Phoenix Sub Zero

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Sure, Captain. But he’ll need depth control to do it. He’s not going anywhere without us flooding a depth-control tank to take some of the buoyancy off.” “Okay,” Kane said. “We’ll get ready to flood a DCT manually , or we can rig up the ballast-control panel so it’ll work.”

  “How will he know where to go?” Mcdonne said. “He’s got no compass back there.”

  “We’ll tell him,” Kane said. “We may not have a phone but we’ve got something just as good.”

  “What, sir? Tomato-soup cans and string? If we were surfaced we could just walk outside the hull and bang on his hatch and set up the soup

  cans, but we’ve got a hundred-foot-thick ice raft between us and the surface.”

  “You forgot the underwater telephone, XO.”

  Mcdonne looked stunned. The UWT system was an active sonar hydrophone that broadcast the human voice instead of pings or pulses. “You think the UWT works?

  Damn, maybe you’re right. Let’s power it up and see what we can—hey, wait, we don’t have AC power. It won’t work on DC.” “Yes it will,” Sanderson said from behind them. “As soon as I make some changes in its wiring. All I’ve got to do is retie in the static inverter to the battery supply and hardwire and fuses. Well, there’s more to it, but in three or four hours we’ll have a UWT.”

  “If we can stay warm that long,” Mcdonne said.

  “Break out the parkas, Houser,” Kane ordered. “Grab all the sweaters, sweatshirts and long Johns you can find.”

  “Yes sir,” Houser said, vanishing out the forward door after Sanderson.

  “Let’s hope,” Mcdonne said, “that Engineer Schramford back aft is reading from the same script we are.”

  A hundred feet aft, in the engineroom, Lt. Comdr. Tom Schramford lay facedown in a rapidly cooling pool of blood.

  USS seawolf apt hull section Pacino looked at Vaughn. Both had thrown up. The men still alive, some eighty of them, were gathered in the more open spaces of the top deck of the compartment, between the quiet turbine generators and the main engines.

  “What is it, XO?” His voice sounded dead. His hearing was coming back, but too slowly.

  “Atmosphere,” Vaughn said. “Must be contaminated.”

  “Let’s try the emergency air masks.”

  As the men rummaged for masks, four more of the survivors threw up. Once in his mask, Pacino had a new unhappy thought … trussed up in masks, the breathing air bottles aft wouldn’t last long with them all sucking from them. They needed time, time to be rescued. It could take two days to get a DSRV to them to pull them out, assuming someone knew they were there and still alive.

  “Skipper,” Vaughn shouted. “We need to be thinking about a sub escape.”

  Pacino stared at Vaughn. It would be suicide. There was no way a body could do a free ascent from … what was it … a thousand feet, and live. If it wasn’t just the pressure effects, what about the water temperature and hydrothermia?

  Popping up through the water at twenty feet per second in twenty-eight-degree water would be enough to cool a person’s core body temperature so fast that they’d all be ice cubes by the time they got to the surface. Pacino had heard the stories of patients in cold water surviving without air for forty-five minutes, but rescue might be days away, not minutes.

  There would be no one standing by topside.

  And what about ice cover? There was no guarantee they were below open water. Since it was shallow, it might have frozen more quickly. There might be an ice floe a hundred feet thick waiting for them. If they bonked their heads into it at twenty feet per second, it wouldn’t matter if it were 100 feet thick or a half-foot thick, it would do the same damage—collision and drowning. And even if that weren’t the case, what if the Steinke hoods didn’t work? A tear in one of the air hoods would fill with water and leave a man 1,000 feet underwater with no air. That was no way to die.

  Even if that weren’t a problem, what would they do in the freezing water

  once they got out? Lie in the rafts with wet clothes, the arctic wind blowing over them, waiting to die of the cold?

  A submarine escape didn’t just postpone death, it was a terrifying way of bringing it on quicker. Pacino figured better to go from asphyxiation in the hull than trying such an escape.

  “We’d better think about the escape fast, sir,” Hobart said, not privy to Pacino’s thoughts. “These masks are fed into the same high-pressure bottles used on the escape trunk. We can either do an escape or sit here and suck air. We can’t do both. A sub escape means we go out in groups of eight.

