Collapse Depth

by Todd Tucker

  Jabo shook his head. Fuck, he thought, he’d been standing right there. “No, I didn’t look at it. I like to think I would have noticed if it was pressurized like that, but I can’t swear to it. I talked to Howard for a few minutes and moved on.”

  “Alright then,” said the Captain, putting his fists on the table. “Training opportunities for all, officers and crew.” The captain’s X1J phone, a direct line to the conn, buzzed beneath the table. He spoke briefly to the OOD and hung up. “Looks like we’re ready to go to periscope depth and get the smoke off the boat.” He left the wardroom with Maple in tow.

  When the door shut behind him, the XO smiled. “You fucked up Danny. You should have seen that hose.”

  “I know sir. I fucked up. It won’t happen again.”

  “And Howard fucked up too.”

  “Yes sir, it looks that way.”

  “I’d like to take that fucker to mast right now, but the fact is, we need him on the watchbill. We’d be port and starboard in machinery two without him. So we’ll wait, until either we pull in and get a new A Ganger, or until someone else qualifies machinery two. You’re going to handle the investigation. Do it during all of your spare time.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “No point in telling Howard about this—I don’t want him to know helping somebody qualify will get him to mast faster.”

  “Good idea sir.”

  The XO leaned back in his chair, sighed, and cracked his knuckles over his head. “You think he pressurized that hose, too?”

  Jabo was a little shocked by the question. He’d assumed that someone had thrown open the valve in the excitement of arriving at the scene, a stupid, but somewhat understandable, mistake. But if the hose had been pressurized in the rack before—the XO was asking if Howard had done something much more serious than fuck up a load of laundry. “I don’t know…you think he’d fuck around like that?”

  “Just asking the question.”

  “Sir, Howard may be a fuck up. But he’s no saboteur.”

  “Well let’s hope that this was just a pure act of stupidity then. And God help the sailor who did it when I find out who he is. Get up there to control and see if you can help, Hein has been on the conn forever. Relieve him at periscope depth”

  “Relieve Hein at periscope depth, aye sir.”

  • • •

  When Jabo walked out of the wardroom, Howard stepped out from behind the ladder to control, looking worried.

  “Howard. We were just talking about you.”

  “I didn’t do anything!”

  Jabo grimaced. “Howard, you want to know my personal philosophy in situations like this? Say the following words: ‘I fucked up, and it won’t happen again.’”

  “But I didn’t!”

  “Howard, they found your book in the dryer. On top of a big pile of rags.”

  “I know—Yowler told me. I didn’t wash any rags. As soon as my poopies were dry, I got out of there—I was going to head to the conn to go to PD, like you said.”

  “And the book?

  “I keep that book in there, shoved between the deck and the hull. I would never put it in the dryer!”

  “So what do you think happened?”

  Howard shook his head. “I have no idea. But I got my poopies out of the dryer and left. I was changing in my bunkroom when they called away the fire.”

  Jabo thought it over—it was weird. Howard had just been drying poopies, he’d seen it with his own two eyes. And why would he throw a load of rags in after, along with a book?

  “I don’t know what to say Howard. I fucked up too—I should have seen that hose pressurized in the rack. And if you did make any mistakes—take responsibility for them, you’ll come out better in the end.”

  Howard shook his head at that, and walked away frustrated, his young man’s sense of justice violated. Jabo walked up to control, still reeking of smoke, his feet tired and his head pounding, and took the conn from an equally exhausted Lieutenant Hein.

  He pressed his right eye to the periscope and turned slowly around, one complete revolution every minute. It was dusk, and the ocean was like glass, smooth to the horizon where sea and sky met, different shades of the darkest blue. Ship control was easy and the scope stayed a steady three feet out of the water; Jabo calculated that the distance to the horizon was about 2.5 miles. So the Alabama’s periscope pointed up in the exact center of a five mile diameter circle, inside of which, Jabo verified with each revolution, there were no other ship was in sight, no running lights of any kind, white, red, or green. He looked west and saw nothing, no running lights of any color. If Sierra Nine was out there, he couldn’t see it. Alabama was profoundly alone.

