Collapse Depth

by Todd Tucker

  “Number three high pressure air bank is restored,” came another announcement. Hallorann made his way toward the cluster of men near the machinery. A few cast disapproving glances at him, but Jabo smiled. “Hey, a nub!” he said. “Here to learn something?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “These are High Pressure Air Compressors,” said the lieutenant. “Or ‘hipacs.’ They compress air into our air banks at three thousand PSI. That sound you heard,” he said, pointing to the top of the middle compressor, “was this relief valve lifting. And it wouldn’t re-seat. Pretty loud, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes sir,” said Hallorann, moving closer. “It was just air?” That seemed incredible to him.

  Jabo nodded. “Yes, but anything at that kind of pressure has to be treated with respect.” Hallorann noticed for the first time that the piping immediately around the relief valve was caked in a thick, knobby, coating of white ice. Jabo touched it. “Besides being loud, a stream of fluid at that pressure could put a hole right through you. Or cut your arm clean off. Like a scalpel.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m not shittin’ you,” said Jabo.

  “So what did you do, sir?” said Hallorann.

  “I isolated the relief by closing this valve,” said Jabo. “That’s why you heard that announcement…because that’s not a normal configuration, obviously, the hipac isolated from its relief. Then the chief here came down and fixed our sticky relief valve according to the casualty procedure.”

  “It’s called ‘mechanical agitation,’” said the chief, tapping the mallet to the palm of his hand.

  “That caused the valve to re-seat, so we were able to un-isolate the air bank and get on with our day.”

  Hallorann nodded. He was so impressed he didn’t know what to say.

  “Is there anything in your little yellow book about relief valves?” said Jabo.

  Hallorann hesitated. “I’m not really sure, sir.”

  “Well, take a look,” said Jabo. “And come get me to sign it if there is.” He slapped the chief on his back, and then departed the engine room while they all watched.

  • • •

  Angi Jabo waited only a moment outside Captain Soldato’s office before she was called in. Soldato looked slightly lost behind the enormous wooden desk that befitted his status as the new Commodore of Submarine Squadron 17. A television behind him showed CNN with the sound down; Angi knew it was a story about the latest breakdown in negotiations between the US and China, some scrap about a Taiwanese merchant ship. When the story broke, Danny pointed out how many American wars had begun with an attack on a ship: the Maine, the Arizona, the Gulf of Tonkin. It was something Danny clearly took pride in. It made her feel a little nauseous; she’d been avoiding the news ever since. Captain Soldato shut off the TV, stepped quickly around his desk, and hugged her tightly.

  “Angi! Congratulations. Congratulations to you both!”

  He stepped back, and Angi found herself surprisingly touched. So far, other than Danny, who’d been a nervous witness to the pregnancy test, she’d told only two people, both of them on the phone: her mother, back in Tennessee, the moment she knew for sure. And Cindy Soldato, the captain’s wife. Mario was the first person other than Danny to congratulate her in person, and his enthusiasm for her pregnancy felt downright great.

  “Thanks, Mario.”

  “How do you feel?” he said, a huge grin still plastered across his face.

  She shrugged. “Better, now. I was pretty sick for a couple of weeks. How about you? How do you like being Commodore?”

  He offered her a chair and sat down on another one, beside her, not behind his desk. “It’s depressing as hell. I’ve been on seven submarines, Angi, punched a lot of holes in the ocean. Now I’m ‘one of them,’ just another air breather who they’ll scrub the decks for once a month when I show up at the end of a patrol.”

  “I’m sure it’s not that bad,” she said, laughing at his theatrical self-pity. “Can’t you boss them all around now?”

  “When you’re an officer in the navy, your entire career, you strive to be the commanding officer of a warship. There’s no higher calling. Everything after that, no matter what rank they give you, is just bullshit. Excuse my language.”

  “Well, at least you’ve got this beautiful office,” she said. She could tell he hadn’t completely unpacked, but he did have the plaques from seven submarines in a line on the wall behind his desk: Sunfish, Skipjack, Baton Rouge, Jacksonville, Archerfish, Omaha, and the last one from SSBN731, USS Alabama.