  That’s ten fills and drains of the trunk, eighty Steinke hoods filled at high pressure. That’s about the same as all of us sucking this air for about thirty hours. And that’s about all we’ve got left. I don’t know about you. Skipper, but I’m with Mr. Vaughn. I’m ready to try an escape. If we make it to the surface maybe someone looking for us will pick us up. Down here we have zero chance. Even if we had a week of air we’d starve. And if we die in the escape … I’d rather die looking at clouds than this dead hull.”

  So Vaughn and Hobart wanted escapes, Pacino thought.

  Okay, they could have them. “Who else wants to try to go out the escape

  trunk?”

  Of the men crowded into the space, all but twelve raised their hands. Pacino stared. He looked around, saw Vaughn’s eyes, challenging. He knew he had no choice, he would go with the crew. In the last load. If they ran out of air, he would stay behind.

  “Okay,” he said. “It’s out the trunk. Engineer, you’ll do the honors?”

  “You got it. Captain. Let’s get the hell out of here, you know?”

  Chief Milo Nelson of the Phoenix had never seen himself as anything but a mechanic, a blue-collar worker in the Navy.

  The Navy had seen him as much more, every command offering him a shot at officer candidate school. He had the brains, the leadership, the character presumably needed to be an officer. He had avoided it, fighting it off. He didn’t want to be a damned officer and face the old man every day of his life. He wanted to work with the mechanics, turn the wrenches, keep his fingers dirty. Sitting in officers’ country, daintily drinking coffee from a cup and saucer, never saying “fuck” and competing with fresh-faced college-educated kids who thought they knew everything but were naive babes clawing their way up the Navy’s ladder? No way.

  Some might say that the idea of the heavier responsibility frightened him. He didn’t give a shit. He knew what he knew.

  Milo Nelson was the chief mechanic for Phoenix’s M-division, working for Lieutenant Houser and the engineer, who happened to be lying in a congealing puddle of his own blood in the maneuvering room waiting for the report from Nelson that the turbine generators were up and ready for loading. The torpedo blast had put Nelson down on the deck aft but had just shaken him up. Engineer Schramford some how had taken the hit hard, much harder than the enlisted man George Falsom, an electrician who was minding all three panels in the room. Falsom said that Schramford had been leaning around a panel, straining to see the progress of the engineroom crew, the torpedo coming closer, the captain on his case, when the blast hit, tripping him and knocking him into the side of the reactor-control panel. Somehow he had caught his head on a main coolant pump switch. The electrician Falsom had hit the deck, Schramford tumbling down on top of him after smacking his head on the pump switch.

  Nelson had been standing watch as engineering-watch supervisor, the senior roving enlisted man in the aft watch section. As such, he could start the engineroom by himself.

  In the dark. It hadn’t taken too long for him to determine that the RC was gone. He’d shut the steam bulkhead valves, stopping the seawater flooding down the steam headers.

  He’d tried the phones to the forward compartment with no results.

  In the maneuvering room he checked out the electric plant control panel, put the voltage selector to the battery, wondering if the wiring going forward had survived. He and Falsom held their b
reath as the voltage needle spun up to read 260 volts. At least they had indication.

  “Want to try it, Falsom?”

  “Why not. Chief?”

  Falsom reached out and rotated the battery breaker knob.

  He put the selector switch on the output of the breaker. It zipped 260 volts. It had worked. They had DC power aft.

  “So far, so good. Bring up the lights,” Nelson said.

  The lights flashed into fluorescence overhead, the patches of light from the battle lanterns no longer needed.

  “Think they came on up forward?”

  “Who knows?”

  “I’m gonna try the EPM and see if I can spin the shaft. If I can, we just might be able to get out of here.”

  “Assuming there’s somebody awake up front.”

  “Big assumption. I’ll be back …”

  When the lights came on in the forward compartment, Kane allowed a wide grin.

  “Hey, XO, Tommy Schramford has the stick. Now we just need to be able to talk to him.” XO Mcdonne said nothing, sweat pouring down his forehead in the frigid cold of the room.