  • • •

  The Navigator spread his charts out in the Officer’s Study and erased the track that he had carefully laid out in the days before. They hadn’t lost much time. The Captain had opted to use the diesel engine rather than the blower to ventilate the ship, which did the job in about half the time. Within two hours at snorkel depth, all atmospheric tests in the missile compartment proved benign so they stopped the rumbling diesel, and descended back to 400 feet. In total they’d lost almost three hours during the fire, almost half a watch. Which meant they were behind, and would have to move even faster to make up their track.

  It was so weak, he thought. A fire in the laundry.

  Optimism had shot through him when he first heard the alarm, smelled the smoke. And the closest hose made useless! Maybe the fire would cripple the ship, he thought, turn them around, end their disastrous journey to Taiwan.

  But that was stupid, he now knew. A mere fire in a clothes dryer wouldn’t stop this ship, this mission, not even close. Huge forces were at work, malignant forces. And he was an idiot to think that a few burning rags could stop that. But would what could?

  Almost all equipment on the boat, like the washer and dryer, came in pairs. For just this reason: redundancy meant reliability. There was only one reactor, but that sacred machine was incredibly well protected by men and machinery. It was hard to imagine an equipment malfunction that could make them turn around.

  But people were different. The submarine had lots of equipment but few people. Already the watchbill was stretched to the limit. If crewmen started dying, then the ship would have no choice but to turn around. Especially if they died in large numbers.

  The navigator’s tried to stop his hand from shaking by refocusing on the chart. He was running out of time: they were halfway to Taiwan.

  • • •

  Mary Beth Brown picked Angi up at her house in her new Lexus. They took the Kingston Ferry across the sound, and then drove to Bellevue, home of the Bellevue Square Mall. The parking lot looked like a luxury car dealership, and Angi knew it was Microsoft money, perhaps with a sprinkling of Starbucks fortunes interspersed as well. It was much different than the Fords and Chevys that populated the lot at the Silverdale Mall, where she lived, a blue DOD sticker on every windshield. As they walked in, Angi noticed how the two malls even smelled different, Bellevue smelling like very good coffee, while the mall in Silverdale smelled of burnt popcorn

  “So, one more patrol?” Mary Beth asked, as she waited for the Jimmy Chu black pumps in size 8, marked down to a mere $350. Unlike some of the officers’ wives, for whom Navy service seemed like a sacrifice, Angi had never had money, and neither had Danny. Danny’s dad was a heating and air conditioning repairman, while Angi was raised by a single mom who worked in an ink factory. She never once thought of herself as poor, but, looking back, they certainly never had an excess of money lying around. One of the stranger things she and Danny had in common was that neither one of them, in their entire lives, had ever gone on a family vacation.

  So to them, the Navy salary had never seemed like a hardship. In fact, she drove a new car, a Honda Accord, for the first time in her life, and she absolutely loved the house they’d purchased together with a VA loan. But, after spending a few hours with Mary Beth Casazza, whose husband had line
d up a job at Microsoft before getting out of the navy the year before, she was starting to become aware of the things she couldn’t buy on Danny’s lieutenant’s salary, even with sea pay, sub pay, and the nuclear power bonus tacked on.

  “That’s the plan,” Angi said, considering trying on a pair of Manolo Blahniks, even though she would never, she vowed, no matter how much money they someday might make, ever spend that much on a pair of shoes. “If I’m not mistaken, I think he’s already turned in his letter.”

  Mary Beth rolled her eyes. “Isn’t that amazing, when you think about it? That you don’t know? That the Navy can just do whatever they want to him, as long as they want? I’ll bet you can’t wait to get out.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Angi. “Danny’s never hated the Navy, and neither have I.”

  “But the baby?” she was smiling.

  Angi raised an eyebrow.

  “Cindy Soldato told me.”

