Collapse Depth (26 page)

“Doesn’t shoot up…just creeps up,” said Barnett. “Just like it really would in a casualty.”

“But we didn’t have any of the collateral indications,” said Morgan. “No noise in the engine room, nothing. But all I know is what I’m seeing here. I’m afraid water is getting ready to carry over, go right out there and shred both main engines, both turbine generators.” It was a frightening prospect—any moisture travelling into the thin, precisely engineered turbine blades at their high speeds would destroy them, obliterating both propulsion and electricity. Morgan continued.

“Tremain was the throttleman…he had his hands on the cutouts.” He pointed to the big hydraulic valve handles that should shut off all steam to the engine room. “We’d still lose power, still lose propulsion, but we’d save the turbines.”

“Jesus,” said Duggan.

“Right, I know…it would cause a scram, too, don’t forget, automatically. And we were ready to do it. I was ready to give the order. I was two hours into my first watch.”

“Then Chief Flora comes haulin’ ass in here from instrument alley,” says Barnett. “Saying, ‘don’t do it! Don’t do it! We fried the flip flop!’”

“He’d been reviewing the maintenance records and noticed a discrepancy…ran back to the engine room just as we were calling it away, put it all together and stopped us just in time,” said Morgan.

“I still think you should have called it away,” says Barnes. “If you’d been following the procedure…you had the indications. You had no way of knowing. What if Flora had just lost his mind? What if he’d decided to try to kill us all?”

“I guess Flora was right,” said Morgan, grinning. “And so was I. So…I wonder what will happen on your watch?”

“We’ll see,” said Duggan. “Hopefully nothing.” He took a deep breath. “Lieutenant Morgan, I am ready to relieve you.”

“I’m ready to be relieved. Reactor is at 100% power, normal full power line up, reactor plant is in forced circulation, all main coolant pumps on fast. Keep an eye on the main engine bearings, and make sure someone takes McCormick some ice water in upper level, so he doesn’t pass out or puke.”

“Will do. I relieve you.”

“I stand relieved!” Morgan slapped him on the back and started to walk out.

“Ensign Duggan is the Engineering Officer of the watch,” he said. He wrote the time and same words on the EOOW’s log, his first entry as a qualified watch officer.

“Throttleman, aye.”

“Reactor operator, aye.”

“Electrical operator, aye.”

Morgan spoke from the other side of the chain. “Good luck, pal.”

“Thanks,” said Duggan. He watched him walk away, and a few seconds later heard the clank of the engine room watertight door. Morgan was gone, and Duggan felt the full weight and loneliness of being the sole officer in the engine room of a United States nuclear submarine. He reached below his small desk, where copies of all the reactor plant manuals and casualty procedures, thousands of pages of documentation, were kept. He pulled out one of the thicker books, opened it, and began to review the procedures for steam generator water level casualties.

•   •   •

As Jabo walked aft he was aware of the throbbing in the deck plates beneath his feet—it was the feeling of the boat moving very fast, a harmonic that ran through the very hull caused by both the friction of the cold sea against the ship and by every piece of machinery on the boat running at maximum speed. He’d never been on the boat when they ran so fast for so long. Or, for that matter, so deep for so long, the depth dictated by the submerged operating envelope. The boat was designed to operate at that speed indefinitely, of course, but it was just so unusual, after a few days it was unnerving, a feeling that the boat was frothing like an overworked horse, begging to catch her breath.

As he walked, he thought again about the nav, and all that had happened that patrol. That business about him stabbing himself in the leg; the talking to himself in the officer’s study, all the general weirdness. And now…a missing message hidden in his desk.

Jabo was glad he’d kept the folder with him, lest the message disappear again before he got a chance to talk to the captain. The word ‘evidence’ floated through his mind, and he thought again about another odd place the nav’s name had come up: on Howard’s yellow sheet of paper, where the sailor had been trying to compile evidence (that word again) to exonerate himself.

Jabo arrived in Machinery Two, nodded at Renfro, who was exhausted and trying to stay awake by the oxygen generators.

“You doin’ alright, Renfro?”

“Fuck no, sir. You ever been port and starboard this long? It kinda sucks.”

He pointed to the deck. “Anybody down there?”

