The sun climbed above the horizon, its glare shimmering over the calm water of the western Pacific. The water was a tranquil deep blue, mirroring the sky above. No land was visible; there were no ships. Only the vast stretches of ocean stretching from horizon to horizon. Beneath the calm surface the underside of the waves appeared silvery, reflecting some of the light back deep. The water was so clear that the surface could be seen down to a hundred feet. Below that, there was diffuse light enough to see fifty feet in any direction, but the underside of the gentle waves above could no longer be made out.
At a depth of two hundred and ten feet, the temperature of the water suddenly changed from the lukewarm water of the Pacific in spring to the frigid cold of the sea below, the deep water unaffected by sun or waves. At three hundred feet the light was barely enough to equal that of a flickering candle. Deeper, at four hundred feet, all light from the surface was blocked and the sea was darker than a coal mine. At five hundred feet, the water temperature was a fraction of a degree above freezing, the sun above no longer a factor. At a thousand feet, the weight of the water above caused the pressure to be thirty times atmospheric pressure, enough to crush all but the most primitive life forms. Here the water was undisturbed by currents, fish, sound or light. It was a world more dead, more hostile than the surface of the moon.
The nuclear submarine cruising at this depth was invisible, no light to show the three-hundred-sixty-foot length of her hull, the thirty-three-foot diameter cylindrical black pipe narrowing to a cone at the rear and to a bullet-nose at the bow. No light showed the conning tower presiding over the cylinder of the hull. The conning tower, the “sail,” was a fin of black steel that afforded visibility for navigating the vessel on the surface and housed the periscopes and antennae — her vital sensors that could scan the world on the surface from the protection of the deep.
Inside the cylindrical pressure hull of the ship, beneath the sail, the forward compartment’s upper deck was subdivided into rooms, most of which were full of watch standers doing the routine duty of driving the huge nuclear ship deep below the surface. In the control room, the Officer of the Deck stared at the firecontrol screens and the sonar repeater monitor, bored now that no surface or submerged contacts were being tracked. Forward of the control room, the sonar room was quiet, filled with consoles and screens and enlisted sonar men one with headsets scanning the passive towed array narrow-frequency display. The radio room and ESM room were empty, both of them unused unless the ship was at periscope depth.
One deck below, in the middle level, the crews’ mess was half-filled with enlisted men eating traditional bacon-and-eggs breakfasts, their eyes heavy from six hours of watch standing through the middle of the night, the mid watch In the neighboring galley cooks were finishing the last servings of breakfast, cleaning up and preparing for a lunch of “sliders,” hamburgers so greasy they were known to slide down the throat. On the starboard side of the middle level, officers’ country was quiet. The staterooms were empty. The officers’ wardroom, which doubled as a conference room, office, movie screening room and dining room, was crowded with men, some officers, some senior enlisted chiefs and petty officers. Most were dressed in blue cotton coveralls, their silver or gold submariner’s dolphin pins above their left breast pockets, all of them wearing sneakers or crepe-soled shoes for ship silence.
The seat at the head of the table was empty. The man in the seat just to the right of the end seat counted heads, stood up and lifted a phone by the starboard bulkhead communication ship status console.
“Captain, Engineer here,” he said into the phone.
“We’re ready.”
One deck above, in the captain’s stateroom adjacent to the control room, Commander Sean Murphy smiled as he acknowledged and hung up the phone. Murphy was forty, of medium height with the muscular build he had had at the Naval Academy. Since then, of all his classmates, he had probably changed the least. He had yet to lose a single hair to baldness, although gray seemed to be appearing with regularity in his wavy blond hair. He had fought off the weight gain of middle age and was still able to fit into the dress-white uniform he had worn to his graduation eighteen years before. His only wrinkles were the laugh lines around his dark blue eyes, accentuated by hours of squinting out of a type-20 periscope. Murphy was almost always cheerful, his smile softening the planes of an otherwise harsh-looking face. His leadership style had always featured encouragement and reward, rarely threat or admonishment, and it had taken him up the Navy’s ladder quickly, giving him command of the second newest submarine in the entire fleet, the last Los Angeles-class nuclear submarine built before Electric Boat retooled for the new but already canceled Seawolf-class ships.
