Collapse Depth

by Todd Tucker

  Nuclear Power School and prototype training brought with them a new kind of pressure, and with it, a few worrisome episodes. Once, while at nuclear power school in Orlando, he’d slept an entire weekend. Went to bed on Friday night, and didn’t wake up until Sunday afternoon. He awoke to a bed that he’d soaked through with urine. He had to drag his mattress and sheets to the apartment complex’s dumpster without his roommate seeing, and slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of his room for the rest of the term.

  The second episode was worse. It happened at the S1-C prototype in Connecticut, an operating nuclear reactor that was the capstone of their engineering training. The plant was built to operate exactly like a submarine plant, and even turned a shaft. Since there was no ocean, however, to absorb the energy, the screw turned a generator which dissipated the plant’s energy into electrical resistors, which turned it into heat, which dissipated over the Connecticut countryside. When the plant was running, the resistors were hot—it was their job to be hot. They were surrounded by a high fence designed mainly to keep out the raccoons who were attracted to the warmth, but who would sometimes get trapped between resistors and cook, making a god awful mess.

  One frigid February night, Mark wandered outside the plant trying to clear his head after a marathon studying session. The next morning he was to be observed as Engineering Officer of the Watch conducting casualty drills. If he performed well, his nuclear power training would be successfully completed. If he failed, his nuclear aspirations would be ended. He hadn’t left the site in twenty-four hours, and planned on studying through the night, right up until the moment he took the watch in maneuvering. He was stressed, exhausted, and fairly certain that some of the mumbling he heard inside the large, common study area was audible only to him.

  He paused at the high fence that surrounded the resistor bank. He could see where the insulated cables came out of the fake hull, channeling electricity into the resistors. I=V/R, Ohm’s Law, flashed into his head, the cornerstone of electrical theory. Like all the other ensigns at the site, he could rapidly and accurately calculate in his head what current would flow through the resistors at a given power level, how many shaft horsepower that translated to, and how much heat would be generated by the resistors as it absorbed that power. Because it was so cold, he could actually feel the heat coming off of the resistors; it felt good on his face as his back turned cold in the chilly night; it even smelled pleasantly warm, like a campfire, something Mark had never noticed before during midnight walks around the installation.

  That’s when Mark noticed that a long, thin oak branch had fallen from the surrounding trees and landed atop the resistors; what he smelled was the unmistakable aroma of wood being heated to its burning point. There were no trees directly over the resistor bank, but the branch was covered in dried, curly leaves. It must have snapped off in the cold and glided over from the surrounding woods like a paper airplane, landing exactly where it would do the most harm. Mark couldn’t do anything himself because of the fence; the branch was unreachable. He immediately turned, intending to run to the nearest phone and alert the Engineering Officer of the Watch. .

  But…he stopped.

  He watched the branch in a kind of trance, thinking that it was not unlike an experiment Naval Reactors might conjure up, to see what the consequences of a branch falling on the resistor bank might be. He pictured a chart in a Reactor Plant Manual charting the temperature of a wooden branch versus time on a logarithmic graph, a bold horizontal line indicating the auto-ignition temperature of dried leaves. For a few minutes, he thought maybe nothing would happen. But then white smoke began to curl away from some of the leaves, and he smiled as the nostalgic, pungent aroma wafted over him. Then a few of them burst into flame, then, almost simultaneously, all of them were on fire.

  The branch burned quickly, and settled into the resistor bank as it fell apart and turned to ash; the crevices between resistors and wires showed vividly in the orange flames. Soon Mark began to smell the sour, acrid smell of an electrical fire, and a few pops came from the resistors as wiring melted and shorted out. Resin inside the resistors melted and dribbled down the side, like gore from a wounded animal. A minute more, and he heard the KA CHUNK of large circuit breakers tripping, one right by his feet, that made him jump, and one just inside the hull. A bleating alarm sounded inside the hull, and he heard a muted, concerned announcement of the casualty from inside. He wandered away from the resistor bank, and took the long way back to the classroom where he’d been studying.

