Collapse Depth

by Todd Tucker

  “They reported no hot spots while we were on our way up.”

  The captain turned to Kincaid. “Prepare to ventilate with the low pressure blower—we’ll get the diesel up and running when we can, if we can. Who knows what the damage is down there.”

  “Prepare to ventilate with the low pressure blower, aye sir.”

  An ET leaned around from the small ESM console behind the conn. “Sir, I have a military freq broadcasting near us. Very near.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said the XO. What next. A military frequency? He immediately thought of the Chinese.

  “Bearing?” asked Kincaid, still rotating around on the scope. “I don’t see anybody.”

  “It’s loud and clear!” said the ET, his code book in hand. “SUBSUNK!”

  “It’s us,” sighed the captain. “The BST buoys. We’re the sunken submarine.”

  • • •

  Jabo was still in machinery one when Master Chief Cote showed up holding his Polaroid in one hand and a large knife in the other, something Jabo suspected he’d been taking to sea since Vietnam. He carefully took photos from every angle of the navigator’s lifeless body. Then they pulled a stool over from the diesel control panel, and Jabo held it steady as Cote climbed up, and slashed through the belt that held the navigator. The dead man landed on pointed toes, like a gymnast, and then fell straight over on his face with a splash. There was no hurry to get him out of there, and moving the body was a pain in the ass in EABs, but Jabo and the master chief did it anyway, both of them, without saying it, feeling it important to get him out of there. They got two men on the upper side of the ladder to help pull him up, and then wrestled him into the freezer, where they sat him next to the heavy green bag that held Howard, the first man he’d killed.

  • • •

  It took four hours to get all the water off the boat, with both trim pumps and the submersible pumps working in concert, very efficiently at the shallow depth. Wipe down teams went in with bags stuffed with rags afterward, still encumbered by their EABs, wiping up whatever trace of water that remained. As they did so, maneuvering kept close track of electrical grounds, which slowly climbed into the normal range as the ship dried out.

  • • •

  It took six hours to ventilate the ship to the point where EABs could be removed. When the word was passed, every man pulled his mask off and breathed in the fresh Pacific air that had displaced the smoke, fear, and steam that had filled their ship for so long. The men looked at each other, having not seen each others’ faces in many hours. Their eyes met briefly, knowingly. They allowed themselves to acknowledge what they had all just gone through, then looked away, eager to move on, eager to keep busy with the endless activity needed to restore the ship to normal.

  • • •

  Shortly after EABs were removed, Jabo climbed the ladder in the middle of the control room, ready to shift the watch topside, to the bridge. There had been a lively debate about this in control. The XO thought they should keep the ship buttoned up, keep the watch in control, afraid that if the ship went down again with the bridge open, for any reason, they would not recover. The captain, on the other hand, wanted real human eyes topside as long as they were travelling under their own power, and was confident, after six hours, that the ship was securely on the surface. As was typical in these types of debates…the captain won.

  Jabo would be the first on the bridge. He climbed until he could reach the opening ring of the lower hatch, spun it all the way counter-clockwise. Then he climbed another step, so he could push his shoulder against the hatch. A slight difference in pressure had developed between the ship and the world, and it took all of Jabo’s considerable strength to move the hatch against it. As it opened a crack, warm air rushed in, as if the giant ship were taking a deep breath.

  The interior of the bridge trunk was lit by a single yellow bulb. It smelled good, like the sea, the smell of being close to home, because that was generally the only time the ship was surfaced, at the very beginning and the very end of patrol. He scurried up the next ladder, to the upper hatch. He spun the ring and opened it, revealing a circle of blindingly bright daylight above him. He climbed up a third ladder, toward the light.

  As he climbed, something glistening in the dark cavity behind the rungs caught his eye.

  He reached through with his damaged, left hand. He felt something slimy against the small bare patch of un-bandaged skin on his palm. He pulled the flashlight off his belt, curious, and looked again.