  Angi nodded. “I guess it’s ridiculous to pretend it’s a secret any more, now that I’ve told Cindy. I’m a little over three months.”

  “You must be so excited!” said Mary Beth. She had the shoes now, was sliding her feet into them. “And Danny will be back…”Angi watched her doing the math in her head.

  “Oh no, honey. . .”

  She nodded. “Yes…probably not back in time. That’s okay. My mom will come in town.”

  Mary Beth put her hand on her arm. “No, honey, it sucks.”

  “You’re right. It does suck. But we’re not the first to go through it.”

  Mary Beth was shaking her head. “Soon, you won’t have to worry about any of this shit. Has Danny applied to Microsoft yet? Larry says they are hiring Navy guys like crazy right now, love the nukes”

  “Didn’t you say he’s working all the time?”

  Mary Beth nodded. “In comparison to the real world: yes. But compared to the Navy? He’s home every night. He’s home for dinner probably three nights a week. And he’s home every Saturday and Sunday, just like he’s supposed to be. And the money…let me tell you Angi, you’ll get used to it in a hurry. We’re going to France this summer. After I get that out of my system, maybe I’ll talk Larry into getting me pregnant.”

  At the register, Mary Beth decided at the list minute to get another pair of the same shoes in brown.

  • • •

  The submarine was, in many ways, just an arrangement of tubes within tubes. Different tubes contained different fluids: water, air, steam, radioactive coolant, refrigerant, drinking water, pure oxygen and pure hydrogen all coursed through different parts of the ship. Some fluids were at high pressure, like the hydraulic oil kept at a deadly three thousand pounds per square inch: a tiny stream ejected from a pinhole leak in that system could pierce a man’s skull. Other systems ran at low pressure but were hazardous in other ways, like the burbling, unending stream of sewage that 154 men created as they lived their daily lives. Most of the tubes ran from fore to aft, the main axis of the submarine, carrying their cargo from its source to its conclusion. Twenty-four of the biggest tubes, however, pointed straight up and down, as they contained Trident nuclear missiles, the submarine’s reason for being. The biggest tube of all was the submarine itself, a giant tapered tube of HY-80 steel forty-eight-feet wide at its widest point, and five hundred and forty eight feet long, blunted at the forward end by the sonar dome, and pinched off at the other by the seven-bladed screw that propelled them through the Pacific Ocean.

  Being a qualified officer on the submarine meant being able to identify every one of those tubes on sight: what it contained, where it ran, the implications of a breech. To learn it all was daunting, as the pipes ran everywhere, layered on top of each other in every direction, but the patrols were long, diversions were few, and the men had all been screened carefully for their intelligence and their ability to work tirelessly in pursuit of engineering knowledge. Ensign Brendan Duggan was on his first patrol, in the first stage of the process, tracing the pipes and ducts of a few isolated systems at a time, learning how they tied together to make some part of the boat function. By his third patrol, he’d know every pipe of every system, and be able to hand draw most of the systems with every valve in place. Danny Jabo, on his sixth patrol, was in the final stage of the learning process. Having learned the physical composition of every system, he was tasked with learning the philosophy of its design, why it was a certain capacity, why one material had been chosen over another to construct it, the trade offs that the engineers had made in designing it, between safety, efficiency, and silence.

  As part of this process, Jabo was walking Ensign Brendan Duggan through the boat, pointing out valves and ducts, attempting to help him qualify Battery Charging Line Up officer. Jabo knew almost nothing about Duggan. He was an academy guy, Jabo remembered, from somewhere in the south. He’d heard that he knew something about bluegrass music, and a rumor that he’d brought to sea a dulcimer, or a mandolin, or something like that. Thank God he’d had the sense to keep the thing stowed thus far: a nub officer couldn’t be seen doing something as frivolous as playing music.

