Foreman wasted no time on pleasantries. “Where is Bateman?”
“Down below,” McCallum responded.
“Get him.”
“Wait one.”
Foreman tapped a finger on the conference table top as the seconds dragged into a minute. Then two.
“Captain McCallum?” Foreman finally asked.
The voice on the other sounded harried. “Yes?”
“What’s going on?”
“Captain Bateman seems to have locked himself into our computer control center. We can’t get in there, nor can we raise the crewmen who were on duty in there.”
“You need-” Foreman began but he was interrupted by a yell from McCallum.
“What the hell! XO, abort dive. Abort!”
There was a few seconds of static, then McCallum’s voice shouting. “XO, what is going on?”
“Captain McCallum?” Foreman leaned forward. “Captain McCallum!”
The only reply was the hiss of static.
On board the Seawolf McCallum was dealing with a very unique situation, one that his training had not prepared him for. The nose of the submarine was already under as the submarine began to submerge. Except the Captain had not given the order, he had six crew men still on the top of the sail with him and the hatch below him was open.
He dropped the SATPhone as he yelled once more into the intercom. “XO, abort dive!”
Commander Barrington’s voice echoed out of the speaker with an answer McCallum didn’t want to hear. “We can’t, sir! Controls won’t respond!”
“Emergency override, blow all tanks,” McCallum yelled.
“We’ve tried, sir. No response.”
McCallum looked forward. The sea had covered the forward deck and was now around the base of the sail.
“Clear the bridge! Clear the bridge! Emergency dive!” McCallum yelled. The six man bridge crew reacted well.
The captain stood aside as the crewmembers on the bridge dashed past him and slid down the ladder to the operations center. Water began breaking over the top of the bridge as the last man went by him. McCallum jumped into the hatch, grabbing the side of the ladder with both hands and sliding down until his head was clear.
“Bridge clear, close hatch!” he yelled.
“It won’t close, sir!” A crewman was standing next to the ladder, slamming his palm against the large button that controlled the hydraulic arm which shut the four hundred pound hatch.
A wave of water splashed through the open hatch, inundating McCallum. He shook his head, getting salt water out of his eyes. He had less than five seconds before an unstoppable tunnel of water poured through the opening.
“Down! Close the bottom hatch!” McCallum ordered the two sailors just below him.
“Sir-” one of the men began to argue but McCallum had no time.
“Move it!” he screamed as he pulled out the manual crank arm.
They disappeared through the bottom sail hatch and the hatch swung shut, trapping him in the sail access tube. Another wave of water slammed McCallum against the ladder. He gasped in pain as three ribs broke from the impact.
The Seawolf was now almost completely under water except for the very top of the sail. McCallum desperately turned the crank and the top hatch slowly began to shut.
Another wave splashed through, blinding McCallum once more, but he had no time to clear his eyes. He blindly kept turning.
The top of the sail went under water and a torrent poured through the open hatch, battering Captain McCallum as he struggled with the crank. He felt water around his feet and knew that meant the sail access was already half-full of water.
Three more turns and the hatch was three-quarters closed but the water was around his chest and still rising. The Seawolf was completely submerged now, and McCallum knew alarms were ringing in the operations center below him because of the open hatch. He also knew this was never supposed to happen- the emergency computer system would not allow the crew to submerge the ship with the top hatch open. Either the system had failed or someone had over-ridden it.
The water reached his neck and McCallum pushed himself as high as he could in the compartment while still turning the handle. He took a deep breath as water lapped over his face. The handle stopped turning- the hatch was shut.
McCallum opened his eyes. With the boat angled down there was a small air bubble, perhaps a foot deep by two feet wide in the upper rear of the compartment and he pushed against the ladder to reach it. His face pressed into the air and he took a deep breath, savoring the oxygen.
