Collapse Depth

by Todd Tucker

  “Get OOD permission.”

  “Before that.”

  “Oh shit.” Duggan hesitated a minute, and then stood and removed his belt and pens from his pocket.

  “That’s right,” said Jabo. “Remove all metal.” He stood to do the same. He didn’t enjoy going in the battery well—one of the reasons he wanted to get Duggan qualified in a hurry. The hundreds of liquid acid cells in that tight compartment emitted a strange, sour smell, and Jabo always left the well feeling itchy for hours. But he couldn’t let Duggan go in by himself. “Are we ready?”

  Duggan nodded. Jabo pointed to the phone.

  Duggan picked it up, and growled control with the phone’s tiny lever. Slightly nervously, he said, “Chief of the Watch, Ensign Duggan, request permission to enter the battery well. For training.” He awaited a response. Jabo heard the Chief of the Watch relay a request from the officer of the deck. “I’m with Lieutenant Jabo.”

  He covered the phone with his hand and looked at Jabo. “He said to wait one.”

  “That’s weird,” said Jabo. Surely Hein wanted another officer to qualify for the battery charging line up as much as he did…he started unconsciously reaching for his belt, sensing something was about to happen.

  Hein’s voice on the 1MC: “All officers report to the wardroom for navigation brief.”

  That explains it, thought Jabo. “We’ll finish this up later,” he said to Duggan, who dejectedly put his belt back on.

  • • •

  They were assembled in the wardroom once again, for a navigation brief describing the second half of their journey to Taiwan. The mood was considerably less jovial than it had been during the first brief. After two weeks of straight three section watches they were all tired. The fire had shocked them all out of complacency, and the watch officers had become more demanding of the crew, and the senior officers more demanding of the watch officers. Looking around the wardroom table, Jabo saw a lot of hollow eyes, a lot of men who’d been living on caffeine for too long.

  The captain rapped the table with a knuckle. “Alright Nav. Let’s get started.”

  The Navigator propped up the small scale chart on the tripod once again, showing the great circle route to Taiwan. He’d made a red “X” on the their current location. “Here we are,” he said, hitting it with a pointer.

  “Is that your whole brief, nav?” asked the CO. Everyone but the navigator chuckled.

  “No sir,” said the Nav. He fumbled to pull another chart down and put it across the easel.

  “Just put it on the table, nav,” said the XO. “All you JOs get your greasy fucking elbows off, learn some goddamn manners.”

  Everyone backed off and the nav unrolled a huge white chart of the Pacific Ocean across the table. There were boxes marking their assigned areas, and their track, moving relentlessly westward. “Because of the time we lost during the fire, we’ve had to increase our SOA to twenty-two knots. And I’ve built into that going to PD twice a day for the broadcast.”

  “Just a half hour per trip, gentlemen,” said the XO. “So no fucking around up there. Slow down, clear baffles, get up, and get the broadcast. We’ll need to shoot trash at the same time, and anything else we need to do slow.”

  Jabo stared at the chart. Other than the marks made in the navigator’s neat pencil, it was almost devoid of information, an unmarked expanse of pale blue. He ran his fingers along the ship’s track. “It’s so bare,” he said. “There aren’t even that many soundings.”

  “These areas are far from the major shipping lanes,” said the navigator, looking down at the floor, avoiding eye contact. “And far from the normal Trident operating areas. They don’t get updated as frequently, and these areas aren’t surveyed like our normal waters.”

  Jabo nodded; it made sense. Some of their normal operating areas were surveyed so well that they could fix their position within a few feet just by taking a series of soundings, measuring the water’s depth, determining the exact contour of the ocean floor and finding a match on the chart. Looking at a chart like the one in front of them could lull a watch officer into a false sense of security, as it appeared to describe a vast area of deep, featureless ocean.

  “So at twenty-two knots, how deep do we need to be, Lieutenant Morrissey?” asked the Captain. Morrissey was on his second patrol, trying desperately to qualify OOD. The question the captain asked related to the ship’s “submerged operating envelope,” part of the bedrock of running the ship safely, and something every OOD was supposed to know so well that it became part of his intuition. Morrissey furrowed his brow in thought.