  The next morning, crews were cutting down every tree within five feet of the outer fence line, and the plant was shut down while they all had training on the incident, and discussed the seriousness of what had happened: a reactor that is creating energy and then suddenly has no place for that energy to go. It could lead, they all reviewed, to soaring temperatures, protective actions, damaged fuel. They all worked through equations to calculate the rate and the extent of the potential damage.

  Mark had to wait two days for repairs to the resistor bank to have his observed watch; he combated simulated flooding and recovered from an actual scram. He passed with solid marks. He didn’t let the branch incident bother him for more than a few days. After all, it wasn’t like he’d thrown the branch onto the resistors, there would have been a fire even if he’d never gotten near it: his presence there was a coincidence. And all the reactor’s protective mechanisms had worked properly, protecting it from any damage. He graduated third in his class and received orders to the USS City of Corpus Christi. On his way to the west coast, he stopped in his hometown of Lansing, Michigan to marry Muriel, his high school sweetheart.

  Mark loved Muriel, but he told her nothing about the fears he had for his own sanity. It was easy to keep from her at first. When they’d dated in high school and during trips home from the Academy, he’d been fine. Muriel was a tough woman, a realist, and Mark knew if he told her, she would immediately seek help, help that would result inevitably in the end of his career. And, in a way, keeping Muriel in the dark made him feel better, just as fooling the Navy shrinks had. Muriel was smart, and perceptive. If she couldn’t tell that Mark was crazy…well then, he must not be that crazy. Of course, when she finally realized everything, he had to leave her. A wife telling the Navy that her husband was crazy was one thing. But a spurned wife telling the Navy that her ex-husband was a nut...the Navy would have to shut down if it listened to every allegation hurled by an ex-wife.

  Everyone told junior officers that as demanding as the nuclear power training was, going to sea was harder. When he arrived on his first boat, the USS City of Corpus Christi, it had just begun a refueling overhaul in the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. For his entire tour, the boat never left drydock; he had to be loaned out to other ships around Puget Sound to complete his at-sea qualifications.

  He completed them with aplomb, pinned on his gold dolphins, received top marks on his fitness reports, and screened for department head with flying colors. The overhaul was demanding and stressful, but Mark got through the entire tour without an episode. He began to think again that he had healed. He did a leisurely shore tour at the ROTC unit at Creighton, then was ordered to report to the USS Alabama, where his optimism disappeared on the first day of his first patrol.

  It was after the two-day transit to Point Juliet, two days in which he’d spent all but a few moments in the control room staring at charts. The ship had completed its preparations to submerge, and they’d just taken a sounding, confirming that the water beneath them was as deep as expected. After two nauseating days rolling on the surface, everyone was eager to submerge, so the XO was encouraging the OOD, Lieutenant Kaiser, to hurriedly shift the watch to the control room and get down from the bridge.

  The last lookout dropped down from the ladder, directly in front of the conn, and Kaiser came soon after. The Nav noticed that there was only one “Open” indication left on the Chief of the Watch’s panel, a single green “O” in a row of amber lines; the indicator
for the lower hatch to the bridge. As Kaiser spun the ring that sealed the hatch, the nav watched the light turn from a green “O” into an amber-colored straight line, a line that continued the length of the COW’s panel. It was an elegant representation of their status: the ship was completely sealed.

  Suddenly, his own throat began to tighten, as if the wheel that Kaiser spun also controlled the flow of oxygen into his lungs.

  “The ship is rigged for dive,” announced the OOD.

  The navigator realized with sudden, overwhelming panic that he was locked in a steel tube driving through the ocean, and would remain so for more than one hundred days. He felt the ship running out of air, his lungs constricting, starving. There was a chorus of voices in control then, the usual yammer of everyone doing their part to get the ship submerged safely. But Mark knew at least a few of those voices muttering in the background were voices in his head, warning him about the danger only he could see.

