“Ship is at test depth, sir,” said the dive. No one reacted, but everyone stared at the depth indicator to watch something they’d never seen before. They drifted down another foot, and the ship had exceeded its test depth.
“Captain…” said Kincaid.
“Blow the forward tanks for three seconds,” interrupted the captain. “That’s it…not another second.”
“Emergency blow the forward tanks, three seconds.”
“Emergency blow the forward tanks three seconds, aye sir,” said the chief of the watch. He stood and put his hands on forward switch only. It was an unusual posture; they were trained to completely blow the tanks dry if they ever needed too. To blow only one tank for a limited time was like trying to use half your parachute. The COW hesitated, then threw the single valve forward.
High pressure air flowed roared through the valve, rushing into the forward main ballast tanks and the valves that sat atop them. Those valves turned, and for three seconds they admitted the ship’s highest pressure air, the air that had nearly ruptured Hallorann’s ear drums on his first day in the engine room. Released into the forward tanks, the air expanded. While the tanks were destroyed at the bottom, enough of the tank remained intact at the top that the air expanded and pooled there, forcing seawater out through the bottom. After three seconds at that sea pressure, a bubble of air roughly the size of a car developed in each of the front three main ballast tanks. It expelled from the ship an equivalent volume of water, and they almost instantly became buoyant again. The action also shifted the center of buoyancy aft, which pushed the front of the ship up.
After three seconds, the COW pulled back the valve. The indicator lights for all three tanks turned amber again.
“Angle is coming up!” said the Dive, confirming what the captain felt in his feet.
Beneath them, thousands of gallons of seawater that had flooded into the torpedo room rolled aft. One positive effect of this was that it further shifted the ship’s center of buoyancy, accentuating the angle that the captain wanted to generate. But it also covered everything in its path in a rolling wall of cold, salty seawater. A great many of the things it touched had electricity coursing through them. Some of them, like the battery well, were designed to be watertight. Many of the machines, however, were designed only to be “splash proof,” and could not be submerged long without consequences.
“We’re still going down,” said the Kincaid, quietly, straining to mask the worry in his voice. The angle was coming up but the ship was still sinking.
“Give it time,” said the captain. He’d pictured it in his mind like one of those computer animations the shipyard engineers used, a graph of the ship’s depth versus time as air flowed into the front tanks, lifting the front of the ship up, the ship’s overall buoyancy turning positive. But there was downward momentum to overcome, and the captain knew it would take a few long seconds for the ship to rise. He’d tried to calculate the bare minimum amount of air he could expend and achieve positive buoyancy, and he hoped he was right. He had two bold, horizontal lines in the diagram he was constructing in his mind. The higher one was test depth, which they’d already exceeded. Beneath that line was crush depth, which if they exceeded they would never again rise above. But between those lines was a third line, a third important depth limit. And the Captain knew that before their momentum changed, they would cross it.
“Still deeper,” said the Dive. “But the rate is slowing…”
“We caught it,” said the captain. “We’re going to come up.”
Suddenly, a new alarm rang through control, one no one had heard before, a primitive buzzing sound that came from the corner of control by the main ladder. On each side of control came a dull pop, one that made Kincaid jump. Something bumped against both sides of the hull. All but the captain were startled.
“What the fuck was that?” asked Kincaid.
“The BST buoys,” said the captain. “We’re going to be famous.”
Once the ship exceeded its test depth by a predetermined percentage, the explosive bolts that held the BST buoys to the outside of the hull detonated, and the buoys were released. Like so many key systems on the boat, there were two of them, redundant and identical, and both functioned flawlessly. Highly buoyant, they shot upward, untethered to the ship, until after twenty-one seconds they popped to the surface. A mechanical accelerometer sensed their stoppage, and the transmitters of both buoys began broadcasting a powerful, repetitive distress signal along a frequency that had been reserved by the Navy for just that purpose. The recorded message consisted of an SOS, a sequence of numbers that identified the Alabama, and the message SUBSUNK.
Three radio rooms placed on three different continents were manned around the clock by radiomen whose only job was to await a signal that, much like the message ordering the launch of nuclear missiles, they all hoped would never come. Like the buoys themselves, the listening posts were designed with redundancy in mind: one was at the Marine Corps base in Okinawa, Japan. The second was in Holy Loch, Scotland. And the third was deep within the United State’s Strategic Command, in Omaha, Nebraska. All three listening posts began alarming simultaneously, even the one in Holy Loch, which was half a world away. Quickly the message was decoded and handed to a duty officer at each station, who in turn notified his commanding officer, who in turn notified the Chief of Naval Operations. The CNO made a call to the president’s chief of staff, and the president of the United States was then awoken with the news that a United States Submarine was in distress. From the time the buoys were launched until the president was awoken took a total of sixteen minutes.
Throughout the history of the submarine fleet, there has always been a degree of fatalism inherent in the various theories of submarine rescue. Alabama, like all ships in her class, was fitted with three Logistics Escape Trunks, or LETs, designed to mate with a Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle and allow the egress of crewmen. Assuming total disaster and loss of power, each LET had affixed to it a steel plate describing a series of hammer signals men in and outside the trunk could use to communicate with each other. It read:
ONE TAP means TANK IS FLOODED
TWO TAPS means TANKS IS PRESSURIZED
THREE TAPS means TANKS IS DRAINED
On the plate outside of each trunk of Alabama, someone had long ago scratched “ZERO TAPS means I’M DEAD.”
For several decades the submarine force relied on a fleet of submarine rescue ships, each with the hull designator ASR. These vessels were of World War II vintage, and were in effect modified salvage ships who could hover over a sunken boat and release divers. Submarine rescue theory of that era was startlingly crude, and revolved around “free ascent”—the process of having men egress a sunken boat and swim to the surface, arms crossed, and exhaling in concentrated, forced gasps to minimize the effects of decompression and the formation of lethal nitrogen bubbles in the blood. Every old submarine base had as its central landmark a tall, cylindrical “dive tower” where recruits could practice this procedure, a rite of passage for generations of submariners. It was officially estimated, and universally doubted, that a man might actually survive free ascent from a depth of up to 300 feet.