Here at sea. Murphy was in his element, in the role that he had trained for for nearly three decades-command at sea. Although he could not walk onto the bridge, smell the sea air and scan the horizon with binoculars and see dolphins and seagulls, like his surface-warfare classmates, the smells and sounds of the submarine deep under the Pacific were compensation enough for him. His only regret was that one year hence he would have to turn the boat over to her next skipper and give up the sea for an endless series of desk jobs. The thought filled him with a momentary sadness, and again he found a foreign thought entering his head, to resign his commission and leave the Navy, but then he would be trading a desk job at squadron for a desk job in civilian industry. What was the difference?
He made an effort to put the matter out of his mind, picking up the drill briefing sheets and scanning them before affixing his signature on the bottom. As he considered the schedule for the day — nuclear reactor emergency drills in the morning, tactical drills in the afternoon, perhaps some approach-and-attack runs against surface ships with some simulated torpedo shots — he found his mood improving. Another day of play deep beneath the Pacific with this brand new billion-dollar toy.
Murphy closed the spiral notebook he had been writing in before the call from the wardroom. The notebook was a long letter to his wife Katrina, whom he hadn’t seen in ten weeks since Tampa deployed to WESTPAC; in the next six weeks the book would be filled with his daily notes to her, the only way he knew to ease the ache of being away from her and nine year-old Sean Junior and two-year-old Emily. Murphy tucked the photo of Sean and Emily into the notebook and put it in a cubbyhole on the aft wall of his ten by-ten stateroom, grabbed a red baseball cap from a hook near the door and walked out to the passageway, down the ladder, and into officers’ country and the crowded wardroom.
As he entered the wardroom, a familiar feeling took over as he saw the collection of his officers and men, waiting for him at the table and on the bulkhead sofa seats, some standing, leaning against the bulkheads.
The feeling was an odd mix of affection, gratitude, and obligation. These men had given up their lives and families to go to sea with him, to submerge for months in a steel pipe hundreds of feet underwater, all to drive a nuclear submarine, to poke holes in the ocean in the name of service, the defense of America, in a time of peace, when few if any at home noticed or cared. It was more an honor to be their commander than to command the magnificent machinery of the Tampa itself. As wonderful as the hardware was, it was nothing next to these men. Centuries before John Paul Jones had said, “Men mean more than guns in the rating of a ship.” That was as true in the space age as it had been in the era of wooden sailing ships.
Near the head of the table the Engineer, Lieutenant Commander Jackson “Lube Oil” Vaughn, stood and nodded to Murphy. Vaughn was Murphy’s age, his career delayed by leaving the Navy for several years after his first submarine sea tour. Finding something missing in civilian industry, Vaughn had volunteered to go back to sea. Vaughn’s nickname had survived from a decade before, from his first submarine, Detroit, when he had repaired a DC main lube oil pump himself after the Mechanic Division chief had given up on it. But in the process Vaughn had also flooded engine room lower level with lube oil, requiring a complete main engine shutdown and twent
y-four hours with the entire ship’s company to clean up the oily mess. The incident’s survival in his name had always irked Vaughn, but Murphy knew that aboard Detroit he had been much more a hero than a goat from the incident, and the Detroit crew had affectionately called him Lube Oil ever since. Now that he was chief engineer on Tampa, he was rarely called anything other than “Eng,” unless one of his division officers was kidding him on liberty or at a ship’s party.
Vaughn was a solidly built and tall Texan with graying hair and a cowboy drawl. His at-sea beard was fully grown in, since he had quit shaving the day they had left San Diego ten weeks before. Vaughn was a serious officer, which was an advantage when entrusted with the sleeping giant of the ship’s powerful and potentially dangerous nuclear reactor system. Still, Vaughn was capable of sudden bursts of humor and a grin that took over his entire face. But when things went wrong Back Aft, Vaughn was as likely to raise his voice, a stern frown clouding his face, preaching to his officers and men, sometimes even lecturing broken equipment. Ship’s folklore held that more than one stubborn repair problem had been solved shortly after one of Vaughn’s episodes of “counseling” the offending machinery.