  “Six hundred and eighty feet?” he said.

  “Is that an answer or a question?” said the XO. “Grow some balls.”

  “My answer.”

  “Well you happen to be right. Now I’ll ask one of these smart ass OODs why that is. Lieutenant Kincaid?”

  “Two things limit depth at that speed,” said Kincaid. “A stuck stern planes incident, and the threshold for cavitation.”

  “Is that right, Morrissey?” said the XO.

  “Yes sir.”

  “So what’s this cavitation that Kincaid is so worried about?”

  “The noise made by collapsing bubbles of water vapor in the low pressure area behind the ship’s propeller,” said Morrissey.

  “Good job. At that speed we need to run pretty deep so that we don’t pop out of the water in an accident, and so that we don’t cavitate and make a lot of fucking noise so the bad guys know we’re coming.” He paused. “Which brings us to the second reason we are here. Danny, dim the lights.”

  Suddenly intrigued, Jabo leaned back in his chair to hit the switch. The XO clicked a few keys on his laptop and projected a grainy image onto the movie screen pulled down at the front of the room. It was a black and white satellite photo of a two submarines at a pier, tied along side each other, head to tail. He instantly recognized it as a Soviet design, the long, blunt conning tower being distinctively Russian. It took him just a moment longer to identify the specific class.

  “Anybody know what these are?” he asked.

  “Russian,” said Jabo. “Kilo Class.” There was a murmur of admiration among the other JOs at Jabo’s acumen. The short squat body of the enemy boats and the somewhat blocky lines of the hull made them look at the same time primitive and yet seaworthy, as indeed they were. Kilos were one of oldest and largest classes of submarines made by the Russians and the Soviets before them.

  “You’re sorta right, smart ass. They’re Soviet Kilos, but these particular boats belong to our friends the Red Chinese. Our friends in intel tell us that these are a particular version of the Kilo called a Project 636 boat. Jabo, do you know what that means?”

  “They call it the ‘black hole,’” said Jabo. “Because it disappears from sonar.”

  “Correct again. Running on its battery, it’s one of the quietest submarines in the world. We’ll have training on it tomorrow night in the wardroom after dinner. Danny, I think you just volunteered to give it. So study up tonight while you’re on the midwatch. Teach us what we need to know: max speed, sound signatures, armament, etcetera. Got it?”

  “Aye, aye sir.”

  The XO cleared his throat and turned to the captain. All were silent, waiting to hear why they suddenly needed to understand the specs of this particular Russian submarine.

  “On the broadcast, about an hour ago, we received a message from SUBPAC saying that these two boats have departed the Chinese submarine base at Ning-bo. Heading for the open seas. Anybody want to guess what they’re doing?”

  No one said anything.

  “Me neither,” said the Captain. “But we’ve been reminded by SUBPAC, who has been reminded by the national command authority, about how important our mission is. And we’ve also been reminded that China considers the seas we are entering to be their sovereign, territorial waters. So if they were to identify an unknown submerged contact in those waters…let’s just say we’re not going to let that h
appen.”

  For a moment they all just stared at the screen, absorbing the fact that the boats depicted in the grainy, aerial image were now their adversaries.

  The captain continued. “We have to get to Suao in time, and we have to get there undetected. This is the mission we’ve been handed, and I intend to complete it successfully. So follow the navigator’s track, and memorize every angle of the submerged operating envelope. If we stay inside it then the best minds in the Navy assure us that we’ll remain undetected and safe. Be smart. Any questions?”

  “No sir,” they all said in unison. Jabo glanced at the navigator, the only other man not staring at the movie screen, perhaps lost, he thought, in a mental calculation of how far they’d come, and how far they had yet to go.

