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The torpedoman stood up and Hallorann replaced him, pumping until his arm felt like it would break. He started to notice, to his excitement, that the noise of rushing water was starting to decrease. The water was up to his waist now. But the sound got higher in pitch and lower in volume as he pumped, like they were pinching off the flow. Finally, the roar stopped.

“It’s shut!” said the torpedoman, pointing to an amber line on to the torpedo console. “It fucking worked…we cleared it, and now its shut!”

The space was filled with a huge, dangerous amount of water, water that sloshed with the slightest motion of the crippled ship. But after twenty-three minutes, they’d plugged the hole.

Hallorann slogged forward and picked up the 4MC, which was just inches above the water.

“This is Seaman Hallorann in the torpedo room,” he said. “The flooding is stopped.”

•   •   •

“Captain, the flooding is stopped,” said Kincaid, even though everyone in control had heard the report.

The captain said nothing, but continued running it all through his mind, still trying to calculate if the time had come to perform the complete emergency blow. He was convinced now that the front main ballast tanks had been nearly destroyed in the collision, meaning the blow would only get them about half the effective buoyancy that it might if the ship were intact.

Secondly, the flooding had stopped, and they were moving water off the boat. Getting shallow would make it easier to do this—the reduced sea pressure at a shallower depth would make the all the pumps that much more effective.

But the fire—that changed everything. They wouldn’t be able to ventilate until the fire was stopped and overhauled. Any sudden influx of fresh air could inflame the fire, or cause hot spots to reignite, like blowing on a campfire.

As much as it pained the captain to stay at this depth, in this damaged condition, they wouldn’t emergency blow. Not for the moment.

“Captain?” said Kincaid.

“Continue prosecuting that fire,” said the captain. “And get water off the boat.” He looked around control. “Has anybody seen the navigator?”

•   •   •

Jabo ran forward, squeezed down the ladder to Machinery One past two fire hoses that were heading for the same destination. Almost out of breath, he plugged his EAB into the manifold at the bottom of the ladder. He took in the scene.

The fire raged. Flames licked up the aft bulkhead, orange and blue, and the compartment was filling with thick black smoke. Six men on two hoses crowded the space, aiming water at the base of the flame. The beams of the battle lanterns criss-crossed the darkness randomly, cutting swaths through the smoke. Several crossed in front of the dead pale face of the navigator, the only human face visible in the compartment, as everyone else’s was covered by an EAB. His was covered in water that ran in dirty, sooty tracks down his cheeks. His neck had stretched since Jabo first saw him, it looked almost like he was leaning over to get a better look at the men who were fighting the damage he’d caused. The hose teams had organized themselves, one on each side of the hanging body. Jabo’s feet were freezing, his shoes soaked through. The rest of him cooked, the space was becoming a furnace. Jabo took a deep breath, unplugged, and moved forward, found the XO.

He tapped him hard on the shoulder. The XO looked at him, eyes fierce.

“Good!” he said. “Take over. Can you?”

Jabo nodded, holding up his bandaged hand.

“Lieutenant Jabo is the man in charge!” the XO announced. He unplugged and moved to control.

The hose teams moved in closer. Jabo could not see what was actually on fire, but he assumed that the electricity that had originally fed the fire was gone: hopefully Maneuvering had secured that machine immediately. But the original heat from that ground had been enough to set ablaze all the wiring and insulation inside the motor generator, and some of the insulation on the surrounding walls. A chunk of lagging fell off a pipe over their heads, almost at their feet, trailed by a shower of orange sparks. The hose team next to him quickly doused it with water. The nozzle man stomped on it, breaking it up into ash and embers.

The hose teams were not tiring, Jabo saw, they were fighting the fire with a fury.

“Stop!” said Jabo, tapping each nozzleman in the small of his back with his closed fist. They all threw the bails forward, and the gushing water stopped.

They waited a few minutes, hoping that the fire had stopped. But like a good campfire, a tendril of smoke came from what was left of the machine, the smoke turned dark, there was a pop, a flash, and then more flames.