  Battery Charging Lineup Officer was traditionally the first thing a new officer qualified on board, usually in his first week at sea. The BCLU verified that the ship’s ventilation system was operating normally prior to a battery charge, as charging the battery released a number of undesirable elements into the ship’s atmosphere: hydrogen being the most dangerous. It was an unavoidable byproduct of the process that crammed electricity into the battery’s wet, acid-filled cells. Prior to the charge an enlisted man went through the ship and set everything up, but such was the importance that an officer was required to physically verify the position of every valve and every switch. To learn the battery charging lineup was good for a new officer because it took him through every area of the ship. An officer who knew what he was doing could complete it in under thirty minutes. Like so many things a new officer on a submarine did, it was at once tedious and highly important.

  Duggan’s qualification was important to Jabo because it would put him one step closer to the watchbill, which might, at some point, result in an extra six hours of sleep for him. Which was why Jabo was willing to take an hour out of his sleep prior to taking the watch to walk through the ship with him, in an attempt to get Duggan to the point where he could withstand an oral examination by the engineer and get qualified, a small step toward becoming useful.

  “What’s this?” Jabo asked, pointing to a large, humming machine in Auxiliary Machinery Room 2.

  “A scrubber,” said Duggan confidently. “At least one of them has to be running during a battery charge.”

  “Correct,” said Jabo. “What does it do?”

  “Removes carbon dioxide,” said Duggan.

  “What creates carbon dioxide?”

  “I do,” said Duggan. “We all do. It’s a product of respiration.”

  “Right,” said Jabo. Which is why non-qualified personnel on the boat like Duggan were sometimes called “scrubber loads.” Along with non-qual, nub, dink (short for “delinquent”), and host of other insults. “So how does it remove CO2?”

  Duggan hesitated just a moment, recalling a scrap of information from his memory. “It heats up a catalyst...”

  “What catalyst?”

  “MEA. It heats up the MEA…”

  “How hot?”

  Duggan stopped. “I don’t know.”

  “Look that up,” Jabo said. Duggan was frustrated, he could tell, thinking this was more information than he needed to know to perform the battery charging line up successfully. “You’re going to need to learn it sooner or later,” said Jabo. “You might as well learn it now. And it’s important—this is actually one of the hottest pieces of machinery on the boat. You should know how hot. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Duggan, writing down the “look up” in his little green notebook.

  “And what’s this?” said Jabo, continuing the tour, laying his hand on a machine on the other side
of the space.

  “A burner. Removes hydrogen.”

  “And?”

  Duggan hesitated a moment. “It removes something else?”

  Jabo laughed. “Now, that’s something you really should know. Carbon Monoxide.”

  “Okay,” said Duggan. Jabo noticed that he had brought the battery charging checklist along with him. “Let’s go through the whole thing, see if you can actually do the line up. Ready?”

  “Sure,” said Brendan. He was eager to get started, eager to qualify something, contribute something. That yearning was a good quality, and at this stage in Brendan’s career, the only aspect of his personality that Jabo cared about. Jabo was already walking forward, to the battery well, where the procedure would start.

  “Danny? Can I ask a stupid question?”

  Jabo stopped. “Sure.”

  “The scrubbers remove carbon monoxide, right? And the burners remove hydrogen and carbon monoxide, right?”

  Jabo nodded. He was starting to wonder if they were rushing through this…that was pretty fundamental stuff. “So what’s your question?”

  “What about everything else?”

  “Everything else?”

  “Yeah, I mean, that’s three things we’re actively removing from the atmosphere. All this equipment, all these systems operating, organic compounds breaking down, people living inside here for months at a time, I mean, surely those aren’t the only three things building up on the boat, right?”

  “Well, we monitor for a bunch of things, as you know. I suppose if anything else built up to a dangerous point, we’d go up to PD and ventilate.”

  “Sure,” said Duggan. “I told you it was a stupid question.”

  “No,” said Jabo. “I’d tell you if it was. Actually it’s a pretty good fucking question.”

  They’d made it to the battery well, in the lower level of Auxiliary Machinery One, right next to the diesel, the ship’s two most important back up energy supplies sharing a room at the bottom of the submarine in the forward compartment. Jabo knelt next to the hatch of the well. “Okay, what do we have to do now?”