  “I’d rather be driving ships and leading men,” he said. “You’ll see what I mean someday, when Danny takes command of a boat.”

  She froze her smile at that, and looked down at the polished surface of his desk.

  “Isn’t that the plan?” he said.

  She cleared her throat. “It seems I can’t keep any secrets from you, Mario.”

  He patted her hand. “Has he turned his letter in yet?”

  “I think so—needs to do it soon, before he hits the four-year point.”

  “Are you doing it because of the baby?”

  “No! I mean—I hope not. Lots of reasons. Danny just wants to do something different.”

  The captain looked genuinely stricken, and Angi noted again the difference between how Captain Soldato seemed to feel about Danny in her presence, and how her husband perceived it. Danny would come home and relay the tirades he’d endured from Soldato, sometimes alone and sometimes as part of a group. On Mario’s last patrol, during a botched firing of an exercise torpedo, he’d said, “Jabo, how do you keep the ants off your candy ass?”

  But whenever Mario mentioned Danny in front of her, he was like this: pure paternal concern and professional admiration. She thought it a shame that the captain could never show this side of himself to Danny, but after three patrols together, she’d assumed it was impossible, because of some combination of nautical tradition and masculine inhibition.

  “Well, Angi, take comfort in this: whatever Danny decides to do, you’re going to have this child in a Navy hospital. And Cindy and I are here to help in every way possible. Now that they’ve taken me away from the boat, I’ve got plenty of time on my hands.”

  “Thanks Mario, I really do appreciate it. I do feel sometimes like I need someone to help guide me through the insurance process…”

  He waved his hand. “Consider it done. I know all the people at Group Nine who manage this stuff, and I went to the Academy with the CO of the hospital in Bremerton. Everything will be fine.”

  “I know it will, but thanks for the offer. There’s a chance, depending on how long this patrol is, that Danny may be home before my due date…” The Captain immediately shook his head, and she knew with sudden certainty that he would not.

  “We’re going to take care of you Angi,” he said. “You and your baby.”

  To Angi’s complete and utter surprise, she began to cry.

  • • •

  At home that night, Angi got on their computer and studied Taiwan and China. She had been avoiding the news up to that point, afraid to learn what was going on, but she suddenly wanted to know as much as she could, no matter how unsettling. It had seemed odd to her all along that the tensions between these two distant countries would so urgently involve the United States. And it seemed downright bizarre that it might affect her, and her nascent family. Now she wanted to know why.

  She had to scan several historical overviews before she found one that seemed relatively untainted by politics. She learned that that China had been fighting for the island of Taiwan for five centuries, and that this tortured history was impossible to separate from the current crisis.

  In 1662, the Chinese went to Taiwan and expelled the Dutch, its first European colonial masters. The Dutch treasured the island they named Formosa, for its rice, its large native deer population, but mostly for its commanding position on the Asian sea lanes it contested with Spain and Portugal. Not only Europeans coveted Tai
wan, however, and in 1895 the Japanese defeated the Great Qin in the first Sino-Japanese war, leading to a long Japanese occupation. Japanese rule of the island lasted until their 1945 defeat in World War II, when the victorious allies deeded the island back to the Chinese.

  Clarity was avoided, however, by the Chinese Civil War. That conflict pitted the Communist Peoples Republic of China, led by Mao Zedong, against the Republic of China, led by Chiang Kai-Shek. The war had raged since 1927, stalling briefly during World War II. As soon as World War II ended the Civil War resumed, until the 1949 defeat of Chiang Kai-Shek. With about two million of his supporters, he retreated to Taiwan, where the ROC declared itself to be the sole, legitimate government of China.

  This declaration put the United States in an awkward position. For one thing, it was so obviously untrue. And no one really believed that the ROC, with its corrupt leaders and inept military, would ever pose a legitimate threat to the ruthlessly effective communists of Mao and the PRC. On the other hand, the ROC were fierce-anticommunists, and some of the US’s only allies in Asia at a time when the US badly needed allies in that part of the world. So the US began a long, awkward advocacy of the status quo. The unstable arrangement resulted in periodic, predictable crises, many of which metastasized into military action, sometimes on a massive scale. In 1958, China fired so much artillery at the ROC controlled island of Quemoy that the high-quality steel shells became an un-natural resource for more than a generation of island blacksmiths, who became renowned for the meat cleavers they could fashion from the shells that had been intended to kill them. A skillful blacksmith could to this day, Angi learned, make sixty cleavers from a single shell.