  It was a small octopus, its head about the size of a grapefruit. It legs were writhing, trying to escape in a panic. It had found its way into the bridge trunk somehow, and was stranded when they surfaced. Jesus Christ, thought Jabo, startled, he’d never seen that before. It was a patrol of firsts. He carefully reached through the rungs and grabbed it, palming it like a basketball, and scooped it toward him. He held it against his stomach as he climbed the ladder the rest of the way, feeling its legs beating helplessly against his stomach. The thing was soft but strong, like one big muscle.

  He climbed the rest of the way to the bridge. Getting up first was always a moment he savored. Jabo had no problem working in close quarters with minimal privacy for months at a time, it was one of the reasons he was a good submariner. But he always did treasure those first seconds on the bridge, when the OOD and all his responsibility still resided in control while he enjoyed the best view of any man on the submarine, surrounded by fresh air, water, and daylight. He was alone except for the octopus.

  “Hello!” said Jabo, looking it over. It was fascinating, he could have stared at it for hours. Another time, he might have sent it below in a bucket, let the crew take a look at it, everybody would find it interesting. On some patrols, it might rank as one of the most interesting things to happen, a legendary episode, the time they caught an octopus and made it their mascot for a few weeks.

  Jabo hefted it with his good hand, holding it in front of his face like Yorick’s skull. Its eight legs groped around his wrist and arm. Jabo leaned over as far as he could, and then he heaved the animal, shot put style. It landed in the water with a splash. Its legs spread outward like the petals of a flower, perfectly symmetrical, then closed powerfully. It shot forward and down, disappearing into the safety of deep water.

  • • •

  Within thirty minutes, they shifted the watch topside, and Jabo was the officer of the deck. He had company, Seaman Connelly as lookout. Connelly had a large bloody bandage on the side of his head, and a swatch of his hair had been ripped off.

  “How’d you do that?” said Jabo.

  “Not real sure, sir,” he said. “After the collision, I guess. The doc saw me after we removed EABs and slapped this bandage on my head.” He reached up and brushed it with the tips of his fingers. “How about you?” he pointed at Jabo’s hand.

  “Hatch slammed on it.” He held his hand up.

  “Fuck, sir, are those fingers gone?”

  “Yep. Two of them.”

  “Holy shit,” said Connelly. He stared at it a moment before putting his binoculars back to his face.

  “XO to the bridge,” came an amplified announcement from the bridge box at their knees, and moments later they heard quick footsteps on the ladder.

  The XO scaled the ladder and was soon standing beside them. He took a look around, especially at the bow. “Can’t really see any damage from up here,” he said.

  “Look at the port bow wave,” said Jabo. “You can see it’s a little asymmetrical.”

  The XO peered at the water for a few minutes. “You’re right. I can see that.” The bow wave on that side of the ship was frothier, compared to the smooth green swell on the starboard side. But other than that, all the ship’s damage was invisible, below the surface. “I can’t fucking wait to see it in drydock.”

  “Is that where we are heading?” said Jabo.

  “Still sorting everything out. But I’m pretty sure we’re not delivering anything to Taiwan.” He shot a look back
at Connelly to make sure he wasn’t paying attention, or at least pretending not to pay attention. “Wouldn’t make good TV to make a delivery like that from a broken ship. Know what I mean?”

  Jabo felt a pang as the XO said the words: broken ship. But that’s what they were. “So where are we going?”

  “For now, where going to stay up here, within our assigned operating area. I expect a revision soon. Probably to the nearest submarine drydock, which, by my estimate, is Pearl.”

  Jabo nodded. They were travelling less than eight knots. It would take them two weeks on the surface to get to Pearl.

  “But listen,” said the XO. “Let’s get some immediate priorities set, officer of the deck. We need to feed this crew, and we need to rest this crew.”

  “Can we feed them now?”

  “The chop is working on it. The doc says there are just nine men bad enough he wants to keep them in bed. So we’ve cleared out bunkroom eight, that’s where we’re going to put them all. After that, he’s going to clear out of Crew’s Mess, and the chop says he can have sandwiches and soup ready in an hour. After that, hopefully, we can start getting some guys some sleep. We’ve already shifted back to a normal watch section, with a few modifications. We’ll change the watch in four hours, start cycling guys through.”