  • • •

  Every junior officer on his first tour had two major duties: he was both a watch officer and a division officer. As a watch officer, he would routinely stand six hour watches, either as Officer of the Deck or the Engineering Officer of the Watch. The OOD, in control, was the captain’s direct proxy, responsible for everything that happened to the ship during that period. Approximately three hundred feet aft of control, in the small sealed cube inside the engine room that was Maneuvering, resided the EOOW. He reported to the OOD, and was responsible for the numerous complex systems and procedures inside the nuclear propulsion plant. His mission, it was often summarized, was to keep, “the lights burning and the screw turning.”

  The division officer role was in a sense the junior officer’s “day job.” He was in charge of a division of enlisted men with specialized training responsible for some specific area of the ship’s operations. While officers on the boat were generalists, expected to know everything, enlisted men were specialists. There was a division of men responsible for the sonar system, another for the missiles, yet another for cooking all the crew’s meals. These divisions each had a chief or first class petty officer with many years of experience who really ran things. But he reported to a junior officer who generally signed the forms, approved leave, assigned responsibilities, and, when necessary, administered discipline.

  Jabo’s division was Radio; his title was Communications Officer. He reported to his department head, who happened to be the navigator, one of three department heads. The other two were the engineer and the weapons officer. Department heads, on their second sea tours, would occasionally stand watch, but their lives largely revolved around the department that they ran. Communicator on a Trident Submarine was an especially sensitive role on a normal patrol, because of the strict requirements that the sub had for staying in constant communication while on alert—ready within seconds to receive authorization and launch nuclear missiles should the order be issued.

  In one sense, the extraordinary nature of their patrol made Jabo’s job as communicator easier: he no longer had the unending stress of worrying about the depth of floating antennas, the vagaries of sunspots on low frequency radio waves, and the fear that a few seconds of lost communications would make for a black mark on an entire patrol. But now, the ship had to download its entire day’s message traffic in a single burst, with each trip to periscope depth, so Jabo had to process a great many messages at once, drinking in two giant gulps what he used to drink all day long in sips. As communicator he was expected to read every single message, and then decide who else should read each one. Anything of particular sensitivity would be sent to the captain immediately. The ship had been at periscope depth at midnight when he took over the watch from Hein. As soon as radio reported that the entire broadcast was onboard, Jabo lowered the scope, went deep, and turned the lights back on in control.

  “Ahead full,” he ordered.

  “Ahead full,” repeated the helm, and the dinging of the engine order telegraph indicated that maneuvering also acknowledged the order. Jabo watched the ship’s speed rise.

  “How long were we up there?” he asked the quartermaster.

  “Twenty-three minutes,” he said, looking at a stop watch. “We’re getting better at this. Like an attack boat.”

  Jabo nodded; it was good. A few weeks ago a thirty minute trip to PD would have been extraordinary; now it was routine. It was also a necessity if they were to get to Taiwan in time. Jabo rubbed his eyes and let them adjust to the lights in control. He wandered over the short distance to Flather and the chart.

  “We’re right here,” said Flather. They’d also gotten a GPS fix while at PD, and Jabo was interested to see two pieces of information revealed by the fix. One, their dead reckoning, even at high speed, had been pretty accurate. The fix was just a few hundred feet off the last triangle that indicated their DR position. Flather had dutifully adjusted the DR track to account for the new fix. Secondly, they were right on track, right on schedule.

  “Flather, does it ever bother you how blank these charts are? I wonder how good the data is.”

  Flather nodded. “Yes sir, it does, sometimes. These areas just aren’t surveyed that well, not even by the merchant fleet. So we don’t have a lot of information to work with.”

  “So do these charts ever get updated?”

  “Not like our normal charts. We’re supposed to go through things like this,” said Flather, pulling out a thick, paper-clipped document from the shelf behind him.

  “What’s that? Notice to Mariners?”

  “Yep, NTM. They come out once a week—and this one’s fifty-eight pages long. Describes stuff all over the world that you might or might not want to incorporate into a chart. Normally, our charts are so up to date, these don’t usually help us all that much, we’ve already got the information. But in water like this…I’m reading every one of these freaking things.”

