by JE Gurley
He chuckled, startling a few of them. “You know, back in Philly, I had a job for a while at a hotel as a valet. Some folks didn’t like a young black boy with tattoos parking their shiny new automobiles. Now, I drive around in a 2.5 billion dollar submarine.” He shook his head. “If they could only see me now. Of course, I did manage to ding it up a bit,” he added.
He kept a close eye on the radiation level. So far, it remained below 100 Roentgen Equivalent Man units. Prolonged exposure of a dosage over 100 rems would cause vomiting, diarrhea, and lethargy. They would run out of oxygen or succumb to carbon dioxide poisoning before then, as soon as the lithium hydroxide scrubbers failed. If the levels rose any higher, he would move the men from the crews’ quarters to the control room and seal the hatch. He did not want to do that. It would mean cutting off passage to food and water and reducing the amount of remaining air.
The injuries ranged from severe steam burns, broken bones, and concussions, to cuts and bruises. The overworked pharmacist’s mate and a few of the crew who had first-aid training attended to the injured in their berths. He had cautioned the rest of the crew to limit their activity to conserve oxygen. Most lay in their berths in the habitat module aft of C-and-C or in the AMR module a deck below it or playing cards in the galley. Only the watch crew remained on duty.
When the sub suddenly lurched to starboard, Prescott grabbed a console and held on. The hull slid forward and ground against the rocks. He checked the camera monitor and saw the tail of the behemoth megalodon swim by. The shark was checking them out. The SeaFox ROV was still there. He flashed a message to the Sunfish telling them the megalodon had returned. Moments later, the shark rammed the sail. Metal groaned under the strain as the boat canted five more degrees to starboard. A broken high-pressure water pipe began spraying water across the control center. Two men rushed to shut off the closest valve feeding it.
The attack reinforced the danger they faced. Several of the crew began praying aloud. “Pray quietly,” he said. “I need to think.”
If the shark nudged them off the ledge, they would sink below crush depth and implode. If it opened up another seam, they would lose precious air. With the torpedo room flooded, they could not fire their last torpedoes at it. All they could do was sit and take it.
“Signal the Sunfish to hold off on communications. The clicking of the ROV’s lights might attract the creature. They need not acknowledge.”
The megalodon made another pass by the sub. Prescott marveled at its size. He had seen blue whales just shy of ninety-feet long, but the giant megalodon had it almost doubled. He estimated it weighed over two-hundred-fifty tons. That was a significant amount of mass when directed at his boat. He caught a flash of the upper lobe of the tail flash through the darkness.
“Brace yourselves!” he yelled.
The shark struck the top of the submarine just aft of the sail. Prescott heard metal shearing and men screaming and knew the damage was severe. The boat wobbled for a long moment before heaving over onto her port side. As she slid forward, Prescott held his breath for fear she was going over the lip of the ledge for her final death plunge. Water began pouring through the open hatch and flooding the control center. Only a handful of crewmen made it into the C-and-C module from the flooding habitat module. The water rose at an alarming rate. Soon, they would be unable to close the door. He made a hard decision.
“Seal the hatch,” he ordered.
Men complied without question. His order had trapped men inside the crews’ quarters, killing them, but he had saved the control center, the heart of the boat. He prayed that some of the trapped men made it down into the AMR module to Chief Petty Officer territory, but knew the most severely wounded would not have had time.
“Bring everyone up to C-and-C.”
He waited as soaked seamen, trembling from the cold and from fear, straggled into the control center.
“Make a head count,” he told the bosun’s mate.
A few seconds later, he answered, “Nineteen, sir, including you.”
Nineteen out of one-thirty-two. He had lost 6/7ths of his crew. The men stared at him with a sickening mixture of guilt at their joy in surviving and distress at the loss of their crewmates. As captain, they looked to him for a statement, words that might mitigate their misery. He had none. If he had, his words would mean very little if the shark attacked again.
“Keep an eye on that monster.”
