Phoenix Sub Zero

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Senior. How do you feel?”

  Sanderson started to glare until even that effort seemed to exhaust him. Kane pulled the chief sonarman to his feet and sat him in one of the control seats at the Q-5 console.

  “I could use a strong cup of coffee.”

  Kane slapped his back and went through the forward door into the passageway.

  Aft, in the reactor-compartment tunnel, Tom Schramford rubbed his head, and pulled himself to his feet by grabbing onto a length of exposed XC piping. He unplugged the air mask, walked slowly aft and noted the overhead fluorescent lights were on. He emerged into the aft compartment through the tight opening of the hatch, amazed to hear the roaring of steam down the headers, the loud shrieking of the turbines, the curtain of hot humid air stunning and welcome.

  He went on to maneuvering, looked in and saw blood on the panels, corpses of his operators lying in a heap on the deck, one of them Ensign Michell, the engineering officer of the watch, the younger brother of an acquaintance from his college days. Michell’s throat had been opened by an exposed switch or metal panel corner, a substantial puddle of the

  youngster’s blood on the deck. The panel operators, though not as sickening to see as Michell, were just as dead, limbs sticking up into the air in grotesque rigor mortis. Schramford saw that the reactor power-meter needle read eighteen percent, that average coolant temperature was low out of the green band at 499 degrees. He reached for the rod lever and pulled the control rods out an inch, the temperature slowly rising back up into the green band at 502. A lone blinking light shone from the annunciator section on the panel, the alarm face marked hi rad—rx compt. The fuel assemblies must have experienced some melting from the torpedo evasion, he figured, and now the reactor compartment had a high radiation level. He looked over at a panel on the starboard side and flipped a rotary switch several times, saw that radiation levels in the reactor compartment were ten times normal levels. The upper level of the aft compartment, the maneuvering room included, was now a high radiation area. But it was not at a lethal level. At least not yet.

  Schramford left maneuvering and found Mcdonne aft in the upper level between the main engines, reading a gaugeboard. The XO saw him, nodded, “Hi, Eng, you look like hell,” and then disappeared behind the turbines to check bearing temperatures.

  Schramford returned to the maneuvering room, dragged the corpses out of the room and placed them in the motor-control cabinet space, then went back to maneuvering, found a rag and a bottle of cleaner and began

  slowly cleaning the blood off the panels.

  Forward, in the crew’s mess, Houser and the chief corpsman, a chief named Ives with red hair and fair skin covered with freckles, had assembled the casualties, some of the living on the six dinette tables, some on the benches, several on the deck, covered with blankets. Ives counted twenty-two injured too badly to return to duty, half of them from broken limbs, nine still unconscious from head injuries.

  In the control room Kane had assembled a skeleton crew of watchstanders at the ballast-control and ship-control panels.

  A phone on the conn periscope platform buzzed. It was Mcdonne.

  “Skipper, I’ve checked out the hovering system and the auxiliary seawater systems. I’ve got Schramford aft. He’s got the drain pump ready to clear out the aft compartment.

  There’s some high bilge levels in the reactor compartment we’ll have to pump. Do we have a chief of the watch?”

  “I’ve got Henderson stationed. He’s got a bad arm and a sprained ankle but he’ll be okay.”

  “Good. Go ahead and have him pump out the compartments on the drain

  pump. I want to test the trim pump on depth-control one when he’s done.”

  Houser returned to the control room, his Hawaiian shirt covered with blood smears. He stood near the conn while the drain pump came up to speed and dewatered the aft compartment, then the reactor compartment and finally the forward compartment torpedo room bilges.

  “Mr. Houser, you have the deck and the conn,” Kane said as Mcdonne walked into the control room.

  “Schramford’s aft,” Mcdonne said. “He’s got enough nukes to watch the plant but not much depth. Manning the plant around the clock will be impossible with a full-watch section. We’ll have to double up duty stations.”

  “The engineer will figure that out, XO. Houser, try to get us off the bottom and let’s see if we have any depth control.”

  Houser acknowledged, grabbing a microphone hanging from its spiral cord from the overhead of the conn.

  “Maneuvering, conn, report status of the main engines.”