  He stumbled out of control into the watchstander’s head at the bottom of the ladder; one of very few places you could be truly alone on the boat. Everyone noticed him stagger out, of course, but the same people had seen him virtually live in control for two exhausting days. And this was his first patrol, before there’d been even a whisper about his odd behavior amongst the crew or the wardroom. Most of the men assumed he’d just done an admirable job of controlling his bladder until an opportune time, or perhaps had finally succumbed to sea sickness. Mark splashed water on his face from the head’s tiny steel sink, and tried to pull himself together. Gradually he began to control his breathing enough to return to the control room, where an endless series of charts awaited his review.

  Ever since then, he’d recognized that the first day at sea was the hardest, that moment when the ship became a submarine. It was a moment he dreaded, but one he was prepared for. He knew that after that first day submerged, all patrol, every patrol, he’d have trouble separating what really happened to him with what was going on in his mind, the voices of the crew from the voices in his head. The problem, he knew, was getting worse. Stabbing himself in the leg was bad; Maple hadn’t been able to make eye-contact with him since. But he knew it was Jabo he had to be careful around, the smartest junior officer on the boat. The rest of the officers might think the Nav was just a little odd, a little stressed out. But he had a feeling he wouldn’t be able to fool Jabo for long.

  Now it was the start of his fifth patrol. He had thought that he would just tough it out, his last patrol before rotating to shore duty, and then he’d vowed to himself to get help. He’d find a civilian doctor who would treat him in secret, away from the Navy’s watchful eyes. Maybe it was as simple as a pill he could take, he’d read about things like that. A good prescription and a shore tour were just what he needed. Maybe he and Muriel would even patch things up. Of course, that had all been wishful thinking before the patrol began and their orders changed.

  Now he knew he would never see land again.

  • • •

  The nav realized his eyes were shut, and snapped awake. The bright, fluorescent box of the Officer’s Study was empty except for him and his charts. He had a splitting headache, and the color scheme of the OS did nothing to relieve it, everything in the room was painted a different shade of orange, with the exception of the brass clock, the only nautical touch in that sterile space. The Nav noticed with a sigh that the clock had stopped; keeping those old-fashioned clocks wound, six of them placed throughout the ship, was yet another responsibility of the navigator’s. He turned back to the clean chart in front of him.

  In the case of nautical charts, unblemished was not a desirable thing. It meant the charts had never been used, and hence never been updated with the frequent changes and revisions that they received from a variety of sources, including the NOAA. Their home charts, the ones near Puget Sound, were smeared and smudged with notes and numbers that had been added as more detailed depth surveys were taken, sand banks shifted, and, occasionally, ancient shipwrecks were identified beneath the waves. When planning the ship’s track with those charts he could be confident that while there were many hazards, every hazard had been identified. But now, they were not only steaming through an area that the Alabama had never been through, it was an area far from the traditional shipping lanes to and from Asia. The new charts he’d received from Group Nine were pristine, with vast swaths of light blue that, the navigator knew, did not indicate a lack of hazards, but a lack of information. With a stack of bulletins and messages, he was adding what few updates he had, but the charts were still dominated by unmarked stretches marred only by the dark pencil line of the ship’s track that the navigator had laid out. The ship was travelling so fast, it was all he could do to keep up with their track, getting a chart updated and approved by the captain and XO just in time to hand it to the OOD as they raced westward. He involuntarily glanced at the stopped clock again; he didn’t know what time it was, and he didn’t how long it had been since he’d slept. He glanced at the edge of the chart, the small island of Taiwan, the looming mass of China.

  His hands started shaking at the magnitude of what they were doing, at the magnitude of his role in it.

  The end of the world, he heard, in a voice that was not quite his.

  You have to stop this submarine.