Without waiting for Jabo’s order, both nozzle men threw open their hoses and doused the fire again. Jabo counted to five, then hit their backs again.

They waited again. This time, there was nothing. The room was now filled with a combination of thick smoke and steam, the water that had vaporized after hitting the flames; it was almost impossible to see anything. The battle lanterns could no longer penetrate the haze, each was just now a dull, smeared glow, like a tired sun behind fog. Jabo moved forward cautiously, felt his way forward with his bad hand. If he was going to get burned, shocked, or sliced, he wanted it to be the hand that was already fucked up. He knelt down, feeling everything, looking over the front part of the space.

He turned to the phone talker who was kneeling slightly behind the hose teams. The men stared at him wide-eyed, pointing their hoses at him like he was the condemned man in front of a firing squad. “To control,” he said. “The fire is stopped. Send in an overhaul team.”

He turned to the nearest nozzleman. “You’re the reflash watch.”

He nodded, breathless, too exhausted to acknowledge the order with words.

Jabo looked again at the dangling body of the navigator, then unplugged his EAB and walked to the ladder.

•   •   •

The XO stomped into control, covered in water and the stench of the fire. He stopped at the top of the ladder, plugged in his EAB, and took a few breaths, ready to report to the captain. Just as he was about to speak came the announcement that the fire has stopped.

He started to talk again but before he could, the captain held his hand up to silence him. Had he not been wearing his EAB, the XO would have known he was concentrating, looking at the CODC console in front of him.

The XO moved behind him: the screen was filled with columns of green numbers. The lower you looked, the more exotic the data became, derivatives of derivatives. First came depth, speed, then pitch, roll, acceleration on each axis, the rate of acceleration on each axis. They were almost motionless forward, the XO saw, but they were moving slightly upward. He could see from the history on the screen that this was a recent change: they were now positively buoyant. Books would be written, the XO knew, about why the captain hadn’t emergency blown immediately. Time would tell whether or not this was looked at as a wise decision or a disastrous one. The captain waited one more second, looking at the very bottom of the screen, where the rate of change of acceleration was increasing. They were accelerating, ever so slightly, in the upward direction. Then he saw something else, an asymptote they been approaching in the calculus of their motion through the sea. The captain stood up straight.

“Chief of the watch, emergency blow.”

“Emergency blow, aye sir.” The chief of the watch stood and this time threw open both chicken switches, the giant valve handles that channeled high pressure air into the main ballast tanks. It made a huge noise, and frost covered the valve handles as the giant pressure change reduced the temperature of the air that passed through. Almost immediately, the ship took a steep down angle, which was intuitively alarming for the experienced men in control: generally a downward angle meant you were travelling deeper. But in this case it was just because the forward main ballast tanks were nearly destroyed, and more air was filling the aft tanks, pulling that end of the ship higher.

The captain looked at the console again. They were zooming upward. And the rate was increasing. Once they started moving upward, they had another factor in their favor. The ship became more buoyant at shallower depths. As sea pressure decreased, the ship expanded, making it displace more water, and more buoyant.

“Five hundred feet, sir,” said the diving offer.

“Very well,” said the captain.”

“Four hundred…three hundred…two hundred…one hundred...”

There was a sound as the ship broke through the surface of the ocean, the sound of water breaking against the side of the hull. It crashed back down, then settled out.

“Raising number two periscope,” said Kincaid. He quickly spun around. “No close contacts!” he said.

There was a murmur of relief in control.

The captain turned to the XO. “Are you here to tell me what the hell is going on?”

“The navigator is hanging from a pipe in machinery one by his belt. Jabo tells me he did all this.”

The captain nodded, tried to digest what the XO had said. “Any reason you can think of we shouldn’t ventilate the ship?”

The XO turned to Lieutenant Maple, who was on the phones with Machinery One. “Hot spots?”

“They reported no hot spots while we were on our way up.”

The captain turned to Kincaid. “Prepare to ventilate with the low pressure blower—we’ll get the diesel up and running when we can, if we can. Who knows what the damage is down there.”

“Prepare to ventilate with the low pressure blower, aye sir.”