He helped pass out hot coffee and dry blankets to the shivering men. His own discomfort paled in comparison. In spite of everything that had happened over the past twenty-four hours, none of his crew complained. He felt honored to serve with such men, some barely more than boys. He spotted another black face, Electrical Technician Bobby Sewell from Mobile, Alabama. The two, a farmer’s son from the Deep South and the son of a single mother who worked at a diner, had little in common except the color of their skin and their shared drive to better themselves in spite of some who objected. Sewell stared at him with pride that a fellow black man had risen through the ranks to become captain of a Virginia-class nuclear submarine. If his young life wasn’t cut short, it offered him hope for his own future.
“It’s coming back, sir.”
Prescott tore his gaze from Sewell and the others and watched the monitor. The megalodon returned, but did not attack. It made several more passes along the length of the sub, but only scraped it with its fins, as if sensing it was no longer a threat. As he watched, the megalodon began acting strangely, darting in and out of the kelp forest. At first, Prescott thought it was hunting the giant crustaceans, but then it began contorting its body.
I hope the bastard’s dying.
Curious about the creature’s strange behavior, he risked attracting the shark by increasing the luminosity of the exterior floodlights. It paid no attention. A few minutes later, it floated in the water and began giving birth to the first baby megalodon. The newborn shark measured three feet in length and immediately dove for the safety of the kelp forest. More followed over the next half hour, hundreds more. Many instantly became prey to the giant crustaceans lurking in the kelp, but the smaller crabs and fish in turn became food for the babies.
Prescott knew Great Whites were ovoviviparous, giving birth to live babies, but he had never seen it happen, not even in nature films. The megalodon were ovoviviparous as well. That explained the gigantic shark’s behavior. Pregnant, she had eaten everything she could, even members of her own species, returned to familiar waters to give birth, and defended her territory. It all made sense that, like Great Whites, female megalodon sharks were larger than the males and were more dominant than the opposite sex. He eyed the hundreds of three-foot megalodons and a hard lump formed in his gut. A sense of impending apocalypse swept over him. Many of the young would fall prey to other denizens of the deep, but most would survive, maturing quickly into giant monsters.
He had to stop them and he had very little time. He hoped the crew of the Sunfish was watching through the ROV camera. He would risk one last message to them. Then, he would take action.
“Send this message. Hundreds of baby sharks from the giant. They seem content to remain here for now. Nineteen survivors in crew. Air gone. I will take steps to end the megalodon threat. Standby to recover crew in SEIE suits. I will detonate a nuke,” He checked his watch and estimated the time required to prepare everything, “in thirty minutes. Recover my crew and get the hell out of the area. Commander Charles Raeburn Prescott, Captain of the USS Utah, out.”
His crew looked at him, some aghast, some shaking their heads in acceptance.
He addressed them. “You know what it means if those sharks make it out into the open ocean. Stopping them is the job we came to do. We still have a chance. We have fifteen SEIE suits. There are eighteen of you. I won’t order anyone to go or to stay. It’s over seven-hundred feet to the surface. You might not make it. It’s a decision you alone can make. It will be a tight squeeze, but I think all of you will fit into the forward lockout
trunk.” He moved his gaze among them. “Some of you are pretty skinny. The trunk was designed for well-fed Navy SEALs.” This elicited a few laughs. “I will use a breather, flood the sub, and make my way to the weapons module. Once inside, I will prep a Tomahawk with a nuclear payload and fire the missile with the tube sealed. Thirty seconds later, it will explode, and I will blow a 2.6 billion dollar submarine to hell. Talk about Black Power.”
“You’ll need help, sir,” weapons officer Tim Caruthers said. “I’m staying.”
He nodded. “Three of you will have to remain here in any case. I can use some help. The rest of you, get into the SEIE suits just as in training and abandon ship.”
The words almost stuck in his throat. He was abandoning his ship and firing a nuclear weapon without specific orders. His name might go down in history alongside Benedict Arnold’s. I guess I won’t be spoken of during Black History Month.