  • • •

  Danny Jabo was not born to be a naval officer. There was nothing remotely nautical in his family heritage, nor was there anything suggesting he was destined to wear the gold braid of an officer, which even in the navy of the world’s greatest democracy carried the faint whiff of aristocracy. His father was the son of a farmer who’d learned to repair air conditioners at the county’s vocational school. He’d passed on to Danny a keen mechanical aptitude, which helped him in the Navy, and an uncomplaining, tireless attitude about hard work, which helped him more. His life had not been without drama or tragedy—he had a little brother die in the crib when he was just five, a loss from which his sad-eyed mother never completely recovered. But it was a solid, good upraising in Morristown, Tennessee, forty miles east of Knoxville, at the edge of the Appalachians. There was an old joke that navy chiefs told when asked where they would go upon finally retiring. I’m going to strap an anchor to my back, they said, and start walking inland. When someone points to me and says, “hey, what’s that thing on your back,” that’s where I am going to live. His hometown, Jabo thought, when he first heard that joke, is that place.

  He’d learned about ROTC scholarships from his high school guidance counselor, and applied to both the air force and the navy, mainly because both services, on their brochures, seemed to offer something that was more technically alluring than the Army’s marketing literature. One part of the process required him to go to Fort Knox, Kentucky, home of the nearest available military hospital, and get a physical, an event that marked the first time he’d ever set foot on a military installation of any kind. Both services, impressed by his grades, his test scores, and his glowing recommendations, offered him full scholarships. The deal both services offered was this: they would pay for 100% of his tuition to any school that he could get into that offered their particular flavor of ROTC. Danny and his father researched the issue carefully, and after a flurry of applications to southern schools, Vanderbilt was the most expensive school with ROTC that he could get into, and thus, they figured, the best deal. Vandy offered Navy ROTC but not Air Force. So before he even entered the Navy, Danny became a Commodore.

  And eight years later, after three summers at sea, a college degree, and a year of the navy’s exhaustive nuclear power training, he found himself wandering the passageways of a Trident submarine. It was sometimes dizzying to think about, like he had just awoken one day and discovered that he was one of twelve officers on a nuclear warship. But at the same time, he knew he’d made the right choice, because he loved his job, and couldn’t imagine serving on a carrier, one of hundreds of officers and thousands of men, or on some supply ship or auxiliary, no matter how necessary t
hose support ships were. He loved being part of an elite group at the tip of the spear, and he knew that he would miss that prideful feeling most of all when he resigned his commission.

  He was looking for Hayes Kincaid. They were about to watch Enter the Dragon in the wardroom, and he knew Kincaid would want in. Soon, after the rigors of the three-section watchbill fully set in, he knew they wouldn’t be able to burn a flick together like that. Whenever one of them was off watch, the other would either be on the conn or in the rack, getting what sleep he could. So he thought they should enjoy it while they were able.

  He suspected Kincaid was exercising in Missile Compartment Lower Level so he headed that direction. Kincaid was a dedicated athlete, and one of few men to return from a patrol in better shape than when he left. Their workout gear was limited, but Kincaid made the most of it with every spare moment, putting himself through punishing workouts. The centerpiece of his routine was the treadmill, on which Kincaid attempted to run five hundred miles every patrol, tracking each run on a sheet of graph paper.

  As Jabo walked by the Officer’s Study, he saw that the door was closed, and wondered if Kincaid might be in there, perhaps reviewing some charts or writing a letter home for the impending mail call. He put his ear to the door before knocking; the way things were going he didn’t want to interrupt some high-level discussion between the XO and CO, afraid they might drag him into the conversation. He heard something, muted talking, muttering on the other side. He lightly knocked on the door with one knuckle and the talking stopped. He knocked again, and opened it.

  The navigator sat alone at the table, a pristine chart in front of him.

  “Oh, hey Nav. Just looking for Kincaid.”

  The navigator didn’t say a word, didn’t nod or respond at all.