Collapse Depth

by Todd Tucker

  “So you turned in your letter?” asked Hayes Kincaid, his roommate in Stateroom 3. Their third roommate, Hein, was on the conn. At the moment the diving alarm sounded, the earliest moment allowed, they both changed from their khaki uniforms into their blue coveralls, or “poopie suits,” and tennis shoes. The poopie suit was one of the great perks of submarine life, and Jabo had trouble imagining how his comrades-in-arms in the surface navy managed to strap themselves into khakis, blues, and shined leather shoes every day.

  Kincaid was not only his roommate, he was his best friend on the boat. He was the only black officer onboard, and the only one who’d been enlisted prior to receiving his commission. Kincaid had done a full sea-tour on a submarine as a nuclear electronics technician before being awarded an ROTC scholarship and attending Hampton College in Virginia, where he got a mechanical engineering degree and an Ensign’s shoulder boards. Then he went right back to nuclear power school, then right back to sea.

  “Well sort of. Not really. The captain refused to accept it.”

  Kincaid laughed loudly. “Can he do that? Didn’t you need to get that in this last mail call?”

  Jabo shrugged. “He was a little mysterious about it. Said we’d have another mail call in a couple of weeks, and that the reason we were having the mail call would convince me I want to stay in the navy.”

  Kincaid laughed again. “Fuck…that. You want to come back to one of these? Be a department head?”

  “That’s what I said—I mentioned the navigator —said he doesn’t look like he enjoys life all that much.”

  “What did the captain say to that?”

  “Said the nav was a bad example.”

  “Fuck that! He’s a perfect example. That department head tour is when they get you. JO tours, XO tours, what are they, three years? Because JOs, like you, they’re trying to trick you into staying in. And XOs, they only need one per boat. And the CO tour is down to what, eighteen months? But the departments heads, the Navy knows they’ve got those guys, they’ve already decided to stay in—so they keep them out here like five years, wring every last drop of sweat out of them. And then what do they do? Promote half of them to XO and tell the rest to fuck off. No pension, no nothing to show for their trouble.”

  “What the fuck, Hayes, aren’t you a lifer?”

  “I’ve got twelve years in, my friend, ‘cause of my enlisted time, and all my time in college counted too. I’ll do my shore tour after this, then my department head tour, and then I’ll have my twenty. The Navy can do whatever it wants to me after that. I don’t give a shit if I don’t screen for XO.” But Jabo knew Kincaid would—he was an outstanding officer and, despite everything he ever said aloud: he loved the navy.

  The rough voice of their Executive Officer on the 1MC: All officers report to the wardroom.

  “Are we finally going to find out what the hell is going on this patrol?”

  Kincaid shrugged. “I already told you the plan. We’re going to go to sea, we’re going to screw around for three, four, five or six months, and then were going to come back. In a year, we’ll do it again.”

  Jabo laughed. “Maybe you’re right.” Kincaid worked hard to always be the least impressed person about any event of shipboard life, whether it was a fire in the engine room or the new ice cream maker in the Crew’s Mess.

  “Let me ask you something, Hayes. Was life on submarines really that much more exciting twelve years ago? Is it that much more boring now?”

  “Let me tell you a secret,” he said leaning in and whispering. “Life on submarines has always been boring.”

  “Fuck you, I don’t believe it,” said Jabo, laughing. “I’ve heard the stories. Plus, why would you stay in all this time?”

  “I like the food.”

  They stepped out of their stateroom and walked down the short ladder that took them to the wardroom.

  • • •

  The Captain was at his traditional spot, at the head of the table, while the XO sat literally at his right hand. The navigator, small and exhausted looking as always, was standing up in front with a tripod that held a chart, a chart hidden by a standard issue navy bed sheet. That was unusual—everyone in the wardroom had at least a top secret clearance, and Jabo felt again that maybe Kincaid was wrong about their patrol being boring. Jabo also sensed some tension in the silent room.

  They were all three in their khakis, and Jabo felt a little underdressed in his poopie. Soon the other junior officers in poopie suits piled in, though, all of them just as eager as he had been to get comfortable. The noise level rose. They waited for Hein to arrive, who was being relieved on the conn by the engineer himself, at the XO’s insistence…whatever was going on they wanted Hein to hear firsthand. Hein finally arrived, looking slightly befuddled, and sat next to Jabo without saying a word.

  The XO convened the meeting. “Everybody shut the fuck up.” They all quickly complied. The XO’s muscular arms bulged inside his khaki sleeves, and his bald head gleamed in the fluorescent lights. MS1 Straub, the head cook, stuck his head in from the galley door, doing his job and seeing if anything was needed. The XO nodded at him, and he got the message, retreating. The XO locked the door behind him when it shut—another unusual precaution.

  “Before we get started,” said the Captain. “I’m tempted to ask what the craziest rumor each of you has heard. About our patrol orders, not about girl babies.” There was nervous laughter around the table. “Whatever you’ve heard,” said the captain, “I can assure you it’s complete bullshit. The XO and I were briefed the morning of our departure by the Admiral, and the navigator found out shortly after.” Jabo looked at the nav, whose face was impassive, haunted, exhausted.

