Collapse Depth

by Todd Tucker

  Yaksic had appeared in control at Maple’s side.

  “Yaksic, any good reason that valve may have been operated?”

  “None sir, not even by accident. It’s out of the way, just above the deck plates in lower level.”

  Jabo’s internal clock ticked—enough time had gone by, they needed to make another maneuver, he didn’t want to waste a second getting to periscope depth. “Sonar, conn, turning to port for TMA.”

  “Aye sir.”

  “Left full rudder, aye sir, my rudder is left full.”

  “Make your course two-three-zero.”

  “Make my course two-three-zero, aye sir.”

  The ship swayed again, and Jabo watched the CODC display. Thankfully, no new contacts appeared, although the eight they had to track now presented a daunting enough challenge. The picture was starting to form in his mind of the ocean over their heads, the relative position and size of the fishing boats. He’d chosen the course two-three-zero because it looked like it might be a safe path to PD, and because it kept them generally on track, although they were so slow he didn’t see how they could ever make it up on their voyage to Taiwan. Jabo started thinking about periscope depth, the preparations to ventilate, calculated how long it might take them to replace the ship’s bad air with good: fast with the blower, faster with the diesel, fastest with both. Petty Officer Hurd, the fire control operator, had appeared at the side of the conn—it would be his job to plug and unplug Jabo’s EAB as he spun around on the scope. There was a lot of chatter in control, rigs being reported, people looking up facts about Freon and Phosgene. Jabo forced himself to focus on the CODC. His job at the moment was to get the ship up to the roof, so they could get the bad air off and the good air on. Everyone else would take care of everything else, but his job was to get the boat up if the course was good.

  It was not.

  Leer came into control, without his EAB so he could hustle faster.

  “Put that fucking thing back on,” ordered Jabo.

  “Turn right!” said Leer. “We are driving bearing rate on Sierra Six!”

  The captain came over to the CODC, he and Jabo both saw that Leer was right. The Sonarmen could actually listen to the contacts with their headphones, didn’t have to wait for the data to accumulate in visual form on the screen, and what Leer had heard was very, very close. By “driving bearing rate,” Leer meant that the Alabama’s own motion was causing the change in bearing rate, as opposed to any motion by the contact—which meant they were dangerously near.

  “Right full rudder!” said Jabo.

  “Right full Rudder aye sir…my rudder is right full…”

  The big ship swung right, and the bright band of Sierra Six’s noise bent away from them, but it was so close now…

  “We’re going right under them,” said the captain calmly. “Rig the ship for collision.”

  “Rig for collision!” said the navigator into the 1MC, and the chief of the watch sounded the collision alarm. Not even the hull of a giant freighter could hit them at a depth of 160 feet—that’s exactly why that depth was chosen to prepare for periscope depth. But these were fishing boats, and there were a lot of things they might be dragging: nets, chains, maybe even an anchor. And that’s if they’d correctly guessed about the nature of the surface boat. It could be even worse if it was dredging, laying cable, trawling…there were a great many reasons to avoid driving your submarine underneath a surface ship.

  “Go deep, captain?”

  He shook his head. “No point now. We’re already under them.”

  They continued to swing right, but the noise of sierra six was a bright band that had consumed the display. The captain toggled one of the display’s switches, changing the scale so they could see more. Jabo was amazed at his calm.

  As they passed under Sierra Six, they could hear a pinging through the hull, a watery, high pitch ping as regular as a metronome.

  “Their fathometer,” said the captain, still watching the display. Sierra Six was behind them now. The captain waited… “steady here.”

  “Steady as she goes!” ordered Jabo.

  “Steady as she goes, aye sir,” said the helm, as he swung the rudder left to steady the ship on the bearing at which the ship was heading at that moment. They were pointing almost due north. “Sir, ship is steady on course zero-zero-five.”

  “Very well, said Jabo.

  “This is it,” snapped the Captain. “Let’s go up.”

  Jabo stepped back and put his hands on the orange ring over his head. “Raising number two periscope.” He swung the ring to the left and the scope smoothly and quickly rose until the eyepiece came into view. He put his right eye to the scope and was now looking into the ocean.