An ET leaned around from the small ESM console behind the conn. “Sir, I have a military freq broadcasting near us. Very near.”

“Jesus Christ,” said the XO. What next. A military frequency? He immediately thought of the Chinese.

“Bearing?” asked Kincaid, still rotating around on the scope. “I don’t see anybody.”

“It’s loud and clear!” said the ET, his code book in hand. “SUBSUNK!”

“It’s us,” sighed the captain. “The BST buoys. We’re the sunken submarine.”

•   •   •

Jabo was still in machinery one when Master Chief Cote showed up holding his Polaroid in one hand and a large knife in the other, something Jabo suspected he’d been taking to sea since Vietnam. He carefully took photos from every angle of the navigator’s lifeless body. Then they pulled a stool over from the diesel control panel, and Jabo held it steady as Cote climbed up, and slashed through the belt that held the navigator. The dead man landed on pointed toes, like a gymnast, and then fell straight over on his face with a splash. There was no hurry to get him out of there, and moving the body was a pain in the ass in EABs, but Jabo and the master chief did it anyway, both of them, without saying it, feeling it important to get him out of there. They got two men on the upper side of the ladder to help pull him up, and then wrestled him into the freezer, where they sat him next to the heavy green bag that held Howard, the first man he’d killed.

•   •   •

It took four hours to get all the water off the boat, with both trim pumps and the submersible pumps working in concert, very efficiently at the shallow depth. Wipe down teams went in with bags stuffed with rags afterward, still encumbered by their EABs, wiping up whatever trace of water that remained. As they did so, maneuvering kept close track of electrical grounds, which slowly climbed into the normal range as the ship dried out.

•   •   •

It took six hours to ventilate the ship to the point where EABs could be removed. When the word was passed, every man pulled his mask off and breathed in the fresh Pacific air that had displaced the smoke, fear, and steam that had filled their ship for so long. The men looked at each other, having not seen each others’ faces in many hours. Their eyes met briefly, knowingly. They allowed themselves to acknowledge what they had all just gone through, then looked away, eager to move on, eager to keep busy with the endless activity needed to restore the ship to normal.

•   •   •

Shortly after EABs were removed, Jabo climbed the ladder in the middle of the control room, ready to shift the watch topside, to the bridge. There had been a lively debate about this in control. The XO thought they should keep the ship buttoned up, keep the watch in control, afraid that if the ship went down again with the bridge open, for any reason, they would not recover. The captain, on the other hand, wanted real human eyes topside as long as they were travelling under their own power, and was confident, after six hours, that the ship was securely on the surface. As was typical in these types of debates…the captain won.

Jabo would be the first on the bridge. He climbed until he could reach the opening ring of the lower hatch, spun it all the way counter-clockwise. Then he climbed another step, so he could push his shoulder against the hatch. A slight difference in pressure had developed between the ship and the world, and it took all of Jabo’s considerable strength to move the hatch against it. As it opened a crack, warm air rushed in, as if the giant ship were taking a deep breath.

The interior of the bridge trunk was lit by a single yellow bulb. It smelled good, like the sea, the smell of being close to home, because that was generally the only time the ship was surfaced, at the very beginning and the very end of patrol. He scurried up the next ladder, to the upper hatch. He spun the ring and opened it, revealing a circle of blindingly bright daylight above him. He climbed up a third ladder, toward the light.

As he climbed, something glistening in the dark cavity behind the rungs caught his eye.

He reached through with his damaged, left hand. He felt something slimy against the small bare patch of un-bandaged skin on his palm. He pulled the flashlight off his belt, curious, and looked again.

It was a small octopus, its head about the size of a grapefruit. It legs were writhing, trying to escape in a panic. It had found its way into the bridge trunk somehow, and was stranded when they surfaced. Jesus Christ, thought Jabo, startled, he’d never seen that before. It was a patrol of firsts. He carefully reached through the rungs and grabbed it, palming it like a basketball, and scooped it toward him. He held it against his stomach as he climbed the ladder the rest of the way, feeling its legs beating helplessly against his stomach. The thing was soft but strong, like one big muscle.