“Morning, Skipper,” Vaughn said as Murphy took his seat at the table and Vaughn sat down beside him on the right side.
“How’re you doing, Eng?” Murphy said in his gravelly voice, a signature hoarseness left over from his days as a two-pack-a-day smoker.
“Ready to break the plant?”
“No, sir, just test it a little,” Vaughn drawled, turning to address the men in the room.
“This drill session will start with a reactor scram initiated by the Captain.”
When he finished his briefing, the men grabbed their red caps and left the room for the engineering spaces aft.
Murphy took his place in the forward part of engine room upper level, where the electronic cabinets were jammed forward of maneuvering. Maneuvering was the nuclear-control room, a cubicle twenty feet square where three enlisted nuclear-qualified men operated the reactor under the supervision of a nuclear trained officer. Vaughn walked up to Murphy in the red cap, the red indicating that the wearer was part of the drill team and was to be ignored by the watch standers
“We’re ready, sir,” Vaughn reported.
Murphy nodded and reached into the cabinet next to them, pulled the Plexiglas cover off a switch marked MANUAL SCRAM, and turned the rotary switch lever to the position marked GROUP SCRAM.
All hell broke loose.
* * *
The switch Murphy had operated had done an emergency shutdown of the nuclear reactor, which until that moment had provided steam for the four huge turbines that powered the ship’s screw and electrical grid. The turbines aft of maneuvering, so loud before, like jet engines screaming mere feet away, spun down, their steam gone. As they came to a stop they howled mournfully, their cry deeper in pitch as the rotors slowed, until the room grew eerily quiet.
The lights overhead flickered as the battery picked up the ship’s loads. The fans wound down to a stop, the air-conditioning shut down, and the compartment’s temperature almost instantly climbed twenty degrees at a hundred percent humidity. Murphy broke into a sweat, his face and hands and body soaked — the room had become a sauna.
The Circuit One PA. system crackled through the unnaturally quiet space.
“REACTOR SCRAM. RIG SHIP FOR REDUCED ELECTRICAL.”
The deck tilted up, barely perceptible at first, then becoming as steep as a stairway. Like a scuba diver whose air is suddenly cut off, the ship was no longer able to survive deep and had to fight to get to the surface.
Murphy walked aft to look into the maneuvering room to see how the Engineering Officer of the Watch was handling the frantic actions required during a reactor scram. As Murphy leaned over the chain at the door of the cubicle the reply of the control room came over the overhead speaker above the EOOW’s head.
“REACTOR SCRAM, MANEUVERING, CONN AYE.”
The Circuit One speakers again boomed through the space, this time the voice of the Officer of the Deck up forward.
“PREPARE TO SNORKEL.”
Murphy waved at Vaughn, who was now in maneuvering watching Lieutenant Roger Sutherland, the EOOW, trying to control the reactor and steam plants as the men tried to troubleshoot the drill’s simulated problem. As the deck became steeper. Murphy pointed forward, and Vaughn nodded, returning his attention to the reactor-control panel. The panel blinked with alarm lights, showing the failing health of the suddenly paralyzed reactor core.
Murphy walked forward through the reactor compartment shielded tunnel and through the massive watertight hatch to the forward compartment. As he made his way down the narrow passageway the angle came off the deck, the ship leveling out. In the control room the Officer of the Deck was on a phone waiting impatiently. A speaker over the periscope stand crackled as maneuvering reported, “PROPULSION SHIFTED TO EMERGENCY PROPULSION MOTOR.”
The control room was the nerve center of the ship, controlling its speed and depth, the deployment of its weapons and sensors. A visitor to the room would find it ugly, cramped, but to Murphy it was more comfortable than his den at home. It gave Murphy the same familiar feeling that a pilot has for his cockpit, a driver for his steering wheel, a preacher for his pulpit. It was where the captain of a submarine belonged.