Renfro nodded. “No, all that exercise shit is still tagged out. Not that anybody has the energy or the time to work out right now anyway.”

Jabo climbed down the ladder into the lower level.

The treadmill was silent, a red DANGER tag hanging from its switch. Jabo walked over to it, read the tag. Signed by the corpsman, which was unusual, within hours of Howard’s death and the Freon casualty. He checked his watch; the navigator wanted to meet him in the captain’s stateroom in about two minutes. Jabo’s confidence was building, and he didn’t want to get their meeting started by arriving late.

He hesitated at the treadmill, and then on impulse flipped the switch to
ON
, in violation of the danger tag. All the lights on the console came on, and then the readout began to scroll. WORKOUT COMPLETE….10.0 MILES….WORKOUT COMPLETE…

He stepped off the treadmill and thought it over. Kincaid was right…he was the only person on the boat that would put those kind of miles on the treadmill in one workout. Certainly the navigator hadn’t devoted that kind of time to running in his pristine running shoes. So Kincaid
had
been the last person to run before the Freon casualty and the treadmill got tagged out. And yet…the navigator had been down there, in his workout gear, right before the Freon casualty. His presence down there had seemed notable enough for Howard to write down in the logs. And now it seemed the navigator hadn’t even exercised while he was there. Which begged the question…what had he been doing in Machinery Two?

Jabo suddenly felt the clipboard in his hands again, and he opened it up to the Freon message. He noticed for the first time that there was another message on the page behind it. He read the subject line: NOTICE TO MARINERS, and got about halfway though the body where a chart number was highlighted: JO90888. Jabo remembered the faded pencil line of their track on the chart, and the slight adjustment the navigator had made for no apparent reason.

He lunged toward the 4MC against the starboard bulkhead, lifted the handset and shouted into it.

“Rig for collision!” he shouted. “Kincaid, get shallow now!”

He ran forward, as fast as he could, his feet pounding heavily on the lower level deck plates. He now understood why the navigator had wanted him to wait ten minutes.

•   •   •

Duggan was stooped over, returning the casualty procedures to their place beneath his desk, when the amplified voice of Jabo came across the 4MC speaker behind him.

“RIG FOR COLLISION! KINCAID, GET SHALLOW NOW!”

Duggan jumped to his feet, all the watchstanders sat straight in their chairs, their eyes alert, scanning their panels. He turned slightly to his right, to an analog depth gage. He felt a slight up angle in his feet, and the ship’s depth, at that speed, responded quickly. The needle began to move counter-clockwise as the ship drove upwards. Duggan waited for something to happen.

The ship collided with an underwater mountain, and everything went dark.

T
he seamount that
Alabama
struck was shaped like a tree stump, a flat-topped ocean floor feature called a
guyot
. Made out of dark brown volcanic basalt that had hardened into place a million years before, it was slightly over 10,000 feet high, but it was atop and in the center of a much larger, much rounder feature that rose from the sea floor. It had all only recently been identified by oceanographers, mapped in precise detail by the oceanographic research vessel
White Holly
three weeks before the collision.
White Holly
had meticulously mapped the guyot and transmitted the results to the NOAA, which in turn transmitted the information to the mariners of the world so they might update their charts. With the exception of the precisely aimed beams of sound from the
White Holly’s
fathometers, no part of the mount had ever been touched by man until the
Alabama
crashed into it, eighteen thousand tons of steel travelling faster than twenty knots.

Thanks to Jabo’s 4MC announcement, and Kincaid’s quick reaction to it, the ship had achieved a slight up angle and some slight upward momentum, which reduced fractionally the total amount of force transmitted through the hull. The ship struck the seamount with its front, port side.

The first thing damaged was the forwardmost part of the ship: the fiberglass dome that protected the sonar sphere. Dome and sphere were ripped from the hull.

Next, the three front main ballast tanks hit. These tanks were always exposed to sea pressure, designed to be either all the way empty, when the ship was surfaced, or all the way full of seawater, when the boat was submerged. As the collision crushed them, it didn’t flood the
Alabama
, but it did greatly affect the ship’s ability to come to the surface, as they could no longer expel water from them and completely fill them with air, to make the ship buoyant. But the tanks did save the ship in another way. By absorbing so much of the shock, they functioned like the crumple zones on a car, absorbing energy even as they were destroyed, so that when the ship’s pressure hull finally came in contact with the hard basalt, it was not breeched, and the “people tank” remained largely in tact. The ship came to a complete, sudden halt.

