Collapse Depth

by Todd Tucker

  • • •

  “Cindy, this is Angi.”

  “Hello Angi, how are you feeling?”

  “Fine, just tired all the time…listen, sorry to bother you, but a couple of us have heard something about a fire on the boat.”

  She paused to await a response from Cindy. There was none.

  “It’s just…I thought if there was an announcement getting ready to make the rounds, maybe you could let me know, so I could head off some of the panic with the new wives, you know…”

  Still Cindy said nothing.

  “Cindy are you there?”

  “Yes, Angi, I’m here. No I haven’t heard anything about a fire. But I am sure everything is okay. If there was a fire.”

  For the first time, Angi felt a real stab of dread. Cindy was the absolute worst person in the world at keeping secrets, and everything she said just confirmed to Angi that something had gone wrong. If it was just a normal, baseless, meandering patrol rumor, Cindy would have wanted to dissect every detail, add her own elaborations, usually colored with her multiple decades of experience as a submarine wife. By not saying anything, she was saying everything.

  “Cindy, is there anything you can tell me?”

  “Angi, I am sure everything is fine.”

  As Angi hung up the phone and replayed Karen Duggan’s phone call in her mind, something else occurred to her. Why in the hell would repair parts for Alabama be heading toward a shipyard in Japan?

  • • •

  The wives in port adhered to a hierarchy that roughly mirrored the one their husbands followed at sea—it just made thing easier. The captain’s wife was in charge, the XO’s wife was second in command, the rest of the officers followed in line, and the enlisted men’s wives followed a whole separate organization, one of petty officer’s, chiefs, senior chiefs, master chiefs, and the Chief of the Boat, a system of rank and protocol that even after six patrols Angi only vaguely understood. But one rule was crystal clear: the divide between the wives and the men in uniform could never be broached. She could call the captain’s wife, but never the captain.

  But Angi was on her last patrol, was pregnant, and was pretty sure the navy had something they should be telling her. She felt like the navy owed it to her. She dialed one more number. And after speaking to a yeoman and a civilian secretary, she finally got through.

  “Captain Soldato.”

  “Mario, this is Angi.”

  “Angi, how are you feeling?”

  “Captain, did something happen on the boat?”

  He cleared his throat. “Angi, you know I can’t talk about stuff like that. If there’s word to go out, it will come through the usual channels…”

  “Mario, please, I won’t tell anybody, I just really need to know…”

  “I’m sorry, Angi, I hope you understand…” Angi could hear the regret in his voice, and desperately tried to read his tone for clues…she regretted that she hadn’t driven onto base to ask him in person. She had considered it, but thought it might give Cindy Soldato enough time to let him know about the rumor. She felt her head spinning with fear, she couldn’t even picture what it would mean to have a fire on a submarine. What was there to burn? What would happen to the air?

  “Captain was there a fire?” she could hear the desperation in her voice.

  There was a long pause, she could feel in the silence Mario considering telling her the truth, and she could feel him rejecting it.

  “Angi, I’m sure everything is fine.”

  • • •

  Captain Soldato hung up and felt horrible. It was the plague of ships at sea, the way the wives could seize on any grain of information and work themselves into an absolute frenzy. Cindy had called him earlier this morning and told him about the rumor—Angi had not been the first to call her. He told Cindy pretty much what he’d told Angi—that even if something had happened, everything was okay now. And he couldn’t say anymore, which pissed Cindy off. He wished he could just tell her that they’d had a fire in the damn laundry, no one was hurt, and in a couple of weeks even the laundry would be repaired. But to disclose that would disclose that the ship would get a new washing machine in two weeks, which meant it had a port call in two weeks, which would lead to a million other questions, a million other rumors. As much as he hated to leave poor Angi in the dark like that, he had to.

