“The shipbuilders of Electric Boat are proud to deliver Vermont to our Navy, an extraordinarily capable ship. I am pleased to report that the Vermont has received some of the highest quality ratings in the history of the Virginia program. We wish Vermont and her crew a long and distinguished career in defense of our nation.”
This black hull with all its weapons
is my home. It belongs to me.
And to all of her officers and crew
May they be strong and forever free.
Let us live to protect her stealth
And look with pride upon her sonar dome.
They say home is where the heart is
This black hull is my home.
This black hull is my home.
“It never happened — we were never there.”
“In the name of the United States, I christen thee ‘Vermont.’ May God bless her and all who sail in her.”
Prologue
The power and heat had died thirty minutes ago. The space rapidly cooled to the freezing temperature of the ocean floor. Inside, under ineffective thermal blankets, four figures shivered, their breathing marked by vapor clouds, clouds invisible in the coal mine darkness.
The youngest, a first class midshipman in the U.S. Navy, stopped shivering as he began to lose consciousness, barely aware of the blurred border between wakefulness and a coma. In the carbon dioxide-infused compartment, he had experienced a clawing drowsiness dragging him into sleep, and he had fought it as long as he could, too cold and frightened of dying to be able to think of anything but the next breath, but soon he slipped further into the grogginess and sleep came for him.
As he lay there, his heartbeat slowed and his breathing became shallower, and it would not be long before there would be breathing no more. And not long after, suddenly he was alert and awake, standing — no, more correctly, floating—ten feet away from his body, watching himself and the other three people he’d tried to rescue complete their last moments of life.
Perhaps the oddest thing about existing apart from his body was that it didn’t feel strange at all. He felt a calmness and a deep focused awareness unlike any reality he could ever remember. It couldn’t be described except to say that everything he’d ever experienced, wondered about, thought about, it all now made sense. There was a feeling that all was right with the universe, that everything that had happened and would happen was meant to happen. He could feel himself somehow fitting into a place where he was supposed to be.
He looked through the darkness, sensing the equipment inside of the deep submergence vehicle that he had climbed into as the floodwaters rose to the hatch coaming. His body lay beside the other three bodies. He floated closer, looking at the other three, seeing their heartbeats and the functions of their lungs, watching their brain activity slow. His own body seemed to struggle for life, a slight twitch kicking at the blanket, but then it went still again.
He widened his awareness and moved outside the hull of the deep submergence vehicle into the free-flood space between the deep submergence vehicle and the hull of the stricken submarine Piranha, which lay at a list on the rocky bottom almost two miles beneath the surface. He faded farther back away from the sunken submarine and saw the frantic robotic arms of a submersible diamond plasma arc cutting the two-inch thick high-yield steel of the hull, melting it away as if it were butter. The lettering on the side the submersible read BERKSHIRE — HMS EXPLORER II. His spirit moved inside the submersible and saw the sweating operator of the robot arm. He could read the man’s thoughts easily — near panic and empathy for the trapped submariners inside of the Piranha. He wanted to tell the man it was too late, but not to worry, that there was nothing to fear about dying.
A moment later a patch of steel was lifted away from the hull, the flickering lights of the submersible revealing the curving hull of the deep submergence vehicle nestled inside the submarine. The submersible worked frantically releasing the vehicle, then began an emergency ascent to the surface. He went with it, floating outside the DSV as it rose out of the black depths of the cold Atlantic. The sea became lighter as they approached the surface, eventually the form of the undersides of the waves visible, shimmering and silvery. The DSV and the submersible broke the surface and broached. He could see the overcast and the heavy rain, the DSV and the rescue submersible bouncing in the waves in the winds of the storm. Strong crane arms reached out over the water, cables and robot grappling arms pulling the DSV up to the deck, the submersible after it.
Back inside the deep submergence vehicle he could see that all four people prone on the deck were in cardiac fibrillation, their body functions beginning to shut down. Rescue techs in air-fed facemasks rushed in and pulled out the bodies, gurneys waiting for them, the medics rushing them into the ship.
The gurney with his body arrived in an operating theater, where it became surrounded by doctors, nurses, corpsman and equipment. He watched a monitor showing one last feeble pair of heartbeats, then a flatline. The corpsman paddled the midshipman’s chest, shocking him to try to restart his heart, but it didn’t respond after seven attempts. The lead physician shared resigned glances with the corpsman holding the electrical paddles and shook his head. A nurse snapped off the monitor, its humming alarm going quiet.
The doctor picked up a clipboard, scribbling into it the time of death.
“What’s his name?” he asked. The nurse found the top of the patient’s coveralls that they’d unzipped to shock his heart. Above his left pocket, block letters of his nametag spelled MIDN. A. PACINO. The dead body had belonged to Midshipman First Class Anthony Pacino.
At the moment of the first paddle shock, on the other side of the operating theater, a black dot appeared and grew wider, opening like the petals of a flower, until it formed an opening resembling the end of the Horn of Plenty, except this funnel-like opening was black and perhaps thirty feet wide, and where it was wider than the height of the overhead, the reality of the structure of the operating room faded away, the black object more real than what almost seemed like a projection of the room around him.
The black funnel led into a long tunnel, which he could tell because the undulating walls of the tunnel seemed to be made of dark thunderclouds that lit up occasionally with lightning, the flashing giving the gloom inside the tunnel shape and form. The funnel pulsed as if trying to get his attention, but he turned away from it and floated down the hall as the corpsman who had tried to revive Pacino told Pacino’s step-mother, Colleen, that the attempt to save his life had failed. That Midshipman Pacino was dead. Colleen swept her raven-black hair off her shoulder, wiped tears from her face, and asked to see Pacino’s body. She was led down to the passageway outside the operating room where they had wheeled Pacino, a white sheet placed over him while someone had been sent for a body bag.