Most of the immediate damage to the ship was done by that sudden deceleration. Since the ship’s equipment was designed to withstand the shock of battle, the pumps, motors, and electrical panels remained safe. A breaker on the propulsion lube oil system did trip, momentarily causing the throttles to shut. Two pitometers, eighteen inch rods that struck from the bottom of the ship and measured speed through the water, were sheered off, which problematically caused every digital indicator inside
Alabama
to show that the ship was still travelling at Ahead Flank even has it sat motionless near the ocean bottom. But other than that, at the moment of impact, the machinery of the
Alabama
held up remarkably, miraculously, well.

The human beings of the
Alabama
suffered more damage. In general, men who were sitting down or in their racks withstood the collision with few injuries. Men who were walking through the ship were less fortunate, at the mercy of where they were on the boat, and, most importantly, what piece of equipment was directly in front of them as they were propelled forward into it by the ship’s sudden stop. Hallorann, in Machinery One, was saved from crashing into the diesel engine by the navigator, as he collided with his swinging body and held on.

Chief Palko, the ship’s leading electrician, fractured his skull as he was thrown against the bulkhead between the missile compartment and the forward compartment. He’d been going forward to the scullery with a toolbox in hand to take a look at one of the ship’s two dishwashers, which had stopped running during the night. After the collision, he lay groaning, unconscious, bleeding from his nose and ears.

Two crewmen were killed within seconds of the impact. Missile Technician Third Class Simpson had been standing atop the ladder from Missile Compartment Third Level to Lower Level when the collision occurred. Out of every eighteen hour period at sea, Simpson roamed the missile compartment for six, a billy club on his belt and a clipboard in his hand, watching over all twenty-four missiles much like a zookeeper watches his animals, monitoring their temperature, their humidity, and their general well-being. He was preparing to climb down into missile compartment lower level when the ship hit. He was thrown forward, then fell down the ladder. His chin struck the deck plate just forward of the ladder, snapping his head back as he fell and breaking his neck. He was dead before he hit the deckplates.

The other death was Petty Officer Juani, the torpedoman on watch whom Hallorann had seen laughing at his computer screen immediately before discovering the dying navigator. Earlier that watch he’d done some minor maintenance on one of the idle torpedo trays, re-attaching a nylon roller that had come loose during the last time they “indexed” the torpedoes, or moved them around the space. While he had placed the large tool box back in its proper position, he had failed to lash it in place with the nylon straps that were there for that purpose. When the ship hit the seamount, the tool box shot forward, aimed at Juani’s skull with an assassin’s precision. His entire head was flattened, and he was dead without ever realizing what had happened.

Almost everyone not hurt critically was shaken or dazed. As quickly as they could, they picked themselves up, and without waiting for an alarm or an announcement, moved toward their stations to fight to save the ship.

•   •   •

The hull itself was badly deformed where it struck the seamount, but remained intact, a testament to the overcaution of the submarine’s designers and the strength of HY80 steel. A large breech through the actual wall of the hull would have been impossible to staunch, and the forward compartment, at that depth, would have filled completely with seawater in minutes until the ship could never rise again. In the language of submarine design, the ship didn’t have enough “reserve buoyancy” to overcome a completely flooded forward compartment, even with an emergency blow of all main ballast tanks, even if all the main ballast tanks had survived the collision.

But along the port side of the ship, one of the ship’s four torpedo tubes was deformed, its perfectly circular opening pushed into an oval, an oval that the round brass breech door no longer sealed. The sea pressure was so great at that depth that the water entered the hull through that crescent-shaped gap with an almost explosive force, a roar that sounded more like an oncoming freight train than flowing liquid. Seaman Hallorann, still clutching the navigator’s body a few feet away, heard it and assumed at first that it was a high pressure air leak, because that was the only sound he’d heard in his life that could compare. He let go of the navigator’s body, got to his feet, and stumbled into the torpedo room to fight the flooding.