And Captain Judd Crocker was darned proud of her. “Never been a submarine to match this one,” he would say. “And I doubt there ever will be. Not in my lifetime.”
And that was worthwhile praise. The son of a surface ship admiral, grandson of another, he had been born into a family of Cape Cod yacht racers, and he had been around boats of all sizes since he could walk. He never inherited his father’s unique talents as a helmsman, but he was good, better than most, though destined always to be outclassed by the beady-eyed Admiral Nathaniel Crocker.
Judd was 40 years old now. A lifelong submariner, he had served as Seawolf’s first Executive Officer back in 1997 and commanded her five years later. He received his promotion to Captain just before she came out of overhaul, and resumed command in the high summer of the year 2005.
That was the culmination of all his boyhood dreams, and the culmination of a plan he had made at the age of 15 when his father had taken him out to watch the annual race from Newport around Block Island and back. The admiral was not racing himself, but he and Judd were guests on board one of the New York Yacht Club committee boats. It was a day of intermittent fog out in the bay, and several competitors had trouble navigating.
Even Judd’s committee boat was a little wayward in the early afternoon, straying too far southwest of the island, about a half mile from the point of approach of a 7,000-ton Los Angeles-class submarine rolling past on the surface toward the Groton submarine base. The sun was out at the time, and Judd had watched through binoculars one of the great black warhorses of the U.S. Navy. He was transfixed by the sight of her, noting the number 690 painted on her sail. He almost died of excitement when a couple of the officers on the bridge waved across the water to the committee boat. And he had stared after the homeward-bound USS Philadelphia long after she became too small to identify on the horizon.
Submarines often have that effect on nonmilitary personnel. There is a quality about them, so profoundly sinister, so utterly chilling. And Judd had gazed upon the ultimate iron fist of U.S. sea power with barely contained awe. In his stomach there was a tight little knot of apprehension, except that he knew it was not really apprehension. It was fear, the kind of fear everyone feels when a 100 mph express train comes shrieking straight through a country railroad station, a shuddering, ear-splitting, howling display of monstrous power that could knock down the station and half the town if it ever got out of control. The difference was that the submarine achieved the same effect in menacing near-silence.
Judd Crocker was not afraid of the submarine. He was fascinated by a machine that could demolish the city of Boston, if it felt so inclined. And as he turned back to the infinitely lesser thrills of the yacht race, he was left with one thought in his mind. What he really wanted was to drive the USS Philadelphia, and that meant the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis three years hence. From that moment on, Judd never took his eye off the ball, which was why, a quarter of a century later, he commanded the most awesome submarine ever to leave a shipyard.
“Conn — Captain…reduce speed to twenty knots. Five up to five hundred feet…right standard rudder…steer course two-two-zero.”
Judd’s commands were always delivered in a calm voice, but there was pressure behind the words, betraying not anxiety, but the fact that he had given the matter careful thought before speaking.
“Conn, aye, sir.”
Judd turned to his XO, Lt. Commander Linus Clarke, who had just returned from a short conference with the engineers.
“Everything straight down there, XO?”
“Minor problem with a jammed valve, sir. Chief Barrett freed it up. Says it can’t happen again. We going deeper?”
“Just a little for the moment, but I want her at one thousand feet a couple of hours from now.”
They were a hugely unlikely combination in command, these two. The captain was a barrel-chested man, a shade under six feet tall, with a shock of jet-black hair, inherited from his mother’s Irish antecedents. Jane Kiernan had also bequeathed to him her deep hazel-colored eyes and the carthorse strength of the male members of her family, farmers and fishermen from the wild windswept outer reaches of Connaught on Ireland’s western shores.
Judd was a rock-steady naval commander: experienced, cool under pressure, and self-trained in the art of avoiding panic in any of its forms. He was popular with his crew of 100-plus because his reputation and record demanded respect, and because his presence, a mixture of imperturbable confidence, professional approach, and great experience, all leavened with a quiet sense of humor, inspired total trust.
He knew as much as any of his expert crew, and often more. But he still took care to show that he valued their work and opinions. He would mildly set them straight only when strictly necessary — often with an apparently simple and innocuous question that would cause his adviser to think again, and work it out for himself. He was anyone’s idea of the perfect commanding officer.
Judd had high qualifications in hydrodynamics, electronics, propulsion, and nuclear physics. His appointment to command Seawolf had come directly from the top, from Admiral Joe Mulligan, the Chief of Naval Operations, in person, himself a former nuclear submarine commander.
The reasons behind Linus Clarke’s recent appointment as Captain Crocker’s executive officer were less apparent. The lieutenant commander was only 34, and he was known to have served for several months with the CIA at Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. No one ever asked anyone precisely what he had been doing there. But serving naval officers with Intelligence backgrounds were rarely appointed second-in-command on big nuclear attack submarines.