  But something he wouldn’t tell Angi, or Cindy, and that he even hated to admit to himself: he was worried too. He’d poured over the Alabama’s message, and was able to piece together from the scant information inside that the fire had been serious, not just a smoldering pile of poopie suits. There’d been water damage on three levels, which indicated several hoses had been brought to bear. The ship had fought electrical grounds for two hours after the fire was extinguished, some of them serious, meaning a lot of water had been discharged from those hoses. And then the ship had to ventilate with the diesel for almost two hours. Meaning there was a lot of smoke. A lot.

  But the most disturbing thing in the message was a single line about how the fire hose closest to the scene had been made useless, pressurized and immovable in its rack. It disturbed Soldato because most of his comrades at squadron took it to mean that someone onboard Alabama was really fucking stupid—some dumbass had arrived at the scene and flat-out panicked, turned the valve lefty-loosey and taken a fire hose out of service. And he didn’t believe that. Some captains he knew liked to look back at their old boats and see how things deteriorated once they stepped away. But Soldato knew too many of the men, respected the captain and the XO too much. The ship, and the crew, were not fuck ups.

  Which left a disturbing alternative—someone had done it on purpose. It was the one thing that all the engineering genius in the world couldn’t account for. It was the reason they worked so hard to screen the men before they even set foot on the boat, and that in the history of the force, submarines had accepted only volunteers. A saboteur was a nightmare scenario, and the idea of it worried the captain so much that he missed a refit review meeting for the USS Florida, as he sat at his desk and brooded.

  • • •

  Jabo checked the ship’s position again on the chart. He had just taken the conn, the officer of the deck on the six-to-midnight evening watch, still pleasantly full after a meal of spaghetti and meatballs. He could still smell the garlic bread, and hear the clatter below decks of the meal being cleaned up.

  They were on track…barely. They’d run some drills that afternoon, what few drills they could run without slowing the ship much below the required twenty-two knot SOA: a radioactive spill in the engine room, an electrical grounding isolation exercise, a fire in the engine room. All lame, except for the fire. During that one they’d gone quickly to PD, practiced ventilating, and while they were up acquired the broadcast—Jabo still needed to review those messages. And, in a huge departure from the simulation while at PD, they shot what trash they could. A submarine disposed of trash by compacting it into metal cylinders ten inches in diameter and shooting them from the bottom of the boat in a device that functioned much like a torpedo tube. Getting rid of garbage was turning out to be one of the real limiting factors of their rapid advance across the Pacific. Like going to periscope depth, shooting trash required the ship to slow. But unlike acquiring the broadcast, shooting trash took more than twenty-three minutes, and the metal tubes were starting to pile up. The trash room was at capacity, and the overflow was now stacked in the torpedo room like cordwood. The smell was starting to become an issue, and the crew had taken to marking the ripest cylinders with yellow post-it notes so that, when the opportunity to shoot a few cylinders presented itself, the foulest would be sent to the bottom of the ocean first.

  But Jabo’s next six hours represented the distillation of their priorities. There would be no going to PD, no shooting trash, and, most importantly, no slowing down. If they kept at twenty-three knots, by the end of his watch, they would have just made their way back to the red dot that marked their required po
sition on the chart. By the end of the midwatch, they would have gotten ahead enough to allow another quick trip to PD, another broadcast, and maybe send a few more cylinders of trash to their watery grave.

  He read the deck log entry from the last watch’s trip to PD and something caught his eye.

  “Did you take this sounding?” he asked Flather.

  “Yes sir.”

  It was 1,850 fathoms. The chart, at the position of their fix, read 2,900 fathoms. “That’s a big difference.”

  Flather shrugged. “Since it was more than ten percent off, we told the navigator and the captain. It’s in the standing orders. There’s still plenty of water under us.” And that was true. A fathom was six feet, so even at their current depth, with the current sounding, they had more than 1,000 fathoms, or six thousand feet, of water between them and the ocean bottom. Still, the discrepancy bugged him.

  “Does that bother you?”

  Flather shrugged again, this time in a way that said: I’ve got much bigger shit to worry about. “You know how these charts have been—they’re pretty sketchy. So I’m not entirely surprised that some of the soundings are a little off.”