  Still spinning slowly around, searching 360 degrees around them, he twisted the handles toward him so that he was also looking up, looking for anything that was too close. He couldn’t see Sierra Six, the visibility underwater was not that far. Had he seen anything, he would have ordered emergency deep without hesitation. But it looked clear after three complete circuits around. Getting up briskly was crucial now, this was when the ship was at its most vulnerable. While no ship on earth could run into them at 160 feet, the same was not true as they ascended to periscope depth. Once they got to PD, they would actually be able to look around with their eyeballs, see the types of ships around them, the course and speeds they were on—it would be easy to make smart decisions. But the journey from 160 feet to PD was fraught.

  “Dive make your depth seven-eight feet.”

  “Make my depth seven-eight feet, aye sir.”

  As they were trained, the control room instantly went silent with that order. The ship pointed up slightly, and they began to rise, as Jabo spun slowly around, continuing to verify that nothing would obstruct their trip to the surface. A lone fish swam frantically in front of the scope, trying to get out their way, a trail of tiny bubbles in his path. The water lightened as they rose, turning from a dark, almost blackish green to a lighter aquamarine. Jabo could see the sun through the water as they rose; he was somewhat surprised that it was so bright out. They’d kept the boat on Pacific Time, and he’d lost all track of what time it was in the world above them. The scope broke through the water as Jabo continued to spin. The only sound was a slight hiss every time Hurd unplugged and replugged his EAB, which kept him from wrapping the hose around the scope as he spun. It was a sacred rule—between 160 feet and PD, no one but the OOD was allowed to speak, and the entire control room awaited to hear one of two reports from him once the scope was clear: “no close contacts,” or “emergency deep!”

  “Scope is breaking…” it was momentarily obscured by a splash. Then it was out.

  “Scope is clear.” Jabo turned three complete times, noted all the contacts right where he thought they should be, but none were on top of him, none had the narrow profile of boats on a collision course. He counted them as he spun, counted nine, one more than they’d seen in sonar. But after three complete revolutions he was certain that they were not going to run into anybody.

  “No close contacts!” Jabo said.

  The control room watchstanders breathed a collective sigh of relief, and began filling the silence again with their orders, comments and recommendations. Jabo kept his mask pressed to the scope. “Sonar, conn, mark surface contacts on the following bearings…” he pressed the red button the scope handle each time the crosshairs in his scope hit the center of one of the fishing boats. “Mark…mark…mark…mark…” Nine times he marked a contact, and each time Hurd called out the bearing as he pushed the button. After a complete revolution, satisfied he’d marked all the visible contacts, he switched the scope to high power and began a search of a ninety-degree arc of ocean. He let Hurd work on the contacts’ solutions in fire control. While satisfied that they were safe at their current course and speed, he was concerned that they had somehow missed one in sonar, one that was close enough to see.

  “Sonar conn—which contact is the one
we missed?”

  There was a pause, the Leer’s voice on the mike: “Designate Sierra Nine. About zero-four-five relative.”

  Jabo swung the scope to the starboard beam and rolled the handles forward to put the magnification in high power. Yes, there it was, another fishing boat. His heart raced for a minute as he discerned a narrow angle on the bow—it was pointing right at them. Then he saw the black ball hanging from the front super structure: the day shape for a boat at anchor. Out of the corner of the control room, by the navigator’s chart, he heard an unusual whooping alarm that took him a second to identify: it was the ESM alarm. ET1 Daniels, the ESM operator, spoke up.

  “Sir, we have a Siren Echo surface radar, bearing zero-five-zero.”

  “Siren Echo?”

  “Soviet-era military shipboard radar.”

  “Soviet military?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Jabo stopped rotating a minute, took another long hard look at Sierra Nine. It sure looked like a fishing boat. But he could now hear the rhythmic whine of the radar on their ESM antenna, in time with the rotation of the radar antenna he could see atop the little boat’s highest mast.

  “Sierra Nine is at anchor.”