  “CONN, MANEUVERING,” an overhead speaker squawked. “PROPULSION IS ON THE MAIN ENGINES, MAIN ENGINES ARE WARM, WE’RE SPINNING THE SHAFT AS NEEDED

  TO KEEP THE MAINS WARM.”

  “Conn, aye. Chief of the watch, line up the trim pump to depth-control one. You got a level?”

  “HOW system lined up, level shows ninety percent.”

  “Aye, pump depth-control one to sea.”

  The chief rotated a switch on the ballast-control panel console section. Lights flashed on the display screen as the pump spun up and the level in the tank dropped. The men in the room—Kane, Mcdonne, Houser and the other watchstanders—stared at the graphics, waiting tensely. The ship would either make it off the bottom now or would require much more persuasion.

  “DCT one is empty, sir.”

  “Shift to depth-control two. Chief,” Houser ordered, a frown creasing his face.

  The chief selected the second variable ballast tank and pumped it dry. But the ship stayed on the bottom, the depth readout unchanged, still reading 1,355 feet.

  “Shift to aux one.”

  “Pumping aux one.”

  Fifteen minutes later the variable ballast tanks were dry and the ship remained stubbornly on the bottom. Houser shut down the HOW system operation and joined Kane and Mcdonne aft of the conn.

  “Any thoughts, XO?” Kane asked.

  “We must have hit a sandy or muddy spot,” Mcdonne said. “If we’d hit rocks the hull would have been breached.

  I’m guessing when we hit we made a crater or plowed the mud and sand up over the sides and top of the hull. Hell, we could be half-buried.”

  “So how do we get out?”

  “We emergency blow and put on ahead full,” Houser said.

  “What about main seawater suction and aux seawater?” Mcdonne asked. “If we’re buried, the seawater suctions will be clogging up and we shouldn’t risk a full bell.”

  “Gotta try something, XO,” Kane said. “Houser, do a timed emergency

  blow, forward first, then aft, with a fifteen-second delay between forward and aft. Give the aft blow thirty seconds, then order up ahead standard. Call the engineer and make sure he knows what’s coming.” After Houser told Schramford his intention the men reassembled near the conn. Houser leaned toward the ballast-control panel.

  “Chief, emergency blow forward.”

  The COW reached up into the overhead and rotated the forward lever, the “chicken switch,” upward into the open position. The room’s silence was immediately broken by the roaring of the high-pressure air into the forward ballast tanks. Seconds passed; the ballast-control-panel area began to fill the room with fog from the ice-cold piping. Houser looked at his watch, then shouted over the noise of the forward blow.

  “Emergency blow aft!”

  The chief rotated the aft lever; the roaring in the room magnified, a cloud of fog boiling out and rolling over the deck. The deck didn’t budge, nor did the depth readout.

  “All ahead standard,” Houser called to the helmsman, who rotated the engine order telegraph dial on the ship-control panel.

  The deck beneath Houser’s feet shuddered and shook.

  Nothing else happened.

  western atlantic ocean continental shelf off norfolk, virginia USS seawolf The ship still sailed on the surface as morning became afternoon, the deck trembling from the power of the flank bel
l and rolling to a ten-degree incline to port, freezing momentarily, then rolling back to starboard, the rocking motion inducing drowsiness. Pacino, standing to starboard of the conn, felt the sleepiness wash over him, the loss of an entire night’s sleep consuming his alertness. He forced himself to concentrate, looked over to the port side of the room where the secure fathometer reading showed the bottom dropping out from under the hull of the ship as the submarine crossed the submerged and abrupt downslope of the continental shelf. The phone buzzed on the conn periscope platform.

  The officer of the deck, Scott Court, pulled the handset to his ear, listened, then handed it to Pacino.

  “For you, Cap’n.” “Captain,” Pacino said quietly, turning his gaze to the television monitor of the periscope view, the blue ocean and overcast sky seen with the crosshairs and range divisions of the reticle superimposed. The blue of the sea was a startling sapphire color, so bright that it looked like the monitor’s color needed adjustment, but the view from the bridge showed that there was nothing wrong with the

  screen, that the sea’s brilliant blue was real.

  “Wardroom, sir, Mr. Joseph. The officers and chiefs are ready when you are.”

  “I’ll be down in ten minutes. Tell the navigator to start the briefing without me.” Pacino replaced the phone and found Court looking at him from the periscope. “Yes, off’sa’deck.”