  “A little? It’s over a thousand fathoms off. A fucking mile.”

  “Maybe it’s the fathometer,” said Flather. “It’s less accurate in very deep water.” Jabo could see that Flather was getting his back up, insulted by any implied inaccuracy on the chart or in the sounding.

  “True enough,” said Jabo. “But let’s take another one. It’ll make me feel better.”

  “Captain’s permission?”

  “Don’t need it to use the secure fathometer at this speed.”

  “Be aware that the secure fathometer is even less accurate, and this speed will degrade the accuracy even more,” said Flather. He was being pissy now.

  “Noted.”

  Flather turned to the console on his left, spun a few dials and flipped some switches, in a minute he was ready to go. He turned to Jabo for final confirmation.

  “Go ahead.”

  He pushed the button at the center of the console. A discrete, focused pulse of sound shot from the bottom of the boat to the ocean floor, then bounced back to the sensor on the hull. The fathometer measured exactly how long it took the sound to make its journey. It then corrected the speed of sound for the ocean’s temperature, one of the values Flather had entered, added in the depth of the boat, and in less than a second, displayed the depth of the ocean: 1,840 fathoms. Flather noted it in his log, then wrote the number, in his tiny, neat script, next to their estimated position on the broad, featureless chart of the Pacific that was supposed to tell them where on the planet they were. The consistency of the two readings, to Jabo, probably ruled out equipment malfunction. Which meant one of two equally disturbing possibilities: either their chart was inaccurate. Or they weren’t where they thought they were.

  Someone cleared his throat at the conn and Jabo turned. IC2 Lester stood waiting with his clipboard. Lester absent-mindedly turned and reset the timer for the BST buoys as he waited to get Jabo’s attention. The “beast buoys” were distress beacons attached to the side of the boat with explosive bolts, designed to float to the surface and alert the navy that a Trident submarine was in serious trouble. A number of things would cause the buoys to automatically launch: excessive depth, certain conditions inside the hull, and a timer that had to be manually turned at least once every three hours. If no one thought to turn the timer in that amount of time, the logic went, then everyone on the boat must be dead. In one legendary Trident submarine incident, USS Michigan in drydock forgot to secure the buoys, as they are supposed to be in port, and then no one wound the timer. After three hours, just as designed, the explosive bolts fired, the twin buoys rocketed off the side of the boat, crashed into the drydock basin, and began broadcasting their distress signal, a frequency that was continuously monitored around the clock by three dedicated teams of radiomen around the world. According to the legend, the president of the United States was actually awoken before the buoys were shut off, and the captain was relieved of command before the sun came up. Good electricians, like Lester, turned the BST timer habitually, every time they walked by it.

  “Yes Lester?”

  “Review my logs sir?”

  Lester was the Auxiliary Electrician Forward, a roaming watchstander with responsibilities all over the forward section of the ship. The Officer of the Deck was required to review and initial his logs periodically, but a good watchstander, like Lester, would prompt the OOD to take a look when something was wrong. Jabo really wanted to study the chart, puzzle over that inconsistent sounding. But Lester knew what he was doing, he’d spent two years on a fast boat before coming to Alabama. Jabo knew he wouldn’t be bothering him without reason.

  He crossed the conn and took the clipboard. He scanned it quickly, wanting to see if anything jumped out at him before asking Lester what his concerns were. There were only a few red circles on the sheet, from the last watch, when they’d been at PD. They’d ventilated briefly, and the oxygen level in the ship had actually drifted high out of spec, slightly beyond the twenty percent they tried to maintain with their normal underway O2 bleed. (There was an upper limit for oxygen because too much of it could make fires more likely and intense.) Since going back deep, the crew of Alabama had managed to breathe it back down into specification. And for the last two hours, Jabo could see everything was in black. He scanned over the rows that were the normal areas of concern; hydrogen, electrical grounds, the bilges. Everything at first glance looked good. But that’s why they put smart guys like Lester on the watchbill: to let them know what was wrong before alarm bells started going off.