  Jabo nodded. It felt good to be thinking about normal shit: food, sleep, watchbills. He contemplated for a moment which he wanted to do more: eat or sleep. He decided overwhelmingly he’d rather sleep.

  “How ‘bout you?” said the XO. “How are you, Jabo?”

  “I’m good.”

  The XO reached for his bandaged hand and held it up. “Look at that. What are you missing, two of them? Can’t the doc super glue them back on or something?”

  Connelly laughed at that and so did Jabo. “I don’t know,” said Jabo. “The doc’s got them somewhere in a bag of ice, says we might be able to re-attach them.”

  “Make sure he gets you the right ones. I wouldn’t want you touching Angi with someone else’s fingers.”

  A scratchy announcement came from the box again. “Officer of the Deck, ESM, we have a military band radar at 045 relative.” Connelly swung that way and Jabo raised his glasses. He couldn’t see anything yet.

  The XO found another set of glasses in the bridge bag and looked in the same direction. “Nothing there yet.”

  Another voice on the box: “Officer of the Deck, radio, we are being hailed on band nine, can’t quite make it out yet, they are very far out. But they are using our NATO call sign.”

  “Well, at least it’s one of ours,” said XO.

  “And they know who we are?” said Jabo. He was confused. He put down his glasses and the XO was nodding grimly, glasses still raised, waiting to see it.

  Radio again: “Sir they’ve identified themselves: it’s a tug from the military sealift command, the USNS Navajo.”

  “The Navajo?” said Jabo. “What the fuck is the Navajo?”

  The XO sighed then finally put down the glasses and looked at his watch. “Our rescuers.”

  • • •

  The captain stayed in control until the watch was shifted and he was absolutely certain the situation was stable. Even then he found it difficult to leave until the XO went up the ladder. He made his way to Bunkroom Eight.

  The doc had done an incredible job throughout, just as the captain expected. These old master chief corpsmen were a godsend, and they were getting harder and harder to find, no boat ever wanted to let theirs go. They were like the old klaxon diving alarms, passed from boat to boat, never allowed to retire or go to shore. Guys like Cote, who’d actually patched up Marines under fire in Vietnam….they were all years past their twenty-year point. Even the ones like Cote who loved it all—the navy couldn’t keep them at sea forever.

  The bunkroom was quiet. The nine most injured men on the boat all seemed to be sleeping soundly, and the captain wondered if they had all been sedated or were at least doped up on pain killers. Three of the bunks had IV bags suspended from them. Cote was sitting on a small stool in the middle, writing on a clipboard that he was looking at through his tiny reading glass. Something that looked a lot like a fishing tackle box was on the deck at his feet, full of rolls of gauze, tape, and shiny stainless steel scissors. The scene was a portrait of utter competence.

  “Doc.”

  “Captain, hello…” said Cote. He started to get up.

  “Don’t,” said the captain, raising a hand. “But do you have a second to tell me what’s going on?”

  Cote put down the clipboard and stood up anyway, eager to tell the captain about the status of his most injured men.

  “These three are probably the most serious,” said Cote, pointing to the forward three racks.

  “Who are they?

  “Palko has a fractured skull…he’s not moving. Rogers and Ferrero have concussions.”

  Jesus, thought the captain, two a-gangers and the E-div chief.

  “How bad?”

  “Hard to say,” said the master chief. “That’s why I want to keep an eye on them. But all three were knocked out, I don’t know for how long. The good news is, that’s the worst injuries we’ve got.”

  There was a pause between them where they both thought the same thing: except for the bodies in the freezer.

  “What else?” said the captain.

  The master chief pointed toward the three outboard bunks. “Here we’ve got two pretty severe bleeding cuts, that I stitched up, and they should be fine. I just want to keep them still for a while and make sure—since we really don’t know how much blood they lost. And the bottom rack there is Frazier with a complex fracture. He got thrown into the ice cream machine at the moment of the collision. Broke his ulna clean through and absolutely destroyed the ice cream maker.”