  The captain was in his ear. “See anything to make you think it’s not a fishing boat?”

  “No sir. Maybe they bought that radar at a salvage auction or something…”

  “Or maybe somebody out here is looking for submarines.”

  The other odd thing about Sierra Nine, other than its high-grade military radar, was that it appeared to be at anchor in what was supposed to be very, very deep water. “Quartermaster, mark charted depth.”

  Flather took a second to read the chart. “Two thousand fathoms, sir.”

  “That’s really deep for a fishing boat to anchor in, isn’t it?”

  “Really deep,” said the Flather. “I doubt he has that much chain. Maybe it’s a sea anchor.”

  It’s possible, thought Jabo. It was curious, for sure. “Take a sounding,” he said.

  Flather turned to the fathometer, calibrated it, and pushed the button. “Two thousand fathoms,” he said. “Just like the chart says. At this depth and speed—that should be a good reading.”

  At least where we are, thought, Jabo. But that fishing boat appeared to be holding fast, like a boat would at anchor. He considered giving a slight right rudder, so they could edge closer, take a look. As he stared out at the boat, a dozen other tasks popped into his mind, things he’d pushed out of the way for the harrowing trip to periscope depth. They’d need to transmit another casualty report. That message would go, to among others, Captain Soldato, the commodore, who would probably start to wonder what the hell was going on inside the boat he had just recently left in good working order. But there was something weird about Sierra Nine, anchored there in the middle of a fishing fleet, her high-quality military radar spinning away. And no one topside hauling nets or traps. If he were just a little closer, he could maybe see inside, see what was on the deck…

  He heard hard, determined footsteps on the control room ladder, and recognized them as the XO’s. Jabo heard him plug into the EAB manifold at the top of the ladder, and take a deep breath, then another, he was winded, as if he had made the trip from Machinery Two to control without stopping to breathe. Jabo listened to the hiss of twenty pound air being forced into the mask and taken into the XO’s lungs and waited for him to make his report to the captain. Finally he spoke.

  . “Howard’s dead.”

  • • •

  Angi drove the short distance from their house to the Trigger Gate. They lived off base in a small house on a circle of small houses surrounded by towering Douglas Firs, every home inhabited by a family, civilian or military, whose livelihood depended on the fleet of eight Trident submarines that called Bangor, Washington, home: Ohio, Michigan, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Alaska, Nevada, and Henry M. Jackson. And while Angi and Danny lived off base, they were barely off base, just a few hundred yards from the gate, and within earshot of the enormous cranes of the distant Delta Pier, whose endless beeping they heard day and night as they rolled back and forth on their railroad tracks, preparing boats for their next patrol. As she pulled up to the gate, the young sailor in dress whites saw the gold bar of her windshield’s sticker that denoted an officer, snapped to, and saluted her as she passed.

  She was to meet the Soldatos at 48 North, the base’s all hands restaurant. It was part of the “upper base,” a complex that included the exchange, the commissary, the chapel, and the gym: almost every place that Angi ever needed to go. Not only were the submarines invisible from the upper base—you couldn’t even see the water, separated as it was by most of the base’s 7,000 heavily wooded acres. The piers were a much different, grittier world, wet and slightly dangerous, guarded by men in fatigues with guns, populated by workers with hardhats and tattoos. Crewmen weren’t even allowed to wear their working uniforms, their cotton khakis and dungarees, on the upper base, which looked more like a community college campus than it did a port for eight ships of war. Some of the old salts, in the most derisive words they could muster, accused it of looking like an Air Force base.

  It was a lunch she’d put off as long as possible. Cindy Soldato had been calling with increasing frequency, her heart (perhaps) in the right place, but her attention could be suffocating. Angi was the only pregnant wife in the wardroom at the moment, and Cindy could focus her considerable energy upon her, generous with her advice about everything from filing military health insurance claims to breast feeding. In one week, her own mom would arrive from Knoxville, and Angi wondered if she would be able to survive all the mothering she was about to endure.