  “Sir, request permission to dive. We’re at the dive point, ship has been rigged for dive, watch shifted to control. Fathometer reads 610 fathoms. Ship’s course is zero five five, all ahead flank. No visual contacts, no sonar contacts.”

  “Very well, slow to two-thirds and submerge the ship to 150 feet.”

  A flurry of orders rang out as the diving officer ordered the chief of the watch to sound the diving alarm and open all main ballast tank vents. The helmsman rang up two-thirds and the engine order telegraph needle chimed back as maneuvering aft slowed to two-thirds. The chief at the ballast panel rotated an alarm lever above the panel, sounding the diving alarm. The klaxon blared throughout the ship, the OOH-GAH more realistic, less electronic now that the shipyard had redone the alarm’s computer generator.

  “DIVE, DIVE!” the chief announced on the circuit one.

  The diving alarm blasted out a final time.

  “All main ballast tank vents open, sir,” the chief said after two function keys changed the green horizontal bars on the. vent display to red circles. The main ballast tanks forward and aft began to give up their air and flood with seawater, the loss of buoyancy already dropping the top of the hull a foot closer to the waves. Court rotated his periscope view directly ahead and turned the view down to the forward deck.

  Geysers of water jetted out of the hull, the airwater mixture coming out of the open vents like the spray of a firehose.

  “Venting forward,” Court called out. He trained the scope aft and looked down on the aft deck, the spray of water from the aft-deck vents reaching higher than the periscope reticle could see. “Venting aft.”

  “Pour two feet,” the diving officer called.

  On the periscope-view television monitor the afterdeck’s surface began to disappear into the white foam and blue sea.

  A wave washed over the top of the deck, thinned out and washed

  overboard. The next wave obscured the green paint of the deck for a moment.

  “Deck’s awash,” Court announced.

  The ship continued settling slowly into the sea, the diving officer eventually calling, “Six five feet, sail’s under,” the signal that the ship was completely under, only the number-two periscope exposed above the waves. On the periscope monitor the blue waves grew closer to the view until they were within arm’s reach.

  “Eight four feet.” The waves on the monitor were now mere inches from the view onscreen.

  “Scope’s awash,” Court called as the white foam boiled up over the periscope lens, obscuring all view. “Scope’s awash …”

  The foam calmed, revealing the undersides of the waves, the surface of the sea now seeming inside-out, the waves above steadily moving more distant. “Scope’s under.” The waves in the view had receded until they were just barely visible in the blue haze, finally vanishing, the view filled only with pieces of seaweed floating by in the water.

  “Five degree down bubble,” the diving officer called, the deck inclining downward as the ship departed the surface.

  “Lowering number-two scope,” Court said, snapping the grips up and rotating the hydraulic control ring in the overhead.

  The stainless-steel pole came down into the well.

  “Zero bubble, five degrees up on the bowplanes. Depth one five zero, sir.”

  “All ahead one-third, diving officer, trim the ship.”

  “I’ll be at the briefing in the wardroom, off’sa’deck,” Pacino said to Court. “When you’ve got a trim, perform a controlled dive to test depth. Once that’s complete get us back to 600 feet and proceed to point bravo at full.” Point bravo was a mark on the chart about 500 miles east-northeast of Norfolk, the agreed-upon hold point in the western Atlantic where Pacino would receive some kind of direction from Steinman and Donchez. Without contact on the Destiny, the mission would be a bust.

  Pacino climbed the ladder to the middle level, turned the corner at the galley and walked into the packed wardroom.

  He made his way to the head of the table, where his seat was waiting, a steaming cup of coffee on the table in a cup with the ship’s emblem on

  it, the snarling wolf’s head staring out, the silhouette of a submarine hull in the background. Henry Vale, the Harvard whiz-kid navigator, stood at a high-definition television flat screen, a pointer in his hand, the profile of the Destiny-class submarine displayed on the monitor.

  “Go on, Nav,” Pacino said. As Vale spoke the deck inclined downward five degrees, the officer of the deck taking the ship down fifty feet at a time to test depth, a test to certify that the hull patch at the Vortex tubes would stand up to submergence pressure.

