He heard the twin bangs of the BST buoys as they launched, not knowing what it was: they all jumped at the sound. He knew he lacked perspective, was the least experienced guy in the maneuvering, but was certain their crisis was dire. He knew it from his training, and he knew it from the tense fervor with which the three enlisted men in maneuvering were now performing their jobs. When the odd order for the three-second emergency blow came across the 1MC, Duggan felt his heart sink. It seemed to him an improvisation, tinged with desperation.
The depth gage in maneuvering was just inches from his head. It looked like an antique, a large analog dial. But like everything else in maneuvering, Duggan had studied the gage, and he’d always taken comfort in the fact that while crude-looking, that depth gage was a completely reliable pressure gage that was attached, by means of a long, thin pipe, directly to the ocean that surrounded them. In a world of electronic and digital intermediation, his depth gage represented an undeniable, hardwired reality.
The big ship reacted almost instantly to the emergency blow; Duggan could feel the angle in his feet. They were starting to point up. But, he could see on his depth gage, the ship’s depth didn’t immediately respond. They continued to drift down, albeit at a slower rate. Then their descent seemed to stop, and they hovered for a moment. And then, almost imperceptibly, they began to rise. Duggan realized that he’d been holding his breath; he exhaled loudly.
“Going up?” said Barnes.
“Yes.”
“Thank God.”
Duggan sat back down in his chair and thought to himself: whatever happens now, we’re moving up. Things are improving.
A blaring alarm on the electrical panel yanked him back into the crisis. Patterson cut out the alarm and scanned his panel. “Erratic voltage,” he said, and Duggan could see it. All the AC voltage meters were drifting around. Electrical voltage was one of the most static indicators in maneuvering, seeing the needles move around made the panel seem funhouse bizarre. Patterson reached to the center of his panel, on instinct: the ground detector. He turned a switch and took a reading. “Fuck,” he said.
Duggan didn’t wait for Patterson to announce it to him, he could see it himself. He keyed the 7MC mike to control. The ground detector was an exponential meter that could measure the resistance of a specified electrical bus to ground in Ohms; the normal reading was 8, the symbol for infinity. On the panel now the readout was in the thousands of Ohms, and dropping. He knew what had happened, and while he couldn’t have done anything about it, he cursed himself for not anticipating it: the floodwater had grounded some piece (or pieces) of equipment.
“Lowering grounds on the port AC electrical bus,” he announced into the 7MC. “Commencing ground isolation.” He released the microphone key and spoke to Patterson. “Start dropping busses.”
The roaming electrician appeared at the entrance to maneuvering to assist, a checklist on his clipboard.
“Dropping the port non-vital bus,” said Patterson, without waiting for an order. He turned a black switch on his panel, and the blue light for the bus went dark. But the Ohmmeter continued to drop. He flipped the switch back on.
“Port DC bus,” he said. He was moving fast, as the grounds continued to drop. With every switch he threw, equipment was de-energized, potentially affecting the casualty control efforts. But there was no question that they should do it. If that ground got to zero, it meant a complete short: an electrical fire. The old submarine saying was: if you don’t find the ground…the ground will find you.
“It’s got to be on the port vital bus,” said Patterson. They’d tried everything else, so by process of elimination, it had to be. But the equipment on that bus was, by definition, vital. The ground isolation had to proceed slightly more deliberately lest they make a bad situation worse.
Duggan grabbed the 7MC again. “Commencing isolation on the port vital bus.”
The roaming electrician flipped to a new check list. “Number two main feed pump.”
“No,” said Duggan. “Start with whatever is in the forward compartment. That’s where the floodwater is.”
He scanned the list. “Ten loads in all forward on that bus. First on the list is forward ventilation.”
“Start there,” said Duggan.
“Too late!” said Patterson. The needle on the ground detector was swinging counter clockwise, plunging like a punctured balloon. They all stared at it. Just a moment passed before once again they heard the adrenalin-inducing crackle of the 4MC speaker.
Fire in the forward compartment!
Jabo was working right next to Hallorann, trying to supervise the frantic efforts of about six men crammed into a very small space in the front of the torpedo room. The work consisted of two efforts: removing the water that had poured into the space, and stopping the flooding.
Hallorann was working with two others to remove water. They’d already sunk a submersible pump into the torpedo room bilge and hooked it up to the trim header. It had been an exhausting task. The submersible pump was heavy and everything had to be done in a soaking, frigid torrent of sea water. Hallorann had only recently learned to operate the pump, working on his quals, but he’d taken control of the operation, attacking the flooding, shoving the pump into the deepest part of the bilge. His hands were so cold that at one point he dropped the spanner wrench into the flooded bilge; without hesitating he went completely underwater to retrieve it. He came up shivering and soaking, with the wrench in hand, and they completed the connection. When they turned the pump on, he felt a small sense of triumph when the outlet hose went rigid; they were getting water out of there and it felt good. By then, the second submersible pump had arrived from the Crew’s Mess. The crewmen went to work hooking it up, the effort and the cold water sapping them of strength.
Just a few feet away from him Jabo watched and worried. He wanted to help but his left hand was completely useless. The submersible pump would make a small difference in the overall rate of flooding. Their great depth worked against them in two ways: the massive sea pressure made the rate of flooding huge. And it slowed the rate at which they could pump water overboard. The water was well above the deck plates now, sloshing at their ankles, and Jabo realized that the ocean wasn’t trying to infiltrate their little world, like a parasitic invader. Instead, they were the invaders, the foreign body, and now the ocean was trying to consume them, the way a white blood cell surrounds and kills a bacterium. The second pump would help some, a decrease in depth would help a lot, and slowing the rate of flooding would help even more.
To that end, an array of damage control kits had been brought to the scene. Some consisted of wooden plugs designed to be hammered into place, designed for punctured pipes. Once in the hole, the wood would swell and seal it, and hammering a wooden plug into a gushing hole was a skill every submariner mastered.
Unfortunately, the flooding they faced wasn’t a round hole that could so easily be sealed. As far as Jabo could tell, the torpedo tube breech door had been deformed to form a hole the shape of a thin crescent. They’d tried to hammer wooden plugs into it, but it did little good.
The XO appeared at his arm. “What about the outer doors?” He had to shout.
“They’re fucked up!” he said. The XO nodded. He couldn’t hear him, the sound was too loud. They moved to the back of the space, Jabo still holding a conical DC plug in his hand.
“I’m assuming it’s fucked up,” said Jabo. “It must be or water wouldn’t get in. Whatever we hit fucked it up.”