Twin storms that had started hundreds of miles away, their winds swirling, were nearing Okhotsk. Beneath the sea, Seawolf sat too deep to put up an antenna, and the crew was unaware of the warnings flooding the airwaves about the cyclones moving up toward the Kuril Islands. The men didn't hear when naval command centers reported winds of S5 knots and swells leaping toward the sky. They didn't know when other craft were warned that the two storms had become one, a single, lethal typhoon.
Within days of the first warnings, thrashed air, bullet rains, and massive waves were combining to force their wrath below the surface, pounding down until Seawolf began to shudder. At first, the men believed they could easily weather the squall. Unlike surface mariners, submarine crews are trained to fear detection, depth charges, and torpedoes, but there is usually little to fear from storms. Run deep. That was the standard procedure. Submariners are indoctrinated from the start with the faith that the skies could open up all they like, winds could gust threatening all who skim the surface, but below, where dark and calm hold court, submarines reign.
Indeed, the 400 feet of water overhead, though shallow by submarine standards, would have been enough to frustrate most storms. But this typhoon was roiling even the depths. And for Seawolf, there was no going deeper. She would have to weather this out on the seabed.
Seawolf began rocking from side to side. Three divers were out, and they were being tossed. The rest of the crewmen, safer inside, were trying to act nonchalant. Squeezing past one another within Seawolf's cramped corridors, they offered comments about the storm as if they were discussing the weather back home. Still, the currents that were hitting Seawolf every twenty or thirty seconds were so violent that her skegs were lifting from the seabed. At first, the submarine rolled only a few degrees, then more. Objects inside went flying — with the submarine on bottom, nobody had thought to secure for heavy seas. Beauregard was knocked from his high perch in the torpedo room and fell to the deck with a resounding crash. For a moment the torpedomen feared their mascot, their favorite ceramic frog, would be erased from their ranks in an instant.With great relief they realized that only his stand was destroyed.
Outside the boat, the divers were losing their fight against the pull of the currents. One diver was sucked toward the rocking submarine and found himself beneath one of Seawolf's skegs. Something grabbed hold of him an instant later. Another diver? A lash of the current? Just as this man was about to he pinned, he was free.
Finally the divers were able to scramble into the unsteady shelter of the submarine. That was what Tiernan was waiting for. He signaled the end of the operation. He wanted his submarine in deep water. He wanted out of Okhotsk.
But Okhotsk was holding on. "Buddha," a reactor specialist who had earned his nickname for his size and despite his thick thatch of black hair, signaled the alarm first. He had been standing at a gauge for one of the heat exchangers that cycled cooled water before it went into the submarine's nuclear reactor. The temperature was not reading anywhere near correct levels. Something was clogging the system.
Checking valves, moving equipment, Buddha started yelling: "I've got sand in there, Jesus Christ!"
The nukes, those men who worked the reactor, came running, followed by Dare and Tiernan. They stood looking at a pile of sand. Seawolf's vents were sucking in muck, salt, the sea, and the seafloor into the cooling system. The storm began taking on new and terrible significance as they realized that the reactor was in danger of shutting down. Seawol f was at risk of losing all power.
Crewmen began checking other points where the submarine borrowed water from outside, cycled it through the boat, and cycled it back outside. Sand, little animals, snails, coral, and sea creatures had gotten into the generators, the main engines, the turbines, and the half-dozen or so critical areas on board. There were piles and heaps of the wet, partially living mass around the boat. No one was sure how much weight they had taken on as the wet mass was sucked in from Okhotsk's bottom. Worse, the sand was coming in because the seawater intake valves that should have been several feet above sea bottom were resting practically flat against it. Each time the storm rocked Seawolf, a little more sand was pumped over the skegs. The currents were forcing the sub to dig herself in. Somehow the engineers who designed those legs as safety devices had ignored the properties of currents that children learn about when they stand in the surf at the beach. Now, Seawolf's skegs were almost entirely buried. She was stuck.
Compartment by compartment, men began to fret. The machinist's mates knew that if the steam plant shut down, it could take a week to restart, if it restarted at all. The nukes worried that with the sand damage, the reactor might not start back up. The Seawolf was just not strong enough for this kind of a test.
No one, it seemed, was immune to the growing tension. An electrician's mate lost control and began yelling, screaming, crying. A medic was ordered to sedate him and send him to his rack. Others began to have chilling visions of blank epitaphs: somewhere lies this seaman, sent to do something in an unknown place and killed somehow in a war that didn't exist.
Seawolf was mired for nearly two days as the chiefs, the old salts who had ridden submarines for twenty years, joined forces with the junior officers. With Tiernan's approval they began trying anything they could think of. First they attempted to rev Seawolf's engines to see whether that would get her to pull up. That failed. Next they tried a controlled emergency blow, hoping the sudden loss of weight would send them floating out of the sand. It was dangerous-Seawolf might pull free, but she might also broach the surface, and that could mean detection and detection would mean a fight. Seawolf had few means of protection at her disposal. Most of her torpedo tubes had been used to store potatoes. There were still some torpedoes on board, but recent tests had proved them all but useless. Seawolf was the loudest thing in the water, so whenever she had launched a test dummy, its sonar guidance system turned the torpedo around and sent it hurtling back toward the sub.
Seawolf's only chance was to remain hidden as she freed herself. Carefully, the crew began to blow ballast, slowly, steadily, gently, first from the bow, then from the stern. Nothing. Try again, someone ordered tensely. A little more water this time, with the anchors down to prevent an accidental flight to the surface. Again nothing.
Another try, and the submarine seemed to move slightly, but only slightly. It was like trying to get a pickup truck out of a rut, rocking back and forth, hoping sooner or later to be able to push it out. But with sand still being sucked into the machinery, the men were in a race: would they get out before their systems shut down? All through the boat, men were trying to blow the sand out, but the submarine was sucking in more than they could discard. A key reactor system was already down to less than 50 percent efficiency, maybe as low as 35 percent.
Somebody came up with the idea of cutting loose the anchors that were there to steady the Seawol f as she sat on her skegs. Anchors might save the sub from broaching, but right now the two concrete mushrooms were also weighing her down. The order was given to cut them loose.
Seawolf began to rise. The main engines were being badly overworked, revving until it sounded as though a drill was whirring through the boat. Then there was a scratchy sound, more of a shriek really, loud enough that some of the men wondered whether their hearing would be forever affected.