U.S.S. Seawolf (3 page)

The private life of Linus Clarke was rather more obscure. He was unmarried, but there were rumors of a serious girlfriend back at his family home in Oklahoma, a place to which Linus retreated at every available opportunity. He made the journey by commercial jet to Amarillo, Texas, and then used the small Beechcraft single-engine private plane owned by his father for the last northerly leg of the journey.

And once on the family cattle ranch, deep in the Oklahoma panhandle, Linus, as usual, disappeared. Given his family connections, it was not much short of a miracle that no word ever appeared about him, even in local newspapers. But perhaps even more unlikely was that he had always avoided the media during his tenure in Washington and at the Navy base in Norfolk, Virginia.

Judd Crocker thought it a major achievement by the young lieutenant commander, but of course, on a far grander scale the English royal family had been doing it for most of the century, effectively “hiding” sons Prince Charles and Prince Andrew for years while they served in the Royal Navy. It had been the same with King George V, of course, and Prince Philip. Indeed, Prince Andrew hardly had his photograph taken when he flew his helicopter off the deck of HMS
Invincible
during the Falklands War. It was the same with Linus Clarke. And he seemed determined to keep it that way.

And so the aura of mystique clung to him. On the lower decks the men knew who he was, and that he had CIA connections. But the subject was not aired publicly. In the wardroom he was watched carefully. It was an unspoken fact that no one wanted him to make a mistake.

“I guess,” remarked Lt. Commander Cy Rothstein, the combat systems officer, “we always have to remember just who he is.”

“That’s probably the one thing we ought to forget,”
replied the captain. “And we better hope he can, too. Clarke has a major job on this ship, whoever the hell he is.”

Right now, as
Seawolf
cruised through the pitch-black depths of the Pacific, still making 20 knots, Judd Crocker was preparing to go deeper, down to almost 1,000 feet, for the torpedo tube trials, another searching examination of the submarine’s fitness for frontline duty.

Behind Judd Crocker’s crew were weeks and weeks of meticulous checking in which every system in the ship had been tested at the primary, secondary and tertiary level. They’d completed their “Fast Cruise”—driving the systems hard while still moored alongside, still fast to the wall. They’d tested for “fire, famine and flood,” Navyspeak for any forthcoming catastrophe. They’d done all the drills, all the tuning, all the routines, checking and changing the water, changing the air, running the reactor, checking the periscopes, checking the masts.

They’d found defects. Engineers from
Seawolf
’s original builders, General Dynamics of New London, had been aboard for weeks, fixing, replacing, and adjusting. The process was exhaustive and meticulous, because when calamity comes to a submarine, the kind of calamity perhaps easily dealt with on a surface ship, it can spell the end for the underwater warriors. Laborious and time-consuming as sea trials may be, every last man in a submarine’s crew gives them 100 percent of their effort. Pages and pages of reports had been written, signed, and logged as they tested and retested.

Out here in the Pacific they were effectively going over all of the same ground again, the same stuff they had checked over and over on the Fast Cruise. But this time they were at sea, and that added a massive new dimension to the equation. Moreover, these tests would be conducted both dived and on the surface.

“
Conn—Captain. Bow down ten…one thousand feet…make your speed fifteen knots…right standard rudder…steer course three-six-zero
…”

Judd Crocker’s commands were crisp and clear, and
they all heard the slight change in the beat of the turbines as
Seawolf
slowed and slewed around to the north, heading down into the icy depths.

The captain turned to his XO and said, “I’m going to run those tube tests again. You might go up for’ard in a while and take a look. I still think those switches are awful close together.”

Fifteen minutes later, Linus Clarke made his way to the forward compartment, which housed the launching mechanisms for
Seawolf
’s principal weapon. By the time he arrived, Chief Petty Officer Jeff Cardozo had already supervised the loading, easing the torpedoes through the massive, round hinged door. The identical door at the seaward end of the tube was of course sealed shut, not only hydraulically, but also by the gigantic pressure of the ocean 1,000 feet down.

The really tricky part occurs next, when the air is vented out of the tube, ready for the tube’s flood valve to be opened to let seawater in. This will ultimately equalize the pressure inside the firing tube with that of the sea beyond the outer door. Chief Cardozo was on duty, eye-balling his tubes crew.