Linus wore his mild celebrity with relish. He was a tall, slim Oklahoman with dead-straight floppy reddish hair. And he wore it rather longer than is customary among the disciplined officer corps of the U.S. Navy. But his rise had apparently been consistent, and he had graduated from Annapolis in the top quarter of his class. But no one was interested then, and he managed to disappear very successfully for a few years before emerging from the portals of the CIA with a rather mysterious reputation.
There was a total of 14 officers in the wardroom of USS Seawolf, and while it was obvious that each of them knew something about Lt. Commander Clarke, no one quite knew everything. Except for Captain Crocker. And, like the rest of them, he avoided the subject. Among the enlisted men there was a certain amount of chatter, principally emanating from a seaman in the ship’s laundry who claimed that the name on the XO’s dog tags was not Linus Clarke. But he could not remember what the name was, and he was thus only half-believed. Nonetheless, there was chatter.
Linus himself was naturally rather secretive, and he added to this by adopting a measure of irony to his conversation, a thin, knowing smile decorating his wide, freckled face. He also adopted the slightly self-serving attitude of one who is a bit too daring and adventurous to spend a long time in the company of the hard, realistic men who handle the frontline muscle of the U.S. Navy. He undoubtedly saw himself as Hornblower, as opposed to Rickover.
A typical Clarke entrance to the wardroom would be, “Okay men, has there been any truly serious screwup you need me to sort out?” He always grinned when he said it, but most people thought he meant it anyway.
One week after his appointment to Seawolf, still moored in San Diego, there had been a small cocktail party ashore. After three quite strenuous glasses of bourbon on the rocks, Lt. Commander Clarke had ventured up to his new captain and confided, “Sir, do you actually know why I have been detailed to your ship?”
“No, can’t say I do,” replied Judd.
“Well, sir, we’re going on a highly classified mission, and as you know, I’ve been on similar missions before. Basically, I’m here to make sure you don’t screw it up. You know, for lack of experience.”
Captain Judd Crocker gazed at him steadily, concealing his total disbelief that any jumped-up two-and-a-half, even this one, would dare to speak to him in such a way. But he rose above it, smiled sardonically, and dec
lined to say what he really thought—Oh, really? Well, I’m deeply comforted to have such a rare presence on board.
At that moment, Linus Clarke made a mental note to be extra careful in all of his dealings with the commanding officer in the future. To himself, he thought, This is one cool dude…I thought my little speech might throw him a little…but it sure didn’t.
He was correct there. Judd Crocker had been around ranking admirals all of his life, men of enormous intelligence. He had sailed the East Coast with the heavyweight financiers of the New York Yacht Club, crewing on the annual summer cruise up the New England coast, and sometimes navigating all the way up to the glorious archipelago of the Maine islands. Since he was a boy, and even when he was a midshipman, he’d sat in some of the most expensive staterooms in some of the biggest oceangoing yachts in the United States, and listened to conversations of great moment. It would take rather more than an insolent, smartass remark by a slightly drunk lieutenant commander to unnerve him. But he assumed, too, that young Clarke had also had his share of company with the great and the mighty.
Nonetheless, they did not form what the Navy traditionally hopes will become a natural trusting partnership in command of a ship that had cost something close to the national debt.
Beyond the Silent Service, Judd Crocker was married to the former Nicole Vanderwolk, 10 years his junior and the daughter of the redoubtable Harrison Vanderwolk, a big-hitting Florida-based financier with major holdings in three states. Like the Crockers, the Vanderwolks had a waterfront summer house on toney Sea View Avenue in Osterville, a couple of doors down from the former residence of the U.S. Army’s youngest-ever general, “Jumping” Jim Gavin of the 82nd Airborne, legend of the Normandy landings.
The Vanderwolks, the Gavins, and the Crockers were lifelong friends, and when Judd married Nicole it was cause for a mass celebration in a yellow-and-white-striped tent, the size of the Pentagon on the sunlit shores of Nantucket Sound.
Unhappily, they were unable to have children, and in 1997, shortly after Judd was appointed to Seawolf, they adopted two little Vietnamese girls, ages three and four, renaming them Jane and Kate. By the turn of the century they were all ensconced in another waterfront property out on Point Loma in San Diego, both sets of parents having clubbed together to buy the $2 million home as an investment while Judd was stationed on the West Coast under the command of the Submarine Force U.S. Pacific Fleet (SUBPAC). The deal was simple: When it was time to sell, the admiral and Harrison would receive $1.1 million each. Judd and Nicole would keep the change. The way things were going in the California real estate market, Judd and Nicole were winning, hands down.
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 on
e 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.
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