  “You find anything in there that affects us?”

  Flather nodded, and pointed to a box he’d drawn on the southwestern edge of the chart and highlighted in yellow. “That’s from this NTM. Some surface ship noticed some discolored water right there where the water is supposed to be 8,000 feet deep. Shouldn’t be any mud in water that deep. So it may be a sea mount of some kind, who knows. So I put in on the chart, even though it’s far from anywhere we’ll be. Maybe we’ll swing southward on the way home, who knows. But I wanted to get it down.”

  “And you’ve got to read through all of these?”

  Flather shrugged. “Me and the nav split them up, we’re trying to look ahead at the water we’re heading into. We’re about halfway through all the NTMs for this year, although I’m getting through them faster than the nav…he’s just got so much shit on his plate right now.”

  Jabo flipped through the Notice. Every entry was marked by a latitude and longitude, followed by some piece of information: an ODAS buoy location off the coast of California had changed. A “dangerous wreck” had to be added to a chart in the Gulf of Mexico. The interval of a lighthouse’s flashing light in Ireland needed to be altered. Each correction was seemingly minor. But, Jabo knew, given the right circumstances, it was the kind of information that could turn a watch shitty in a hurry.

  “Sir?” Jabo looked up to see RM1 Gurno standing at the conn with a clipboard. “The broadcast for your review.” It was a bonus for them, the OOD and the communicator being the same person, one less officer to track down or wake up in order to get the broadcast reviewed.

  Jabo walked up. “Anything good in there?”

  “Nothing you need to wake the captain for. But look at this safety flash.” He opened up to it and pointed to a paragraph.

  Safety flashes were messages they received when the navy had identified a safety concern that needed immediate attention. They usually resulted from death or serious accidents, and were thus more interesting reading than the normal message traffic about wind warnings off Bremerton and new regulations about the disposal of plastic at sea. Jabo read the paragraph.

  “Holy shit…”

  “I know!” said Gurno, giggling.

  “How do you get a testicle ripped off on a rowing machine?”

  “I don’t know,
but they are now officially banned on Navy ships. We’re supposed to put an Out of Commission tag on ours right now. Did you see the boat?”

  Jabo looked. It was the USS Michigan, also based out of Bangor. “Oh man…” he said. “I know a ton of guys on that boat. I wonder if it was an officer.”

  “No way,” said Gurno. “The victim had testicles.”

  The watchsection laughed appreciatively.

  The story of the lost testicle and the rowing machine was indeed brief, and lacked the horrifying details that they would have to get the minute they returned to land. His eyes drifted toward the next safety message…something about R-118, the new refrigerant they’d taken on in their refit, some new warning about it. His eyebrow raised when he saw that apparently, this variety of Freon could mutate into Phosgene, a kind nerve gas, when exposed to very high temperatures. Thanks for letting us know, Navsea, he thought to himself, after we’re already sealed inside a can with the stuff. He scanned to see the classification of the message, thought it might be interesting to share with his father if he could, the heating and air man. He heard the laughing in the control room stop and looked up to see why. The XO was standing in front of him, a stack of books under his arm.

  “Sir.”

  “Danny. Anything good on the broadcast?”

  “Someone lost a nut on the Michigan.”

  “That is good news. Here,” he said, handing over the books. “For your training tomorrow…information about Kilo class submarines. Make it good, lots of pictures so the young ones don’t let their attention wander.”

  “Yes sir,” said Jabo. He took the stack of books and the XO wandered over to take a quick look at the chart before leaving control for a few hours of sleep. Jabo wondered if the XO actually expected him to read, digest, and then summarize all those pages in one watch. He checked his watch. He had four hours left on the conn and still needed to read through the broadcast. Well, he thought. Giving training on Kilo submarines was a lot more interesting than analyzing the effects of chlorides on the steam generators, or studying the navy’s latest personnel policies. Because, in addition to the roles of Watch Officer and Division Officer, every junior officer on the Alabama had a third role that was just as mandatory. This fell under the category of, “shit the XO tells you to do.”