Nineteen-year-old Seaman Recruit Kirk Sarloos from Long Beach was at his post in front of the panel of switches that controls the torpedo systems. After flooding the tubes, equalizing the pressure inside with the sea pressure outside the hull, and opening the bow shutters, the brutally powerful pressurized air turbine system will blast the torpedoes out into the ocean without leaving as much as a bubble on the surface. When the missiles have warheads fitted—not today—that procedure will spell death. For someone.

“
Number one and number two tubes ready for flooding
…”

“
FLOOD NUMBER ONE TUBE
…!”

Kirk hit the two switches for number one tube, listening to the hiss of air forced out through the vent by the water rushing in through the flood valve. He shut both
valves as he heard the hiss turn to a gurgling, crackling noise when the last of the air was displaced by seawater. He hit a third switch, equalizing the pressures in case she changed depth.

“
NUMBER ONE TUBE EQUALIZED
,” he called. “
FLOOD AND VENT VALVES SHUT
.”

“
Open number one tube bow doors
.”

Again Kirk hit a switch. “
Number one bow door and shutter open
.”

Number one tube was now ready to fire.

“
FLOOD NUMBER TWO TUBE
.”

Kirk’s eyes scanned the switchboard, and he flipped both switches. Except he hit the flood-and-vent switches for number one tube by mistake, and a steel bar of water blew clean through the open valve and caught him hard in the upper chest, the colossal force hurling him 10 feet back across the compartment into a bank of machinery. At this depth the pressure behind the water was equal to around 30 atmospheres.

A lethal inch-wide column of ocean was blasting straight into the casing of the torpedo-loading gear, breaking up into a fine dense mist of blinding water particles. Kirk lay motionless, facedown in the deafening thunder of the incoming ocean. It was like a roar from the core of the earth, a hiss that sounded like a shriek, as the single jet dissolved into a lashing white screen of spray, completely obscuring everything. In that hell-kissed compartment, the three men couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, and couldn’t be heard.

Chief Cardozo knew where Kirk was, and he covered his eyes from the sting of the spray. With his head down he struggled through the water. It was 15 feet but seemed like 15 miles, pushing forward in the disorienting blindness of the flood. He grabbed the young seaman and somehow dragged him clear of the blast of seawater. Kirk was groggy, but he hadn’t drowned.

Lt. Commander Clarke, unfamiliar with the sheer force of the ocean at this depth, grabbed the nearest inter
com and yelled, “
WE HAVE A MAJOR LEAK FOR’ARD. BLOW ALL MAIN BALLAST AND SURFACE, CAPTAIN. FOR CHRIST’S SAKE
…” He exited the torpedo room and raced up to the conn.

Captain Crocker, surprised at the unorthodox intervention of his XO, but aware now that there was a problem, overruled his number two. “
I HAVE THE CONN. PLANESMAN…BELAY THAT ORDER…TEN UP…MAKE YOUR DEPTH TWO HUNDRED FEET
…”

Now in the conn, Lt. Commander Clarke could not believe his ears. Agitated, his ears still ringing from the shattering blast of the leak, he turned to the chief of the boat, the senior enlisted man aboard the submarine, now in the control room, Master Chief Petty Officer Brad Stockton from Georgia.

“Is he crazy? This submarine is sinking. We’ve got an unbelievable leak in the torpedo room. Jesus Christ! We gotta get to the surface.”

“Easy, sir,” replied the veteran master chief. “The boss knows what he’s doing.”

Linus Clarke stared at Brad in disbelief. “That water’s gonna sink us. He hasn’t seen it. I have.” And he turned as if to argue further with his captain. But the master chief grabbed his arm in a steel grip and hissed, “STEADY, SIR.”

Judd Crocker turned to his XO and quietly asked, “Did you shut the bulkhead door behind you?”

Linus Clarke hesitated, and then admitted, “Er…nossir.”

“Good,” said the CO. “Check it’s still open.”

Linus began to wonder if he could get anything right today, and moved off to check the door.

Judd Crocker turned to the combat systems officer now standing beside him, Lt. Commander Cy Rothstein, the smooth, composed intellect of the ship, known locally as “Einstein.”