“Good luck to all of you. It’s been a pleasure serving with you.” He threw them a crisp salute. They responded, some with tears in their eyes. He was glad his wet face disguised the tears streaming down his face. They were not tears of fear or sadness. They came from a deep respect for his crew and from his duty as a submarine commander.
He left the compartment as CPO McNair and Bosun Chambers urged the crew to make ready to depart. He had a job to do.
20
December 29, 2018, 3:10 a.m. USS Sunfish, Chukchi Sea–
“He’s doing what?” Asa yelled. He stood up and walked around the table to confront Will, leaning into the table to stare into Will’s eyes.
Although Asa seemed on the verge of panic, Will didn’t back down. He met Asa’s aggressive stance with a solid posture and an unflinching gaze. “You saw the vid. That damned mama shark just had babies, hundreds of fucking little megalodon monsters. If they get out of the cavern, everything we’ve done is for nothing. We lose. Period. Commander Prescott knows his ship is doomed. Most of his crew is already dead. He assessed the situation and is doing what he has to do to get the job done.”
“Situation! It’s madness! Things had gone from unreal to stark raving, dipshit insane. ”
Will lowered the tone of his voice. He didn’t need a confrontation, not now. He didn’t have time. “He gave us thirty minutes. It will take the crew at least five minutes to evacuate the lockout hatch and reach the surface. Add another ten to get them aboard. That leaves us fifteen minutes to place as much distance as we can between that nuke and us. I suggest you get on the engines and make sure they’re ready to go.”
Asa wasn’t through. His jaw clenched and unclenched from anger. “This boat is sinking. Loaded down, she won’t make twenty knots, twenty-two if I burn out the engines.”
“Burn them out. Let’s concentrate on getting the hell away from here. Then we worry about sinking.”
“Christ! Can it get much worse?”
“Don’t even think that,” Will warned. “Don’t jinx us.”
Asa shook his head in disgust and backed away from the table.
“I’ll help,” Grayson offered.
“No,” Will replied before Asa could say anything. “I need all hands pulling survivors aboard. Levitt, you drive. I need not remind you what a ten or twenty-kilo nuke can do. It’s going to get very unpleasant around here very soon. Gentlemen, let’s get moving.”
“I’ll make coffee,” Simon chimed in.
At first, Will couldn’t follow the incongruity of the suggestion, but then decided the chef was trying to insert a bit of normalcy into the situation. “Good idea. Then, find blankets, sheets, towels, extra clothing—anything to dry them off and keep them warm. They’re going to be cold and wet, and we have no heat. I have extra uniforms in my locker, use them.”
Will noticed the look of concern in the chef’s face, as he said, “Seven-hundred-fifty feet is a long ascent without rest stops to equalize the pressure. What if some of them get the bends?”
That thought had crossed his mind, along with a dozen others just as dark. “We have no decompression chamber. They’ll die in agony. It’s that simple. Some might not make it anyway. As you said, seven-hundred-fifty feet is a long way for free ascent. They might drift beneath the cavern roof in the dark and lose their way. There are creatures down there that might eat them. They’re pushing their luck to the max, and they’ve already used up more luck than most people are dealt. If some of them pop up too far away to reach in time, we may have to leave them. There’s nothing in the manual about this situation. I’m winging it.”
His admission to Simon of his lack of viable options drove home to him how dire the situation had become. They could all die in the next half hour. Now I know how Asa feels. He left Simon in the galley and went outside to Haig sitting on the deck with the controls for the SeaFox on his lap.
“Anything?” he asked.
“They popped the hatch a minute or two ago. I counted twelve suits rising.”
“Only twelve?”
He glanced up with a hint of sadness in his eyes. “Some of them must have stayed behind to help Prescott. Good men. Maybe others figured a quick death was better than freezing. I panned the camera on the ROV. I can’t find big mama megalodon. She left her brood.”
“Bring up the ROV. Follow the crew if you can. They can follow the light, and it may help us locate them more quickly.”
