, drinking in two giant gulps what he used to drink all day long in sips. As communicator he was expected to read every single message, and then decide who else should read each one. Anything of particular sensitivity would be sent to the captain immediately. The ship had been at periscope depth at midnight when he took over the watch from Hein. As soon as radio reported that the entire broadcast was onboard, Jabo lowered the scope, went deep, and turned the lights back on in control.

“Ahead full,” he ordered.

“Ahead full,” repeated the helm, and the dinging of the engine order telegraph indicated that maneuvering also acknowledged the order. Jabo watched the ship’s speed rise.

“How long were we up there?” he asked the quartermaster.

“Twenty-three minutes,” he said, looking at a stop watch. “We’re getting better at this. Like an attack boat.”

Jabo nodded; it was good. A few weeks ago a thirty minute trip to PD would have been extraordinary; now it was routine. It was also a necessity if they were to get to Taiwan in time. Jabo rubbed his eyes and let them adjust to the lights in control. He wandered over the short distance to Flather and the chart.

“We’re right here,” said Flather. They’d also gotten a GPS fix while at PD, and Jabo was interested to see two pieces of information revealed by the fix. One, their dead reckoning, even at high speed, had been pretty accurate. The fix was just a few hundred feet off the last triangle that indicated their DR position. Flather had dutifully adjusted the DR track to account for the new fix. Secondly, they were right on track, right on schedule.

“Flather, does it ever bother you how blank these charts are? I wonder how good the data is.”

Flather nodded. “Yes sir, it does, sometimes. These areas just aren’t surveyed that well, not even by the merchant fleet. So we don’t have a lot of information to work with.”

“So do these charts ever get updated?”

“Not like our normal charts. We’re supposed to go through things like this,” said Flather, pulling out a thick, paper-clipped document from the shelf behind him.

“What’s that? Notice to Mariners?”

“Yep, NTM. They come out once a week—and this one’s fifty-eight pages long. Describes stuff all over the world that you might or might not want to incorporate into a chart. Normally, our charts are so up to date, these don’t usually help us all that much, we’ve already got the information. But in water like this…I’m reading every one of these freaking things.”

“You find anything in there that affects us?”

Flather nodded, and pointed to a box he’d drawn on the southwestern edge of the chart and highlighted in yellow. “That’s from this NTM. Some surface ship noticed some discolored water right there where the water is supposed to be 8,000 feet deep. Shouldn’t be any mud in water that deep. So it may be a sea mount of some kind, who knows. So I put in on the chart, even though it’s far from anywhere we’ll be. Maybe we’ll swing southward on the way home, who knows. But I wanted to get it down.”

“And you’ve got to read through all of these?”

Flather shrugged. “Me and the nav split them up, we’re trying to look ahead at the water we’re heading into. We’re about halfway through all the NTMs for this year, although I’m getting through them faster than the nav…he’s just got so much shit on his plate right now.”

Jabo flipped through the Notice. Every entry was marked by a latitude and longitude, followed by some piece of information: an ODAS buoy location off the coast of California had changed. A “dangerous wreck” had to be added to a chart in the Gulf of Mexico. The interval of a lighthouse’s flashing light in Ireland needed to be altered. Each correction was seemingly minor. But, Jabo knew, given the right circumstances, it was the kind of information that could turn a watch shitty in a hurry.

“Sir?” Jabo looked up to see RM1 Gurno standing at the conn with a clipboard. “The broadcast for your review.” It was a bonus for them, the OOD and the communicator being the same person, one less officer to track down or wake up in order to get the broadcast reviewed.

Jabo walked up. “Anything good in there?”

“Nothing you need to wake the captain for. But look at this safety flash.” He opened up to it and pointed to a paragraph.

Safety flashes were messages they received when the navy had identified a safety concern that needed immediate attention. They usually resulted from death or serious accidents, and were thus more interesting reading than the normal message traffic about wind warnings off Bremerton and new regulations about the disposal of plastic at sea. Jabo read the paragraph.

“Holy shit…”

“I know!” said Gurno, giggling.

“How do you get a testicle ripped off on a rowing machine?”

“I don’t know, but they are now officially banned on Navy ships. We’re supposed to put an Out of Commission tag on ours right now. Did you see the boat?”

Jabo looked. It was the
USS Michigan
, also based out of Bangor. “Oh man…” he said. “I know a ton of guys on that boat. I wonder if it was an officer.”

“No way,” said Gurno. “The victim had testicles.”

The watchsection laughed appreciatively.

The story of the lost testicle and the rowing machine was indeed brief, and lacked the horrifying details that they would have to get the minute they returned to land. His eyes drifted toward the next safety message…something about R-118, the new refrigerant they’d taken on in their refit, some new warning about it. His eyebrow raised when he saw that apparently, this variety of Freon could mutate into Phosgene, a kind nerve gas, when exposed to very high temperatures. Thanks for letting us know, Navsea, he thought to himself, after we’re already sealed inside a can with the stuff. He scanned to see the classification of the message, thought it might be interesting to share with his father if he could, the heating and air man. He heard the laughing in the control room stop and looked up to see why. The XO was standing in front of him, a stack of books under his arm.

“Sir.”

“Danny. Anything good on the broadcast?”

“Someone lost a nut on the
Michigan
.”

“That is good news. Here,” he said, handing over the books. “For your training tomorrow…information about Kilo class submarines. Make it good, lots of pictures so the young ones don’t let their attention wander.”

“Yes sir,” said Jabo. He took the stack of books and the XO wandered over to take a quick look at the chart before leaving control for a few hours of sleep. Jabo wondered if the XO actually expected him to read, digest, and then summarize all those pages in one watch. He checked his watch. He had four hours left on the conn and still needed to read through the broadcast. Well, he thought. Giving training on Kilo submarines was a lot more interesting than analyzing the effects of chlorides on the steam generators, or studying the navy’s latest personnel policies. Because, in addition to the roles of Watch Officer and Division Officer, every junior officer on the
Alabama
had a third role that was just as mandatory. This fell under the category of, “shit the XO tells you to do.”

•   •   •

At 3:15 in the morning, Hein wandered into control.

“Head break?” he asked Jabo.

“Shit yes,” said Jabo. “Thanks.” Head breaks were the most needed on the midwatch, because of the vast amounts of coffee consumed, and the hardest to come by, because everyone who could be sleeping was in the rack. They quickly exchanged the keys and Jabo bolted from the Conn as the quartermaster was recording the relief in the deck log.

“This is Lieutenant Hein, I have the Deck and the Conn.”

As the helm was acknowledged, Jabo darted back up the ladder and grabbed a few of the books that the XO had left for him.

“Just a head break Jabo!” shouted Hein.

“This will just take me a second…”

He bolted down the ladder into the watchstander’s head where he took a fantastically long and satisfying piss. He washed his hands and took the books into the Officers’ Study.

The Navigator was there. He looked up from his chart without smiling or speaking, and then went back to work. Jabo edged around the table to the locker in the corner that contained the books he was looking for.

The shelf held their small library of submarine history, all the classics both modern and ancient, novels and nonfiction:
Wake of the Wahoo
,
Hunt for Red October
,
Clear the Bridge
, and
Run Silent, Run Deep
. Jabo was looking for anything that might liven up his lecture on the Kilo.