  After spending an hour on Taiwan’s history, Angi began to get into Taiwan’s recent past and its unique relationship to the US…from Wikipedia she linked to the Taiwan section of globalsecurity.org. She learned that the US policy had evolved into this: if the Republic of China was not actually China, neither was it a “rebel province” as declared by the real Chinese government, one that could be crushed by a PRC police action. The US, under Richard Nixon, finally acknowledged the obvious when it recognized the PRC as the legitimate government of China in 1979. The US embassy in Taipei, Taiwan was closed, renamed the American Institute in Taiwan. (The Taiwanese equivalent in Washington is the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office.) The US, through a series of presidents, maintained the deliberately ambiguous “One China” policy, without ever specifying what that one China consisted of, or who was in charge of it. The US tacitly agreed to never hint that Taiwan was entitled to the independence that it actually had—by 1990 it was a thriving, prosperous democracy. In return, China tacitly agreed not to invade Taiwan and enforce the sovereignty that it insisted it had over the island.

  The current crisis began less than six months before, when Qian Chen, the President of Taiwan, was granted a visa to speak at the University of Notre Dame, his alma mater. This visa represented a reversal of US policy, which had for forty years not allowed top Taiwanese officials to visit the United States—in 1994, Lee Teng-Hui, then president of Taiwan, was not even allowed off his plane in Hawaii while it refueled, lest his presence on American soil antagonize the Chinese. At Notre Dame, President Chen barely deviated from the carefully evolved phrases that characterized Taiwan’s odd status, but his mere presence there was enough to aggravate Beijing. In response, they immediately announced a series of surface-to-surface missile tests in waters less than twenty miles from Taiwan’s northern port city of Keelung—a distance that an M-9 Dongfeng missile travels in 9.5 seconds. Commercial air traffic was diverted and the Taiwanese stock market crashed as the latest crisis unfolded.

  Angi learned what happened next on sinodefence.org, a British website operated by volunteers that called itself, “the most comprehensive and trusted online source of information on the Chinese military.” On a beautiful Fall morning, a specially trained brigade of the Peoples Liberation Army drove an 8 x 8 launching vehicle from the province of Jiangxi to a position about sixty miles away in the Fujian Province. Two missiles were fired and landed in the ocean, a vivid but harmless assertion of China’s anger and their national sovereignty.

  A third missile was launched twenty-two minutes later from the same vehicle: China had announced this in advance, as a demonstration of their rapid reloading capability. This missile followed the same course as the first two initially, and then veered north approximately eight degrees. The missile traveled 576 nautical miles, close to its maximum range, and then slammed into a 170,000 ton cargo ship, the Ever Able. The ship was flagged in Panama, but owned by a Taiwanese company, and was bound for Shanghai. The reasons for the missile strike were immediately and hotly debated, the conversation inevitably colored by the politics of the speaker. China claimed the Ever Able had sailed into the publicized target area, and, in any case, the Dongfeng missile was not a heat-seeking anti-ship missile: it was a ballistic missile fired to a specific geographic coordinate, one that would be almost impossible to use deliberately against a moving vessel. China’s opponents in Taiwan and the United States argued that it was naked act of aggression, and that the time had come at last to defend America’s democratic ally against the Godless Communists of the PRC. The president of the United States, a liberal recently elected, was under enormous pressure to act, having just been seen as weak while negotiating trade regulations with China, who made thinly veiled threats about what havoc they could wreak on the US economy should they decide to divest themselves of their vast holdings of US government debt.

  While the world nervously waited to see what the long-term consequences would be, there was no doubt about the immediate effects of that errant missile. While it carried no warhead, the sheer weight and kinetic energy of a 13,000 pound object flying at ten times the speed of sound broke Ever Able in half. It sunk almost instantly, along with its crew of twenty-two men.