Finding a dozen red SEIE suits in the dark would not be easy, especially scattered over a wide area. Each suit had a flashing beacon attached, but the chop of the waves could hide them from view unless they were right on top of them. He helped Grayson drape a cargo net over the side and mount battery lanterns on the stern, bow, and both sides of the Sunfish to light up the boat. The suits were too bulky for swimming or pulling them aboard. He hoped Prescott had suggested ditching them when they surfaced.
Three minutes later, Haig announced, “They’re a hundred feet from the surface about eighty yards to starboard, about four o’clock. I’m following three suits. I lost the rest when they spread out.”
“Levitt, take us 120-degrees to starboard, five knots.”
The boat began moving toward the rising survivors. Will spotted the lights of the ROV before he saw the first blinking emergency lights of the suits. He quickly counted six in a group and directed Levitt to position the boat among them. Four unzipped their suits when they saw the Sunfish and swam to meet them, clambering aboard on their own power using the nets. Two kept their suits on. He and Grayson snagged them with boat hooks, pulled them within reach, and with Apone’s help, dragged them onto the deck like sacks of flour. More men popped up and began calling to them. Simon came out to escort the survivors to the galley.
“Ditch the ROV,” he told Haig. “We need your help.”
Haig pulled out his knife and sliced the fiber optic cable controlling the SeaFox. The lights dimmed as it began sinking to join the Utah. Altogether, they rescued eight men.
“Where are the others?” he asked of one young ensign gasping for breath.
“I saw the shark get one man. I think it was Glisson.” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Will patted him on the shoulder. “Get out of those wet clothes, son. Join the others below for some hot coffee. We’ll take it from here.”
“The captain, he …”
“I know. He did his duty.”
The ensign nodded and went below. Will checked his watch. They were taking too long. He waited three precious extra minutes drifting and looking, but saw no emergency beacons or heard no cries for help. They had all the survivors aboard they were going to find. It had taken sixteen minutes. They had nine minutes until all hell broke loose. “Levitt, tell Asa to give us all she’s got. We’re cutting it close.” They would still be less than four miles from ground zero when the nuke went off. The bottom was less than two-hundred feet deep outside the cavern, shallow enough to roll up a dangerous tsunami wave that could crush them.
“Wait! Wait!” someone cried from the darkness.
Will sca
nned the water and saw a flashing light two hundred yards away in the opposite direction. The crewman was frantic, waving his arms as he bobbed on the waves. Apone glanced at him with a question on his face. Will shook his head.
“We’ll never reach him and get away in time.”
The boat jumped as the engines kicked to full throttle. Will turned away from the man he was abandoning to die alone in the dark.
Asa didn’t spare the engines any wear and tear. The boat felt slightly sluggish with the extra weight of the rescued crew and the water in the bilge, but Will was confident twenty-two knots was not demanding too much from her. His chest burned as if he had held his breath the entire nine minutes. Fifteen seconds to detonation. It felt as if they were sitting still on the ocean instead of fleeing for their lives.
“Close all watertight hatches. Everyone find a spot on the deck and stay away from the windows. Levitt, strap yourself in tight.”
Fifteen seconds later, the sky behind them erupted in a new dawn, as the nuclear sun rose from the bowels of the cavern, illuminating a square mile of ocean from beneath. After the initial flash, he trained his binoculars on the explosion. The spherical cloud of the blast became a columnar chimney of superheated steam that rose half a mile into the air. He followed the leading edge of the shock wave as it raced across the surface toward them, making the surface dance like water in a hot frying pan.
He had tightened his harness as tight as he could get it, but he held onto the console with both hands. “Hold on!” he warned the others.
He felt a deep rumbling in his chest just before the shockwave slammed into the stern, lifting it four feet out of the water. The bow submerged to the forward gun mount, and the engines screamed as they pushed air instead of water. Every unbroken window shattered. Glass sprayed across the cabin. One large shard embedded itself in his headrest. Several smaller ones peppered his arms. He heard a groan and saw Levitt pluck a shard of glass from his right hand. Blood streamed over the controls, but he held on, fighting the boat back onto a straight course.