  “So here’s what we’re really going to do,” said the captain. “We’re taking this ship to Taiwan.”

  There was some muttering around the table, and Jabo watched for just a moment as even Kincaid was unable to hide his surprise, before he slipped back into his mask of practiced nonchalance. But it was truly remarkable news. Because of the nature of their normal mission, they almost never went anywhere exciting. Unlike their brothers on attack submarines who deployed all over the globe with battle groups, Trident Submarines generally followed a fairly predictable schedule of leaving Bangor, Washington, going to sea for a few hundred days, and returning. If they were lucky, every other patrol or so, they might pull into Pearl Harbor. Once, on Jabo’s first patrol, they had to surface off of Kodiak Island, Alaska, to medevac a shipmate who’d suffered a heart attack. But foreign ports were just never part of the deal—their deployment schedule didn’t allow for it and most foreign nations were hesitant to allow twenty-four nuclear missiles into one of their harbors, with all the protests and controversy it would inevitably cause.

  “The United States has a fundamental commitment to the nation of Taiwan,” said the Captain. “The nature of which, frankly, is too complicated to explain here. But, in short, we will surface two weeks from now one hundred nautical miles east of the island, we will pull into the Taiwanese navy base at Suao, and then we are going to remove sixteen warheads from one of our missiles, and give the government of Taiwan temporary custody of them. It’s all top secret, beyond top secret, until we pull into the harbor, and then the news media of the world will be invited to take pictures. You’ll probably all end up on the Nightly News.”

  “Isn’t that a violation of the non-proliferation treaty?” said Hein. Hein had gone to MIT and was one of the smartest guys that Jabo had ever met. It didn’t surprise him that he would throw out a question like that.

  “That’s a good question Jay. I asked the same thing of the admiral. The official line is that we’re not proliferating because we’re not giving them the warheads—we’re allowing them to store them on our behalf. Or something like that. But your intuition is sound—I have no doubt that this will stir up a shitload of controversy, at home and abroad, and will antagonize the Chinese beyond belief. But I believe, as everyone at this table should, that our nati
onal leadership has thought this through completely and that they’ve decided the benefits are worth the risks.”

  “What do we tell the crew?” asked Kincaid.

  “Nothing,” snapped the XO. “No one knows where we are going or why. We’ll tell them the day before we pull in that we are going to Taiwan, but not why. This is all ‘need to know,’ and you guys need to know, since you’re going to be looking at the chart every night and making sure we’re headed in the right direction. You, you, and you,” he said, pointing in turn at Kincaid, Jabo, and Jay Hein, “will be straight up three-section OOD starting with the next hour. Get to know and love those charts. Outside this room, only quartermasters and a handful of Nav ETs will know. And I guess we’ll have to tell the engineer sooner or later.” Everyone chuckled.

  “You, you, and you,” said the XO, pointing to Morgan, Morrissey, and Retzner, “are our three-section EOOWs.” They all happened to be sitting next to each other on one side of the table, all friends and roommates on their second patrol. They nodded in unison. “And you,” he said, pointing to Duggan, “Your job is to qualify EOOW, get on the watchbill, and make life a little easier for your six shipmates here.”

  “Aye, aye sir,” said Duggan. Jabo heard the urgent sincerity in his voice. It was a shitty feeling to be the only one in the room without a real role to play.

  The XO continued. “All of you can regard any information about our mission just like targeting information— no one else needs to know.”

  “The rumor mill is already running like crazy…” said Hein.

  “Then let it run. I frankly don’t give a shit,” said the XO. “This is a vitally important, vitally secret mission, one that will have historic consequences. I am honored that they’ve chosen us to carry this out, and woe to the sailor or officer who fucks it up. Understood?”

  Everyone nodded. The XO had made it clear that the question and answer period was over.

  “Ok,” he said, waving a hand toward the nav. “Let’s get on with it. The navigator, as we mentioned, just found all this out. After spending the better part of the last week getting our charts in order for a patrol of the northern pacific, he’s got to revise everything. But show them what you’ve got.”

  The Navigator pulled down the sheet to reveal a small-scale chart of the entire Pacific Ocean. On it, he’d penciled in a great-circle route all the way to Taiwan. While it looked curved on the flat chart, the course was actually a straight-line across the curved surface of the earth. A large red dot, on the far right hand side of the chart was labeled PA: Papa Alpha. The track connected it to a point on the other side of the Pacific: PZ, Papa Zulu. Point A to Point Z. “This is all I’ve got so far,” he said meekly.

  Jabo noticed for the first time behind the nav a small pyramid of tightly rolled up charts that looked freshly-delivered from Group Nine. They must have come over in the last mail bag off the tug. Every one would need to be reviewed by the nav, updated, and approved. And every chart he’d already done this for in their normal patrol areas, working day and night for weeks, was now useless. The captain had delivered on his promise in one way, Jabo thought, in revealing to him orders that were spectacularly different from anything they’d done before, an exciting unforeseen mission for them and their boat. But he’d also confirmed that the navigator’s life was pretty fucking miserable.

