Jabo suddenly felt the clipboard in his hands again, and he opened it up to the Freon message. He noticed for the first time that there was another message on the page behind it. He read the subject line: NOTICE TO MARINERS, and got about halfway though the body where a chart number was highlighted: JO90888. Jabo remembered the faded pencil line of their track on the chart, and the slight adjustment the navigator had made for no apparent reason.
He lunged toward the 4MC against the starboard bulkhead, lifted the handset and shouted into it.
“Rig for collision!” he shouted. “Kincaid, get shallow now!”
He ran forward, as fast as he could, his feet pounding heavily on the lower level deck plates. He now understood why the navigator had wanted him to wait ten minutes.
Duggan was stooped over, returning the casualty procedures to their place beneath his desk, when the amplified voice of Jabo came across the 4MC speaker behind him.
“RIG FOR COLLISION! KINCAID, GET SHALLOW NOW!”
Duggan jumped to his feet, all the watchstanders sat straight in their chairs, their eyes alert, scanning their panels. He turned slightly to his right, to an analog depth gage. He felt a slight up angle in his feet, and the ship’s depth, at that speed, responded quickly. The needle began to move counter-clockwise as the ship drove upwards. Duggan waited for something to happen.
The ship collided with an underwater mountain, and everything went dark.
Book Three: Disaster At Sea
The seamount that Alabama struck was shaped like a tree stump, a flat-topped ocean floor feature called a guyot. Made out of dark brown volcanic basalt that had hardened into place a million years before, it was slightly over 10,000 feet high, but it was atop and in the center of a much larger, much rounder feature that rose from the sea floor. It had all only recently been identified by oceanographers, mapped in precise detail by the oceanographic research vessel White Holly three weeks before the collision. White Holly had meticulously mapped the guyot and transmitted the results to the NOAA, which in turn transmitted the information to the mariners of the world so they might update their charts. With the exception of the precisely aimed beams of sound from the White Holly’s fathometers, no part of the mount had ever been touched by man until the Alabama crashed into it, eighteen thousand tons of steel travelling faster than twenty knots.
Thanks to Jabo’s 4MC announcement, and Kincaid’s quick reaction to it, the ship had achieved a slight up angle and some slight upward momentum, which reduced fractionally the total amount of force transmitted through the hull. The ship struck the seamount with its front, port side.
The first thing damaged was the forwardmost part of the ship: the fiberglass dome that protected the sonar sphere. Dome and sphere were ripped from the hull.
Next, the three front main ballast tanks hit. These tanks were always exposed to sea pressure, designed to be either all the way empty, when the ship was surfaced, or all the way full of seawater, when the boat was submerged. As the collision crushed them, it didn’t flood the Alabama, but it did greatly affect the ship’s ability to come to the surface, as they could no longer expel water from them and completely fill them with air, to make the ship buoyant. But the tanks did save the ship in another way. By absorbing so much of the shock, they functioned like the crumple zones on a car, absorbing energy even as they were destroyed, so that when the ship’s pressure hull finally came in contact with the hard basalt, it was not breeched, and the “people tank” remained largely in tact. The ship came to a complete, sudden halt.
Most of the immediate damage to the ship was done by that sudden deceleration. Since the ship’s equipment was designed to withstand the shock of battle, the pumps, motors, and electrical panels remained safe. A breaker on the propulsion lube oil system did trip, momentarily causing the throttles to shut. Two pitometers, eighteen inch rods that struck from the bottom of the ship and measured speed through the water, were sheered off, which problematically caused every digital indicator inside Alabama to show that the ship was still travelling at Ahead Flank even has it sat motionless near the ocean bottom. But other than that, at the moment of impact, the machinery of the Alabama held up remarkably, miraculously, well.
The human beings of the Alabama suffered more damage. In general, men who were sitting down or in their racks withstood the collision with few injuries. Men who were walking through the ship were less fortunate, at the mercy of where they were on the boat, and, most importantly, what piece of equipment was directly in front of them as they were propelled forward into it by the ship’s sudden stop. Hallorann, in Machinery One, was saved from crashing into the diesel engine by the navigator, as he collided with his swinging body and held on.
Chief Palko, the ship’s leading electrician, fractured his skull as he was thrown against the bulkhead between the missile compartment and the forward compartment. He’d been going forward to the scullery with a toolbox in hand to take a look at one of the ship’s two dishwashers, which had stopped running during the night. After the collision, he lay groaning, unconscious, bleeding from his nose and ears.
Two crewmen were killed within seconds of the impact. Missile Technician Third Class Simpson had been standing atop the ladder from Missile Compartment Third Level to Lower Level when the collision occurred. Out of every eighteen hour period at sea, Simpson roamed the missile compartment for six, a billy club on his belt and a clipboard in his hand, watching over all twenty-four missiles much like a zookeeper watches his animals, monitoring their temperature, their humidity, and their general well-being. He was preparing to climb down into missile compartment lower level when the ship hit. He was thrown forward, then fell down the ladder. His chin struck the deck plate just forward of the ladder, snapping his head back as he fell and breaking his neck. He was dead before he hit the deckplates.
The other death was Petty Officer Juani, the torpedoman on watch whom Hallorann had seen laughing at his computer screen immediately before discovering the dying navigator. Earlier that watch he’d done some minor maintenance on one of the idle torpedo trays, re-attaching a nylon roller that had come loose during the last time they “indexed” the torpedoes, or moved them around the space. While he had placed the large tool box back in its proper position, he had failed to lash it in place with the nylon straps that were there for that purpose. When the ship hit the seamount, the tool box shot forward, aimed at Juani’s skull with an assassin’s precision. His entire head was flattened, and he was dead without ever realizing what had happened.
Almost everyone not hurt critically was shaken or dazed. As quickly as they could, they picked themselves up, and without waiting for an alarm or an announcement, moved toward their stations to fight to save the ship.
The hull itself was badly deformed where it struck the seamount, but remained intact, a testament to the overcaution of the submarine’s designers and the strength of HY80 steel. A large breech through the actual wall of the hull would have been impossible to staunch, and the forward compartment, at that depth, would have filled completely with seawater in minutes until the ship could never rise again. In the language of submarine design, the ship didn’t have enough “reserve buoyancy” to overcome a completely flooded forward compartment, even with an emergency blow of all main ballast tanks, even if all the main ballast tanks had survived the collision.