Duggan opened eyes and heard the frantic reports of all three of his watchstanders. No one in maneuvering had noticed that he was knocked out.
“Sir, the electric plant is in a half power line up,” reported Patterson.
“Throttles are still shut,” said Tremain.
The EWS growled a report into maneuvering, but Duggan was processing it all slowly, his vision hazy. He couldn’t keep up.
The engine room watchstanders continued to call in reports. In everyone’s tone was this request: someone please tell us what the fuck is going on. Except for Duggan, the men in maneuvering were all on their feet, facing their panels, cutting out alarms. About one quarter of the electrical control panel was dark; one of the turbine generators had for some reason tripped off. Patterson, without an order, deftly shifted the electric plant into a half power line up, where everything was powered by a single turbine generator. The lights for all the electrical busses again glowed blue. Duggan looked down at the EOOW’s small desk, which was covered in blood. He touched his forehead, felt a large gash. He’d slipped when the boat grounded, slammed his head into the desk, right onto the metal bracket that held the 7MC microphone. Blood streamed down the sides of the desk onto the deck.
Reports continued pouring in, the impact had knocked dozens of things off kilter. Blood ran into his eyes, he wiped it off with the back of hand, felt the slick smear of it against his face. As his eyes focused Duggan saw yellow lights all over maneuvering, warning lights, and a few red alarms: one for the knocked out turbine generator, one for the pressurizer level detector, and one for salinity in the feed system. Every time a watchstander announced one and cut out the alarm, another one would come in. It was almost overwhelming, especially coupled with the chorus of concerned, urgent announcements being made by his team in maneuvering, as they tried to sort out their own problems. And the splitting pain in his skull.
But at the very center of the center panel, reactor power held steady at 50 percent: a lower bell must have been ordered and answered during his unconsciousness. And the electrical plant, while slightly degraded in its half-power line up, was functioning, with all busses energized. The lights were burning and the screw was turning. And Duggan, on his first day as a qualified watchstander, knew that was important enough to pass along.
“Quiet!” he said, his first words in maneuvering since the casualty. The watchstanders silenced immediately, expecting guidance, or orders to prosecute the casualties that beset the engine room. Instead, Duggan grabbed the bloody 7MC microphone in front of him, a direct, amplified link to the control room and the officer of the deck.
“Control, maneuvering….the reactor is critical. The electrical plant is in a half power line up. Ready to answer all bells.”
Jabo stood at the hatch for an agonizing second, screaming, while the missile tech struggled to open it. Finally it flew open.
The pain in his hand was blinding, unbearable, but it was the sight of his hand that almost made him pass out: his fingers were flattened and dangling uselessly from the first knuckle on. The flattening had made his fingers unnaturally large and floppy and all the blood had been pressed from them; it looked like he was wearing an oversized white glove. Jabo looked away and fought to stay conscious.
“Jesus Christ, I’m sorry sir,” said the missile tech. He had glimpsed Jabo’s mangled hand and was looking away, too, pale and in shock.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Jabo. Hot tears of pain ran down his face. He wanted to move toward the sound of the flooding, but the pain in his hand kept him frozen in place. Another missile tech ran out of MCC with a first aid kit and a roll of gauze. He looked down at Jabo’s flattened hand.
“Oh fuck,” he said. His hands dropped.
“Wrap it up,” said Jabo through gritted teeth. He knew gauze wouldn’t stop the pain, but at least it would make his useless fingers stop flopping around. And it would keep people from staring at the fucking things. “You got any Motrin in that thing?”
The missile tech dug a small white bottle out of the bag, and shook out two pills, looked at his hand, and shook out two more, and handed them to Jabo. He swallowed all four without water. They wrapped his hand, taped it, and Jabo ran forward.
The XO and Jabo got to the torpedo room at the same time. They stared at each other. Jabo started to tell the XO what he knew about the navigator, but the roar from the flooding was too loud. The XO pointed and they moved aft into Machinery One, right by the diesel, where they could hear each other, barely, over the noise.
“Holy shit!” said the XO, as they entered.
“The navigator did all this!” shouted Jabo. He involuntarily raised his bandaged hand.
“How?”
“He drove us toward a seamount!” Jabo realized he’d dropped the NTM message, probably when the hatch shut on his hand. “He set the fire and killed Howard!”
The XO rapidly processed that information and concluded it was important, but, at the moment, not urgent. “Get a phone talker in here,” he said. “It will be too loud in the torpedo room. Let’s go.” He started marching toward the casualty.
“But XO!” Jabo actually grabbed his shoulder. “Don’t we need to find the navigator? Stop him from doing anything else?”
The XO paused and raised an eyebrow. He pointed over Jabo’s shoulder. Jabo turned and found himself at eye level with the waist of the navigator’s dead body, right where his belt buckle would have been had it not been digging into the soft flesh of his neck. “Jesus Christ!” he said, startled so bad he almost fell down as he recoiled from the corpse.
“Shit, sorry about that Jabo,” said the XO. “I thought you saw him.”
“All stop!” ordered Kincaid just as the captain arrived control. Kincaid shot a look to him as he appeared, because his was not the conventional order to give in a flooding casualty, not what a drill monitor would look for. But the captain nodded; it was the right call. With their severe down angle, forward motion would only make the ship go deeper. And they were already very deep.
“Shit, we’re not slowing down,” said Kincaid.
The captain looked where Kincaid was looking, the red digital numbers of the bearing repeater where speed wasn’t budging from Ahead Flank.
“We’re not moving,” he said.
“What…?”
“We’re motionless,” said the captain. “The pitometers are probably sheered off.” It had happened to him once before, when he took the Tecumseh through the Panama Canal on his JO tour.
“Fuck,” said Kincaid. Loss of forward motion was a catastrophe in almost any casualty.
The captain took just a second to look out over the control room and take it all in: the alarms, the odd down angle of the ship, the wailing of the alarms, the reports of injuries that were starting to trickle in, and, above all else, the roar of rushing water below their feet. Within seconds he knew that, before it was all over, they would perform an emergency blow.
But he also knew that the emergency blow was not a “get out of jail free” card, not a reset button that would put them up on the roof, basking in the sunshine, allowing them to start writing the incident reports and cleaning up the mess. Performing an emergency blow was the damage control equivalent of launching all their ballistic missiles. You had better make sure you do it right, because the consequences are pretty fucking dramatic. And you only get to do it once.
“Back two-thirds,” ordered Kincaid, and maneuvering quickly answered. It was another non-conventional reaction that was laden with common sense. If a forward bell would drive the ship deeper, then a backing bell should pull it up. The captain could feel the rumble in his feet as the screw began turning backwards. The BRI still indicated a huge forward speed; the digital indicator was officially useless to them now. He stepped down to look at the bubble in the glass that indicated the ship’s angle; as he watched it went from thirty-one degrees to thirty-three. It was what he feared.