  “We’re going to have to really burn it up,” said the Navigator. “To make it there in time, across the operating areas they’ve given us, we’re going to have to have a speed of advance of twenty knots the entire time, day and night.”

  “This is going to preclude a lot,” said the XO. “Our sonar will be degraded, we’ll be limited in the drills we can run. And we’re going to have to keep our heads up. That means you, OODs. You’re going to be covering a lot more ground each watch than you’re used to—keep an eye on the chart, on the fathometer, all that good shit. Make sure we are where we are supposed to be. You hear me?”

  “Yes sir,” they all said in unison.

  “What’s after Taiwan, sir?” asked Jabo.

  The XO looked at the captain, who nodded. “After we complete this mission, we’ll make another two-week transit, assume a target package, and begin a normal strategic deterrence patrol.”

  No one said what everybody was thinking: they were going to be at sea for a very, very long time.

  “Ok, everybody get the fuck out of here and get some rest,” said the XO. “You’re going to need it.”

  • • •

  The three roommates crowded into the stateroom: Kincaid, Jabo, and Hein. Hein was dogging it a bit, giving the engineer a few minutes more on the conn. They all wanted to talk it over.

  “Ever been to Taiwan?” Jabo asked Kincaid.

  “Never. Never heard of a boat that has.”

  “Of course not,” said Hein. “It is going to cause a complete shit storm. This is huge!”

  Jabo nodded grimly.

  “What, aren’t you pumped about this? God knows what kind of attention we’re going to get…this could be great for our careers.”

  Kincaid laughed. “You’re the only one here all that worried about that, my friend.” He nodded at Jabo.

  It took Hein a second to process. “Really? You turned your letter in?”

  “Not exactly,” said Jabo. “Captain’s going to endorse it when we get to Taiwan.”

  “If we make it!” said Hein, grinning. “We’ll have to evade the entire Chinese Navy.”

  Jabo nodded, lost in thought. He was excited, like Hein, like the captain had promised. They were doing something extraordinary. But he was also going to be at sea months longer than he’d expected. With the changes to their orders, he’d originally thought that an early departure might mean an early return; in time for his child’s birth.

  But the opposite was true. They were going to be at sea longer than normal, and he would almost certainly miss everything. He wondered when and how Angi would learn the news.

  • • •

  The Navigator sat alone in the Officer’s Study at 2:00 am, a huge, unblemished chart of the Pacific Ocean in front of him. There was a repeater in the study and the navigator registered subconsciously that they were on course and on track, 280, twenty-two knots, 650 feet. At that depth, they were well-insulated from the upheaval on the ocean surface. They were so seemingly motionless that the five sharpened pencils he had laying on the table only moved when he picked them up. He liked being busy. It seemed to quiet the nervous buzz in his head. If he focused intensely and worked himself into exhaustion, he hoped, he could stop thinking about all the things that worried him.

  Counting his years at the Naval Academy, Mark Taylor had been in the Navy thirteen years. For that entire time, he’d been nervous, fearful that he would somehow fuck things up. At times his anxiety was nearly debilitating. During his Plebe year at the Academy, he once dreamed that he was being strangled, and awoke swinging his arms, fending off his attacker. But Plebe Year was designed to drive people crazy, as the upperclassmen, with their ritualized hazing, attempted to ferret out any weakness among the newest members of the Battalion. While Mark worried about his sanity, he took comfort in the fact that he seemed to be holding up better than many of his classmates. During Hell Week, another fourth class Mid from his company stood on his desk in his second floor room in Bancroft Hall and jumped, intentionally landing on his knees, shattering them, sending himself away from Annapolis with a debilitating injury. He recuperated for a month and then enrolled at Ohio State University on crutches. It was a measure of how miserable Plebe year was that most of the other mids spoke of his experience with envy. Mark worked hard to cope, and hoped that after his Plebe Year things would get better.

  And...they did. For a while. He realized that frenzied hard work seemed to keep his bad thoughts at bay, so he pushed himself ruthlessly in the library and classroom, and chose to study electrical engineering, by consensus the hardest degree at the Academy. His stellar grades soon attracted the inter
est of the nuclear power program’s recruiters who were always looking for motivated young engineers with a high tolerance for abuse. His senior year, he sat for interviews with a couple of psychologists who screened all candidates for the nuclear submarine program. One shrink handed him a piece of paper and a pencil and asked him to draw a picture of himself. Mark drew a stick figure that he hoped looked normal and happy, then worried that the smile looked maniacally toothy and large.

  The second psychologist presented him with two columns of activities; in each case he was supposed to circle the one activity of the pair he would rather do. One instance asked if he would rather “peel potatoes,” or “kill people.” Although his final years at the Academy had been relatively happy, he approached the tests with the attitude that he did have something to hide, and to him, the tests seemed superficial and easy to fool. Some aspiring nukes got called back for a third psychological interview, but Mark didn’t even have to do that: the shrinks gave him a clean bill of health, which Mark, with his great faith in the Navy’s institutional wisdom, took as vindication. When he left Annapolis with an Ensign’s stripes and orders for nuclear power school, Mark began to feel confident that his fears and insecurities had been outgrown, part of the residue of Plebe Year that he’d left behind on the banks of the Severn.