  The lower hatch of the Seawolfs escape trunk opened, admitting eight men. The last in accepted the bundle of Steinke hoods from Hobart and shut the hatch. Pacino shivered as he thought about what was going on overhead, the trunk flooding with the frozen water, the men filling their hoods with compressed air, opening the upper hatch and swimming out into water a quarter-mile deep. Just before the last man went out he would signal Hobart, who would wait thirty seconds and shut the outer hatch with hydraulics. Then the whole process would start again. The second batch of eight men climbed the ladder to the trunk. More hoods. The hatch shut.

  Pacino wandered to the starboard side of the ship, to the signal ejector. He found the locker where he had stowed the four slot buoys and pulled out the one marked No. 4. There was no way to operate the signal ejector now, Pacino thought. There were no seawater systems with pumps pressurizing them to flush the buoy out of the tube. Someone would have to take it out the escape trunk with them. He returned to the base of the trunk, where the third batch of men were climbing the ladder. Henry Vale was the officer to go with this batch.

  “See you on top. Captain,” Vale said.

  “Good luck, Nav,” Pacino said, turning the slot buoy upside down and turning its transmitter on. He handed the buoy to Vale. “Take this up for me. Henry. It’s a distress signal.” “You had that preloaded, sir?” Vale asked, not sure what to make of it.

  “Yes, Nav,” Pacino said quietly. “Just in case. Now go on and I’ll see you in a few.”

  “Hope there’s water up there, not ice.” Vale crossed his fingers and looked around one last time. “Goodbye, Seawolf.” He disappeared up the ladder.

  Milo Nelson stood at the EPM. “I’ll be damned,” he mumbled to himself.

  “It works. Be a damned shame if there’s nobody in the front seat.”

  Up forward, Sanderson stepped into the control room, his hair sweat-soaked though the temperature had sunk to the thirties.

  “Captain, let’s try the UWT. We’ll either burn it to hell or it’ll work.”

  Kane picked up the microphone and waited while Sanderson flipped a toggle switch and adjusted the controls.

  Sanderson nodded, turning down the volume. Kane spoke into the mike.

  “AFT COMPARTMENT, AFT COMPARTMENT, THIS IS THE CAPTAIN. ENGINEER, THIS IS THE CAPTAIN.

  IP YOU CAN HEAR THIS, GET SOMETHING HEAVY AND TAP ON THE HULL TWICE.”

  Kane heard the echoes of his voice being broadcast to the ocean, bouncing off the bottom of the sea. Sanderson turned up the gain-knob on the panel, the speaker rasping the sounds of the ocean around them into the control room.

  They listened. Thirty seconds, a minute. Kane put the microphone up and sat down at one of the control chairs of the attack center. No one wanted to speak. Then, through the speakers, came the sound of two

  booming clunks. They had heard! Kane hurried back up to the conn and grabbed the microphone.

  “AFT COMPARTMENT, THIS IS THE CAPTAIN. IS THE EPM OPERATIONAL? KNOCK TWO TIMES FOR YES.”

  Again two clunks came over the speaker.

  “AFT COMPARTMENT, IN TWO MINUTES WE WILL FLOOD DEPTH CONTROL TO GET US DOWN. TAKE LOCAL CONTROL OF THE RUDDER AND STERNPLANES.

  PUT THE RUDDER OVER TWENTY DEGREES RIGHT AND PREPARE TO PUT ONE THIRD AHEAD TURNS ON THE EPM.”

  “Where’s Houser? XO, get depth-control one and two flooded quick as you can.”

  After hurrying out and back in, Mcdonne picked up a phone from the ballast-control panel, where he could talk to Houser, who was in the lower level machinery space. Mcdonne watched the tank levels rise, took a look at the depth meter at the ship-control panel and spoke again to Houser.

  Finally the depth gauge started to move, the depth increasing from 160 feet to 180, then 200. Mcdonne nodded to Kane.

  “AFT COMPARTMENT, CAPTAIN, ALL AHEAD ONE THIRD ON THE EPM, RIGHT TWENTY DEGREES RUDDER. USE THE STERNPLANES AS NEEDED TO LEVEL THE SHIP.”

  Mcdonne watched the ship-control panel indication as the ship turned, waiting for the compass to come around to the south. It took a long time but eventually the gyro read 180 degrees.

  “I’m gonna take a peek out the type twenty,” Kane said, raising the periscope. “It’ll be dawn soon. Maybe I’ll be able to tell when we’ve got open water overhead.”