  The captain pulled back the curtain with a finger, and Petty Officer Frazier looked back up at him, apparently the only sick man of the nine awake. “Hello Frazier.”

  “Hello, Captain,” he said with a smile and the slightly elongated vowels of a man on heavy pain medication.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Pretty good now,” he said. “The doc fixed me up with some of the good stuff.” He laughed a little as he said it.

  The captain looked up at the doc. “How is that holding out? Do we have enough pain medication?”

  Cote closed the dark curtain in front of Frazier’s rack, and Frazier didn’t protest. “I’m being careful with it,” said Cote. “For a lot of reasons. We’ve got tons of aspirin and ibuprofen…we’ll never run out of that shit. I’m already low on the more powerful stuff like Vicodin and Percocet. So I’m rationing that out. But the worst ones here…” he pointed discretely at Frazier’s rack. “I’ve got morphine.”

  “Ok, good,” said the captain. “Who else?”

  “Over here are the three worst burns,” said the master chief. “They’re all bandaged up but need to stay still. They are probably done until we pull in and get them to a hospital.”

  The captain nodded. It was horrible…but better than he’d feared. It didn’t look like they would have any more deaths.

  “Any others? Any walking wounded around here with an injury bad enough I should know about it?”

  “The worst is probably Lieutenant Jabo,” he said. “Lost two fingers and went right back to the fire.”

  “I heard about it,” said the captain.

  “Captain, I know it’s not my place…but if I had any say in it, that young officer should really get some kind of citation for what he did today.”

  The captain looked at Cote, and for a moment, the difference in their ranks fell away, and they were just the two oldest, most experienced men on the boat, two men with over fifty years at sea between them. And they both knew what the score was.

  “Well,” said the captain. “That’s something you’ll probably have to discuss with my replacement.”

  • • •

  Data about Alabama trickled in to Soldato’s off
ice, as he sat helplessly behind the desk that he despised, the plaques of the ships he loved on the wall behind him.

  First came the word the ship was not sunk, via a transmission of the ship itself, a flash message saying virtually nothing other than that most important facts: the ship had suffered a severe casualty: collision, flooding, and fire, but was now on the surface and apparently moving under her own power. It was a message that raised more questions than it answered, but it was with absolute profound relief that Soldato read it. Not just relief for the ship, and for the men he knew onboard, but profound relief for his country: the United States had not lost a submarine.

  Ten minutes later came a follow-on message that set his mood back: three men dead. Two enlisted, one officer. He thought of Angi Jabo at the gate again, and vowed that somehow, if the dead officer was Jabo, he would be the one to tell her. He thought about what it would feel like to drive to her house, ringing that door bell…then forced himself to put that thought away. Telling Angi about her husband’s death might very well be the last thing he ever did in a Navy uniform. The message, of course, contained no names, and Soldato would have no way of finding out more details until the ship came in. But he knew that the dead man was probably a junior officer…they were the first to the scene of a casualty. And the best ones, like Jabo, were usually the first ones to get there.

  Information of a more banal nature dripped in. Group Nine got involved to handle the press that they would inevitably have to deal with when word got out: only Group Nine had dedicated PR staff, a group of three officers who set up a press “command center” at the Group Nine building. Anything involving the words “nuclear” and “collision” would have to be explained endlessly, and the anti-nuke groups were always ready to pounce on news like this. Thank God he didn’t have to screw with that, and he probably never would, since dealing with twenty-five year old journalists was deemed a crucial enough activity that only an Admiral was capable of handling it.

  A message came in from Alabama with a warning about the collision, an uncharted seamount. Soldato referenced the chart he had in his office. He couldn’t find anything on that vast expanse of ocean that the ship might have run into. Group Nine wrote orders for Alabama to turn around and go the floating drydock in Pearl, entirely on the surface. Soldato approved the orders and they went to the Group Nine radio room to be transmitted. The Taiwanese wouldn’t be getting their nuclear warheads, at least, not from the Alabama.