“This may be quite minor, Cy,” he said. “I just want to
cool it. I know a leak at depth is unnerving. But I can’t feel the pressure increasing in my ears. And look at the barometer. No change. Even if we are taking on water, the flow rate is small, the leak is small. Right now I have to conclude it’s not sinking us.

“I don’t know how bad it is down there, Cy. But the trim’s not altering significantly. I’m damn sure it’s not going to sink us in the next twenty minutes. Go deal with the problem. Aside from a lot of noise and flooding, which we seem to be coping with, there’s nothing disastrous happening…yet. So let’s not act as if there is. Because that way we might make it worse.”

“Aye, sir.”

Both men knew that only the most thorough mental preparation by the CO for all imaginable eventualities will ultimately ensure the survival of the crew. Fear is the enemy when things go wrong, because panic follows fear, and inappropriate reaction follows panic. Confusion follows that, with disaster close behind them all. Judd Crocker knew the rules. Especially the unwritten ones.

At this point Master Chief Stockton and Linus Clarke reentered the control room.

“Hi, Brad. How do we look?”

“It’s only a tube vent valve, sir. We don’t have a hole punched in the hull or anything. It’s just a matter of shutting the damn thing and then getting the water pumped out.”

“Someone make the wrong switch?”

“Guess so.”

“Schulz got it in hand?”

“I wouldn’t say that, sir. But he’s on the case.”

Meanwhile the water continued to blast through the valve and into the torpedo room, the water eventually collecting in the bilges. The engineers worked to close the valve. But the entire electric system in the torpedo room was blown, so it had to be done by hand. Which was incredibly difficult because it was so close to the steel bar
of water, which was prone to knock men clean across the compartment.

However great, however small, a leak at depth in a submarine plants fear in the minds of the men who operate her. There was already, inevitably, only one word in the minds of some of them:
Thresher
, SSN 593, the Navy’s most advanced and complex attack submarine, which sank with all hands 200 miles off Cape Cod on April 10, 1963.

Every submariner knew the story, and in several minds there were already alarming similarities.
Thresher
had gone to the bottom with her entire crew within 10 minutes of incurring a major unstoppable leak in her engine room. The men of
Seawolf
had now been working for seven minutes, and that span of time gave them room to think about one of the Navy’s worst-ever disasters, the loss, 42 years earlier, of the top American nuclear submarine because of a leak during her sea trials in the deep submergence phase.
Jesus, was this creepy, or what
?

The U.S. Navy’s final report on the loss was required reading among officers and irresistible to the men. It laid the likely and primary blame on a catastrophic failure of the casting of a big hull valve that effectively left tons of water bursting every second through a 12-inch-diameter hole in the pressure hull. There was no way to shut the valve off. There was no valve left.

On that fatal spring morning in 1963, the submarine hit the bottom and broke up minutes after it first reported a problem to its accompanying warship USS
Skylark
. Sixteen officers, 96 enlisted men, and 17 civilian engineers perished with her. And like
Seawolf
, she was, without doubt, the best submarine in the U.S. Navy.

The captain too had allowed the apparition of the sinking
Thresher
to flicker across his mind. But being Judd Crocker, he was able to discard it almost instantly. Not so Lt. Commander Linus Clarke. “My God, sir,” he blurted. “I implore you to take this ship to the surface.”

The CO stared at his number two. “XO, take the conn. Slow down to ten knots. Clear your baffles and come to periscope depth…then prepare to surface if I so order. I’m going for’ard to inspect the damage. You have the ship.”

“Aye, sir, I have the ship.”

Judd Crocker could see that the XO’s mouth was dry, and there was a strange cast to Linus’s voice as he ordered, “
Helmsman—XO. Make your speed ten…right standard rudder, come to course one-two-zero. Sonar-conn…clearing baffles prior to coming to periscope depth
.”

Judd never even bothered to change into seaboots, just made his way for’ard, pondering, as all COs might do at times such as these, why
Thresher
had imploded and crashed to the bottom with such alarming speed: first indication of a problem 0913, slammed into the seabed 8,000 feet below at 0918.

Seawolf
’s CO had always had his own private theories as to why the disaster occurred with such terrifying swiftness. First, he believed that the old method of linking alarm systems was a truly lousy idea, because one instantly triggered the next, which triggered the next, which ended up with an automatic reactor scram when the power cut out.