  “Let’s hope we see it before the battery runs dry,” Mcdonne said. “We didn’t have much juice when that Nagasaki hit us, unless the Eng had some power up his sleeve.”

  The next batch seemed to go fast. Too fast. The crew in the space was thinning quickly. There were only twenty-four men left in the Seawolf’s engineroom. Another two batches through the trunk and it would be Pacino’s turn.

  He paced the aft compartment, knowing this would be the last time he’d see it. He plugged into a connection, took a breath and disconnected his hose, walked to the next station until he was far aft in the maneuvering space. The modem electronics were all dark, the space deserted and

  quiet. He sank in the control chair of the engineering officer of the watch and shut his eyes for a moment.

  “Sir?” Vaughn’s mask-distorted voice said at the door.

  “I’m here, XO.”

  “Last batch. Captain. We’re ready to go. The airbanks are down, sir. We might not even get this last group out. Once this batch goes, there won’t be any air left. We have to go now, sir.”

  Pacino felt like telling Vaughn he would stay anyway. The walk felt like a stroll to the gallows. Not a praying man, Pacino managed a few silent words, not wanting to go into the trunk.

  “We’re the last. Captain,” Vaughn said, pointing up the ladder.

  “Maybe you should go on ahead …”

  “Skipper, I read you, but we’re going to live, you’ve got to believe that …”

  “Lube Oil. Jack. I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but—”

  “Sir … Patch, listen to me.”

  Vaughn had never called him that before, Pacino thought.

  “Have you thought about the men upstairs, trying to survive, floating in those rafts? What do I tell them? What the hell do I tell themt That he was a cop-out, Pacino thought. A bullshit captain afraid to cast his lot with theirs. Maybe they would die up there but at least they deserved to die with their commanding officer. And he with them.

  “Okay, XO. You first.”

  Vaughn climbed up, discarding his mask and tossing it to the deck. Pacino did the same as he climbed the ladder and looked below at the battle-lantern-lit engineroom one last time. He climbed into the tight escape trunk, got out of the way of the hatch and shut it, the metal of it making a loud clunk against the steel of the hull.

  Saturday, 4 January labrador sea Kane could see the ice cover overhead, not with normal vision but with the low-light enhancer. The ice overhead looked thick.

  Back aft at the electric plant-control panel, the amp-hours clicked away,
the battery moving closer to exhaustion with every turn of the screw.

  Pacino took the plastic Steinke hood handed him by Vaughn and stood with the other men while Vaughn opened the valve to flood the trunk. The trunk was about ten feet in diameter, about ten feet tall, with a steel wall separating the upper portion from the approach to the upper hatch. The wall came down only a few feet, ending at chest level.

  Vaughn had his head inside the partitioned area as he operated the valves.

  The water that came in soaked into Pacino’s clothes, terribly cold, the water at that depth actually colder than ice water because of the salt in it. The water rose to his shins, and by that time his feet were already numb, his ankles beginning to get numb. The frigid water climbed to waist level, soaking the trousers of his poopysuit. The air in the space was getting foggy, its pressure rising, its temperature climbing from the compression, the odd effect of the hot humid air next to the freezing water filling the chamber with fog so dense that Pacino could no longer make out the upper hatch in the light of the twin battle lanterns. The water rose to his chest, and he could feel his heart pounding, working against the stress of the cold. When the water rose higher he heard Vaughn calling him into the partitioned area. Pacino crowded over with the rest of the men, the hot cloudy air and close quarters making it difficult to breathe. The water rose up to chin level.

  Vaughn’s voice sounded eerie in the highly pressurized space, its pressure equal to outside the ship. Without mixed gas for breathing, the oxygen in the space would become toxic in minutes. They had to get out or die here. Pacino’s feet and legs had left him long before. His hands were going and now even his torso was nearly numb.

  Vaughn filled the first man’s Steinke hood, the plastic going over the man’s head to chest level, a small clear plastic window in the mask showing the man’s pained face.

  “Don’t forget to scream all the way up,” Vaughn said.

  Vaughn hit a hydraulic lever that opened the upper hatch.

  Pacino could hear a bubbling sound as the trapped air out side the partition left the trunk. The chamber was now open to the sea, the surface 1,200 feet above, the only air what was trapped in the partition.