Even with just the second breath from the air bubble McCallum could tell the air was turning bad and he had less than a couple of minute’s good oxygen. Breathable air was something every submariner was an expert on. He also knew that his Barrington was in a bind- the optimum solution would be to blow air into the sail to clear it of water, but if the sub was in an uncontrolled dive, the XO had a hell of a lot more on his hands than clearing the sail. At least McCallum had shut the outside hatch, which gave the hull pressure integrity. The inner hatch was only designed for emergency use and was rated down to five hundred feet while the outer was rated to the sub’s maximum dive depth of three thousand feet.
McCallum took another breath, his hands gripping the ladder tightly. The air was laced with carbon dioxide. He figured he had another minute before he blacked out and slipped under the water. McCallum kept his mouth shut, trying to hold the air in his lungs as long as possible before letting it out. Slowly he exhaled and took another slow, deep breath, feeling the pain of his broken ribs, then clamping his mouth shut.
His ears hurt. McCallum blinked. The sail was pressurizing. The water level began going down and he quickly took several shallow breaths of the fresh oxygen being pumped into the sail.
Before the water was completely clear, the bottom hatch clanged open, letting a splash of water into the operations center. Barrington stuck his head in, but was knocked out of the way as McCallum slid down the ladder, ignoring the sting of pain from his broken ribs.
“Status?” McCallum demanded, still trying to get his oxygen level back up.
“We have no steerage, no dive control,” Barrington confirmed McCallum’s worst fears. “We’re in a steady dive at four hundred feet per minute. Current depth-” Barrington turned toward the Chief Petty Officer who was in charge of diving.
“Eight hundred feet and still steady down at four-oh-oh feet per minute,” the Chief reported.
“All controls have been overridden from the combat systems mainframe,” Barrington continued.
“Bateman’s gotten control of the CSM,” McCallum said.
Barrington nodded. “Appears so, sir. He’s nowhere else on the ship and we cannot gain access to the CSM room. No contact with the duty crew in there and the hatch is locked from the inside.”
“You blew the sail,” McCallum said. “You must have been able to override-”
Barrington was shaking his head, cutting the captain off. “We disconnected computer control and manually diverted emergency back-up from the tanks next to us. But we won’t be able to do all the tanks quickly enough to stop our dive. I’ve got men trying to manually get to all the tanks but they’ll never do it in time.
“What about the bow plane?” McCallum asked.
“Still trying to disconnect computer control,” Barrington reported. “Chief says it’ll take them another five minutes to disconnect and then a minute or two to reorient the planes manually. We don’t have the time, sir.”
“Sixteen hundred feet and still steady down at four-oh-oh feet per minute,” the Dive Chief announced.
McCallum knew that the Navy’s unclassified dive rating for the Seawolf was eight hundred feet but every naval expert knew that was a joke. Jane’s Fighting Ships, the standard handbook for ships, rated the boat at being able to dive to two thousand. The Electric Boat Division at Groton had assured the Navy that Seawolf could do three thousand feet safely. Nobody knew exactly how far the ship could go because no one dared test it beyond three thousand. McCallum had taken Seawolf down to two thousand, eight hundred during the shake-out cruise, the maximum safety regulations allowed him.
“Everything’s set to keep us diving?” McCallum asked.
“Yes, sir.”
McCallum ran options through his mind, one after the other. “He couldn’t have reprogrammed the entire system.”
“We can’t blow ballast and we can’t control the bow planes,” Barrington said. “That’s enough to put us through max depth in-” the XO checked the stopwatch that hung around his neck- “just under four minutes.”
“OK, we do what he won’t have planned for and adjusted the computer for.” McCallum stepped out of the puddle of water that had formed under his feet. “Is the combat systems compartment secure?”
“We can’t get in, sir,” Barrington said. “All hatches are secure. We could try to burn through but that would take a good half-hour.”
McCallum nodded. “All right. Dive Chief, flood the CSM compartment.”
A look of confusion, followed by comprehension crossed the Chief’s face. “Aye, aye, sir.”