  “Check out Freon,” said Lester.

  Jabo scanned the second sheet, where a long list of contaminants were measured by CAMS, the ship’s computerized atmospheric monitoring station. Freon was, indeed, drifting higher, especially in Machinery Two.

  “That’s weird,” said Jabo.

  “I know,” said Lester. “Especially since there’s no refrigeration gear back there. And look at this…” Lester flipped ahead a page, to a row in which he checked the temperatures of the two main freezers, which were almost directly below their feet.

  “Not out of spec…”

  “But getting there,” said Lester. “They usually go high before meals, as the cranks are going in and out of there getting food, but usually by now they’re going back down. They’re still going up.”

  Jabo sighed. “I’d say we may have a refrigeration problem.”

  It was one of those things they didn’t spend a lot of time teaching you until you actually arrived on a boat: the importance of the ship’s numerous refrigeration plants. An ensign was conversant on his first day on the boat in the language and philosophy of nuclear propulsion, thanks to a year of rigorous training, both in the classroom and at a working reactor. He could also fake it reasonably well in a conversation about torpedoes or sonar, or any of a handful of tactical systems that he’d studies at submarine school for three months immediately before reporting to the submarine. But refrigeration was one of those things they were expected to learn at sea, despite the fact that it was a system whose collapse could affect almost every other system on the boat: and it wasn’t at all about the food stores. The same plants that cooled the ship’s refrigerators and freezers provided cooling water to all the ship’s electronics as well.

  “Chief of the Watch, get Chief Yaksic to control.”

  The chief of the watch was already sending the messenger to the goat locker; like any good COW he’d been eavesdropping and anticipating. “He’s on his way, sir.”

  A whoop on the panel and a blinking red alarm light caught the COW’s eye.

  “Number one oxygen generator is shut down on high voltage,” he said.

  Motherfucker thought Jabo. His blood started pumping and he started running through procedures in his mind, aligning priorities, trying to figure out what the fuck was going to happen next, a
nd what he could do about it.

  • • •

  Petty Officer Howard made a slight adjustment to the voltage of the number one oxygen generator, and waited a moment to verify that the individual cell voltage was drifting back down. Since they’d started up the machine that afternoon after the drills, voltage had been edging high again, a tendency that had worsened in recent days. He’d calculated in his head that he had just enough time to complete a round of logs before getting back to the machine and adjusting it, lest its own protective systems shut it down because of the excessive voltage. The machine needed maintenance, real maintenance, with contractors, engineers, and work plans. But that would probably have to wait until they were in port, if not dry dock. In the meantime, it was his job, for six hours at a time, to keep it running.

  The oxygen generators were some of the most advanced, most temperamental, and most important machinery on the boat. They manufactured breathable oxygen from the only raw material that the submarine had unlimited access to: water. Using high voltage electricity, the generators ripped the H2O of water into its constituent parts: hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen was pumped overboard and the oxygen was either piped into the boat or stored in banks for later usage. But the net result of this giant exercise in basic water chemistry was a machine that combined high voltage electricity with high pressure cells of two of nature’s most explosive gasses. Which is why most men on the boat routinely referred to the oxygen generator as “the bomb,” and why almost every oxygen generator in the fleet had hanging somewhere near it a picture of the Hindenburg.

  It was Howard’s skill at running the oxygen generators, he knew, that had kept him away temporarily from the green table—captain’s mast—and whatever variety of punishments awaited him for the dryer fire. The captain and XO wanted to take him to mast, which would, at the very least, mean he would have to re-qualify every watch station. And probably worse: he might lose rank, he might lose money, he might even be kicked off the boat. Shit, who knows—they might even send him to the brig. He’d gotten a recent free pass for his DUI, so he was not expecting leniency. Even if he knew that he was not at fault for the fire.