  It was almost one o’clock in the morning when Angi stared at the image on her computer screen, remnants of the Ever Able’s cargo floating on a calm sea. The bow of a rescue ship jutted into the bottom of the frame, but there was no one to save.

  • • •

  The first days at sea were always hectic, exhausting, but there was something of a relief to it as well: both the ship and the crew were meant to be underway. Alabama’s numerous and complicated systems were designed to operate ideally while in motion, relying on seawater to cool the steam flowing through condensers, shield radiation, and to insulate them from the world of commodores and admirals. The crew was also designed to operate optimally inside a ship at motion, with each division manned to operate a three-section watchbill of six hours on watch, twelve hours off, with plenty of maintenance and training for all hands to do in those off hours, into which also had to be squeezed showering, shitting, shaving, eating, and occasionally sleeping. So while bitching about sea time was an ancient and valued tradition of any maritime force, there was something pleasing about throwing off all lines and getting underway. For almost thirty six-hours, the ship steamed on the surface, each hour rougher then the last, until the ship had finally reached Point Juliet, marking water deep for them to submerge.

  Lieutenant Hein, like many men, had rebounded from his seasickness after the initial episode of vomiting. He was standing watch in the control room as the officer of the deck, and he carefully verified their position on a familiar chart of Puget Sound. He then verified that the ship was rigged for dive, and looked to the captain who was standing at his side on the conn. He awaited his order.

  Captain Shields nodded his head. “Submerge the ship.”

  “Submerge the ship, aye sir. Chief of the watch—submerge the ship.”

  The chief of the watch picked up the 1MC microphone and announced to the crew: “Dive! Dive!” He sounded the klaxon alarm, Ahh-OOO-Gah, twice. Modern submarines had, tragically, replaced the traditional klaxon alarm with a poor electronic facsimile, but Alabama, like many boats, had taken an old iron klaxon from a decommissio
ned boat in the shipyard. The large, gray cast iron alarm was bolted to the deck at the chief of the watch’s feet in a completely unauthorized modification to the ship’s plans.

  After sounding the klaxon again, the chief of the watch threw the switches that opened the vents to the six main ballast tanks, the giant tanks of air at each end of the submarine that kept her afloat. Salty spray shot fifty feet into the air through the open vents, as seawater flooded into the tanks through grates in the bottom. Lieutenant Hein watched the controlled sinking of the ship through the periscope and gave a running update to the men in control.

  “Forward tanks venting…” He turned the periscope one hundred and eighty degrees. “Aft tanks venting….decks awash…” It was always a strange sight to see the dry deck become covered in swirling green water, where just minutes before crewmen had scurried to make the ship ready for sea. Then the scope was at sea level, water splashing over the optics, then it was under. “Scope is submerged. Lowering number two scope.” He backed away from the scope and turned the orange ring that brought the scope down. Every part of the ship was under water. Their patrol as a submarine had begun.

  • • •

  The navigator excused himself from the control room without a word, and quickly locked himself into the watchstander’s head at the bottom of the control room ladder. He grabbed each side of the small steel sink, and looked straight down at the drain to avoid looking at himself in the mirror. He throat constricted as he thought of the sea surrounding them, just inches away on the other side of the bulkhead, endless, dark, and merciless.

  • • •

  In his stateroom, Jabo felt the rolls ease, without completely stopping, as the ship paused at an intermediate depth to get its initial 1/3 trim. The chief of the watch and the dive were working together, moving water from tank to tank, making fine adjustments, until the ship was at a perfect, level angle, and a slow speed, with all the control surfaces at a zero angle. It took time and skill to get it exactly right. Then the ship increased speed, which he could not feel. But it went deeper, which made the rolls completely melt away, and Jabo almost sighed at the sheer pleasure of the moment. Jabo didn’t quite feel any kind of supernatural, physical connection to his ship. Maybe that came after a lifetime of sea tours, maybe the XO and captain felt that way. But Jabo was profoundly in tune with the machinery that surrounded him, and it was a special kind of relief he felt as the ship went deep. It was like driving a truck on rutted dirt roads for two days, then finally pulling onto the smooth asphalt of a new highway.