  When she walked into the restaurant Cindy and Mario were deep in conversation, always a funny contrast to see them together. Mario was small, dark, highly animated, his hands moving with every phrase, leaning forward toward her. Cindy on the other hand was a fair Southern belle with perfect posture, her hands folded neatly in her lap as she listened with a look of rapt attention that looked like it might have been practiced in front of a mirror. Cindy had met Mario when he was one of a group of midshipmen at the Academy drafted to escort Virginia debs to some kind of cotillion. Early in Danny’s tour, at a wardroom party, Angi made the mistake of mentioning they were both from the South. Cindy’s smile had tightened and she didn’t respond: the old prejudice of the plantation south against those from the mountains endured, even in a Navy town along the Pacific Coast, even with a woman who’d scandalized her family, she liked to boast, when she married an Italian Catholic from Cleveland. Mario saw Angi walking toward them and stood.

  “Angi!” He looked down at her belly unabashedly.

  “Angi, please sit down,” said Cindy, actually pulling a chair out for her. “How are you?”

  “Fine, fine,” she said. “I feel really good. I was sick a few days last week, but thankfully that phase appears to be over.”

  “Good!” said Cindy and Mario together.

  “About the worst side effect I have now is really weird dreams. And I’m tired— but that may just be laziness.”

  They laughed. A waiter came by and took their orders: they all ordered chef salads. Mario’s phone was sitting on the table, every few seconds it would emit a short staccato buzz. He glanced down at it every time, but it never seemed worthy of much attention, he didn’t even pick it up.

  “It never stops,” he said, noticing her interest. “They code the messages: a short little buzz like that means I need to see it but it’s not a crisis. Anything really important gets the ‘danger signal’: five short, rapid blasts.”

  “You must come to resent that little thing.”

  “Not at all,” said Cindy. “It’s because of that phone he can pay for our lunch!”

  “It’s true,” he said. “In the bad old days, I would have been afraid to leave the pier, afraid something would happen and they wouldn’t be able to find me.” The phone buzzed once on cue, and they laughed again. He
read the screen. “The Seattle Seahawk cheerleaders are going on base for a fundraiser…they want me to set up a tour of a boat for them.”

  “Don’t give the tour yourself, Mario.”

  “Why not?” he said, indignant.

  “You’re an old man. Let some poor JO do it.”

  “I am pretty old, it’s true. Most of the submarines were still diesel boats when I first went to sea,” he said to Angi. “Some of the old timers were World War II guys back then…I wish I would have gone to sea with some of them, heard their stories.”

  That prompted Angi. “Captain, have you ever heard of a book called Rig for Dive?”

  “Sure…it’s a classic. Written by Crush Martin, captain of the USS Wrasse in World War II. In his first two patrols he sunk something like eighteen Japanese ships. Became a war hero and wrote that book.”

  “Did you ever meet him?”

  He shook his head. “No…he wrote that book, left for his next patrol, and never came back. They think the Japanese got him somewhere in the Yellow Sea, but we’ll never know. It happed to a lot of those guys…it was unbelievably dangerous. But Crush Martin is kind of a patron saint of the sub force…a real warrior.”

  “Wasn’t he controversial somehow?” said Cindy.

  Mario nodded, impressed with her knowledge of submarine history. “Yes…in his first patrol, he sunk a Japanese troop carrier with a torpedo. Then they surfaced, and a bunch of the crew were floating around, clinging to wreckage and lifeboats. Martin ordered his men to machine gun the survivors.”

  “Oh my…” said Angi.

  Soldato shrugged. “They say that’s why he didn’t get the Medal of Honor—that incident. Because by any measure, tonnage, number of ships, he was our most successful submarine captain in the war. This was at a time when the Japanese were winning every single engagement they were involved in: they almost didn’t lose a battle for the first two years of the war. We nearly lost Australia! The allies were devoting everything they had to Europe, and the only thing, I mean the only thing, slowing the Japanese down were the submarine skippers like Martin. Japan has virtually no natural resources, they depended on sea lanes to feed their people and feed their industry. Martin was making them starve. And he died doing it. But enough people thought he was a war criminal to keep the medal out of his hands.”