For just a moment Murphy let his eyes take in the room. It was about twenty-five feet long by thirty feet wide, its center dominated by the periscope stand, the conn, an oval-shaped elevated platform, the long axis of the oval going from port to starboard. The platform surrounded the twin periscope wells and gave the conning officer a view of the entire room. The hightech type-20 periscope was on the port side, the World War II-era backup scope was on the starboard side. The conn platform was surrounded by brushed stainless steel handrails on the forward end, allowing the conning officer to hold on and look majestically down on the deck of the control room below. Nestled into the crowded overhead above the periscope stand were the UWT underwater telephone console and the NESTOR UHF secure voice radio panel. The room was arched overhead since it was on the uppermost deck beneath the sail, the curve of the cylindrical hull’s steel hoop frames forming an arch ten feet tall at the centerline. But the room still seemed cramped from all the pipes, valves, cables and equipment cabinets set below the frames. A tall man would have to duck to avoid cracking his skull on a protruding valve or pipe.
On the forward port side of the room was the ship control console, a station that looked like the cockpit of a large aircraft, complete with two pilots’ seats on either side of a central console, each panel with a control yoke, and a supervisor’s seat behind the console.
The men controlling the yokes were the helmsman/bowplanesman, who controlled the ship’s course and depth, and the stemplanesman, who controlled the ship’s angle. The aft seat was for the Diving Officer, a chief petty officer who was responsible for ship’s depth. To port of the ship control station was the wraparound ballast control panel, a complex console of lights and switches and television screens.
On the starboard side of the control room, starting at the forward starboard bulkhead and wrapping around aft, was the attack center, a group of firecontrol consoles and seats for the officers manning them.
The CCS-Mark I firecontrol system consisted of four main consoles, Positions One through Three and the weapons control console, each console containing a large television computer screen and keyboard, each set configured for a different purpose. Above the Pos One console was a sonar display repeater screen, showing the control room officers one of the displays of the sonar system. Aft of the periscope stand were twin plotting tables, one set up as the navigation table, the second used to plot manual firecontrol solutions to targets, as a check on the computers, and also as a backup in the case of a central computer failure. The port wall of the room was taken up with the fathometer and under-ice sonar consoles. On the aft port corner wall, a door led to the navigation roo
m, where the ESGN inertial navigation equipment was housed. At the forward starboard corner, between Pos One and Pos Two, a sliding door opened to the sonar display room, where the sonar computer consoles held the eight television monitors of the BQQ-5D BAT EARS sonar suite. An opening in the forward bulkhead led out of the room to a narrow passageway leading forward to Murphy’s stateroom and further on to the Executive Officer’s stateroom and the sonar firecontrol computer room.
After decades of building cramped and dysfunctional control rooms, DynaCorp’s Submarine Boat Division had finally gotten it right with the Late Flight Los Angeles-class submarines. For a moment Murphy felt pure contentment at the shipshape look of his control room. It was the shout of the officer on the periscope stand that brought Murphy from his reverie.
“Where’s the captain?” he barked into his phone, his back to Murphy.
The officer. Lieutenant Commander Gregory Lee Tarkowski, was the Officer of the Deck for the morning’s drill session. Tarkowski had brown curly hair and a thick red mustache that had swallowed his upper lip, the cause of constant orders to shave it off. He was as lean as he had been when he pitched for the varsity baseball squad at Yale, and tall enough that his head was in constant danger of knocking into the NESTOR UHF radio-telephone console hanging from the overhead of the periscope stand. Considered an officer on the Navy’s fast track, Tarkowski was both the Navigator and Combat Systems Officer, jobs that were usually given to two separate mid-grade second tour officers. But for Tarkowski, the assignment was not unusual. Although a modest man by nature, it was common knowledge among the crew that Tarkowski had graduated at the top of his Yale class with a degree in international relations and a second one in electrical engineering, while still managing to be the baseball team’s star pitcher. He had sustained the same level of energy after graduating — skydiving, scuba diving and flying any aircraft he could get his hands on, including gliders, hang gliders, ultralights and an acrobatic biplane. The married officers’ wives, apparently believing that as a bachelor he was having entirely too much fun for his own good, had conspired to fix him up with one San Diego beauty after another, and two of them habitually jammed the ship’s phones when Tampa was in port.
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