  “Sir, we’ve been over the Destiny’s stats, our instructions to find the sub and put it on the bottom, and the fact that it has killed two of our 688’s. We’ve all got questions about what the Destiny’s mission is and why it fought so hard to get out of the Med.”

  “Sihoud’s aboard,” Pacino said, sipping the hot coffee.

  The ship-control readout panel set into a cubbyhole next to Pacino’s chair read 250 feet. The deck inclined again as Court drove the ship further down. The hull groaned for a moment. “Destiny might be sneaking him out of Africa to go around the horn. Or getting him away to someplace he can hide.”

  The crowd was speechless, the fact of Sihoud’s presence aboard not yet

  declassified to the men. Pacino was now unwilling to keep the secret when he relied on this crew to help find the UIF killer submarine. The silence was interrupted by a loud pop from above, the hull equalizing against sea pressure as the ship dived deeper. The deck leveled again for a few minutes.

  “Our op-plan has us driving here,” Vale said, the screen changing to a depiction of the Atlantic Ocean as if the oh server orbited thousands of miles above the earth. A dotted red line curved from Norfolk up to point bravo. “We’ll come up to periscope depth and get our traffic from the satellite.

  With luck we’ll have a hot tip on the Destiny by then. If not, we’ll hold there in a large area sonar sector search until we sniff him out.” “Sir,” the engineer Dave Hobart said, the sweat streaming down his fleshy face from being back aft for the drive out of Norfolk, “what good does it do to hold in the Western Atlantic when the Destiny’s coming out of the Med? Seems kinda messed up, you know? If he’s really zipping around the horn we ain’t about to catch him in westlant. You know?” Hobart’s speech was always full of “you-knows.”

  Pacino thought about Hobart’s remark, knowing there was some logic in it based on what he knew but not yet willing to disclose Donchez’s suspicions about the Destiny, about the possibility of it coming
west. Coming … with whafl “That’s the order,” Pacino said. “A lot could

  happen by the time we get there tomorrow morning. The Atlantic is being scoured by Burke-class destroyers, P-3 Orions, LAMPS choppers, the SOSUS submerged hydrophone network and by our spy satellites. Anything pops up, we’ll vector in to ward it.”

  Hobart still wasn’t satisfied. “I don’t know. Captain, it’s still sounding fishy, you know? For one thing, why doesn’t comsublant send out the 688 squadrons as a barrier sonar picket, all listening together, you know? Surely they could cover more square miles than we can alone.”

  Pacino was about to tell Hobart that so far the Los Angeles-class ships didn’t detect the Destiny until it was either right on top of them or had already sent a torpedo down the track. He was interrupted by the buzzing of the phone from the conn.

  “Captain, off’sa’deck, sir. Ship is at 600 feet. Request to rig for deep submergence and proceed to test depth.” The ship-control repeaters read 600 feet. Pacino had barely noticed the steady down angles and level-offs getting down to (hat depth. He wondered if the Vortex tube patch would hold up. If it didn’t, the mission was over early.

  “I’ll be right there.” Pacino stood. “Time to take her deep, gents. We’ll finish this later when we get more data, XO, let’s go to control.”

  Scott Court presided over the control room from the elevated periscope

  platform, leaning on the handrails of the conn.

  “O.O.D, rig for deep submergence and take her down. XO, I’d like you to stay here. I’ll be in the torpedo room.”

  Vaughn nodded and Pacino left through the aft passage way past his and Vaughn’s stateroom on the port side, radio and the electronic countermeasures room on the starboard.

  The passageway ended at the compartment bulkhead, where a dogleg led to the hatch to the reactor-compartment tunnel.

  Pacino stepped instead down the steep and narrow stairs to the lower level, passing a storage room, the auxiliary machinery space where the massive diesel engine sat dormant, to the door to the torpedo room. The room, previously cavernous when empty and tight when full of weapons, was now so jammed that Pacino could barely make his way past the giant and useless Vortex tubes to starboard. The three tubes, each over three feet in diameter, started thirty feet for ward at the room’s bulkhead and extended aft all the way to the wall forming the storage space and beyond—the ship yard had cut the storage room in half to accommodate the tubes—and the entire starboard side of the room had vanished, to be replaced by the tubes. Each one was similar to the one that Pacino had visited briefly aboard the Piranha just before the test platform’s Vortex tube had exploded and sunk the ship. The port side of the room