“Yes sir,” Houser said, vanishing out the forward door after Sanderson.
“Let’s hope,” Mcdonne said, “that Engineer Schramford back aft is reading from the same script we are.”
A hundred feet aft, in the engineroom, Lt. Comdr. Tom Schramford lay facedown in a rapidly cooling pool of blood.
Pacino looked at Vaughn. Both had thrown up. The men still alive, some eighty of them, were gathered in the more open spaces of the top deck of the compartment, between the quiet turbine generators and the main engines.
“What is it, XO?” His voice sounded dead. His hearing was coming back, but too slowly.
“Atmosphere,” Vaughn said. “Must be contaminated.”
“Let’s try the emergency air masks.”
As the men rummaged for masks, four more of the survivors threw up. Once in his mask, Pacino had a new unhappy thought … trussed up in masks, the breathing air bottles aft wouldn’t last long with them all sucking from them. They needed time, time to be rescued. It could take two days to get a DSRV to them to pull them out, assuming someone knew they were there and still alive.
“Skipper,” Vaughn shouted. “We need to be thinking about a sub escape.”
Pacino stared at Vaughn. It would be suicide. There was no way a body could do a free ascent from … what was it … a thousand feet, and live. If it wasn’t just the pressure effects, what about the water temperature and hydrothermia?
Popping up through the water at twenty feet per second in twenty-eight-degree water would be enough to cool a person’s core body temperature so fast that they’d all be ice cubes by the time they got to the surface. Pacino had heard the stories of patients in cold water surviving without air for forty-five minutes, but rescue might be days away, not minutes.
There would be no one standing by topside.
And what about ice cover? There was no guarantee they were below open water. Since it was shallow, it might have frozen more quickly. There might be an ice floe a hundred feet thick waiting for them. If they bonked their heads into it at twenty feet per second, it wouldn’t matter if it were 100 feet thick or a half-foot thick, it would do the same damage — collision and drowning. And even if that weren’t the case, what if the Steinke hoods didn’t work? A tear in one of the air hoods would fill with water and leave a man 1,000 feet underwater with no air. That was no way to die.
Even if that weren’t a problem, what would they do in the freezing water once they got out? Lie in the rafts with wet clothes, the arctic wind blowing over them, waiting to die of the cold?
A submarine escape didn’t just postpone death, it was a terrifying way of bringing it on quicker. Pacino figured better to go from asphyxiation in the hull than trying such an escape.
“We’d better think about the escape fast, sir,” Hobart said, not privy to Pacino’s thoughts. “These masks are fed into the same high-pressure bottles used on the escape trunk. We can either do an escape or sit here and suck air. We can’t do both. A sub escape means we go out in groups of eight. That’s ten fills and drains of the trunk, eighty Steinke hoods filled at high pressure. That’s about the same as all of us sucking this air for about thirty hours. And that’s about all we’ve got left. I don’t know about you. Skipper, but I’m with Mr. Vaughn. I’m ready to try an escape. If we make it to the surface maybe someone looking for us will pick us up. Down here we have zero chance. Even if we had a week of air we’d starve. And if we die in the escape … I’d rather die looking at clouds than this dead hull.”
So Vaughn and Hobart wanted escapes, Pacino thought.
Okay, they could have them. “Who else wants to try to go out the escape trunk?”
Of the men crowded into the space, all but twelve raised their hands. Pacino stared. He looked around, saw Vaughn’s eyes, challenging. He knew he had no choice, he would go with the crew. In the last load. If they ran out of air, he would stay behind.
“Okay,” he said. “It’s out the trunk. Engineer, you’ll do the honors?”
“You got it. Captain. Let’s get the hell out of here, you know?”
Chief Milo Nelson of the Phoenix had never seen himself as anything but a mechanic, a blue-collar worker in the Navy.
The Navy had seen him as much more, every command offering him a shot at officer candidate school. He had the brains, the leadership, the character presumably needed to be an officer. He had avoided it, fighting it off. He didn’t want to be a damned officer and face the old man every day of his life. He wanted to work with the mechanics, turn the wrenches, keep his fingers dirty. Sitting in officers’ country, daintily drinking coffee from a cup and saucer, never saying “fuck” and competing with fresh-faced college-educated kids who thought they knew everything but were naive babes clawing their way up the Navy’s ladder? No way.
Some might say that the idea of the heavier responsibility frightened him. He didn’t give a shit. He knew what he knew.
Milo Nelson was the chief mechanic for Phoenix’s M-division, working for Lieutenant Houser and the engineer, who happened to be lying in a congealing puddle of his own blood in the maneuvering room waiting for the report from Nelson that the turbine generators were up and ready for loading. The torpedo blast had put Nelson down on the deck aft but had just shaken him up. Engineer Schramford somehow had taken the hit hard, much harder than the enlisted man George Falsom, an electrician who was minding all three panels in the room. Falsom said that Schramford had been leaning around a panel, straining to see the progress of the engineroom crew, the torpedo coming closer, the captain on his case, when the blast hit, tripping him and knocking him into the side of the reactor-control panel. Somehow he had caught his head on a main coolant pump switch. The electrician Falsom had hit the deck, Schramford tumbling down on top of him after smacking his head on the pump switch.
Nelson had been standing watch as engineering-watch supervisor, the senior roving enlisted man in the aft watch section. As such, he could start the engineroom by himself.
In the dark. It hadn’t taken too long for him to determine that the RC was gone. He’d shut the steam bulkhead valves, stopping the seawater flooding down the steam headers.
He’d tried the phones to the forward compartment with no results.
In the maneuvering room he checked out the electric plant control panel, put the voltage selector to the battery, wondering if the wiring going forward had survived. He and Falsom held their breath as the voltage needle spun up to read 260 volts. At least they had indication.
“Want to try it, Falsom?”
“Why not. Chief?”
Falsom reached out and rotated the battery breaker knob.
He put the selector switch on the output of the breaker. It zipped 260 volts. It had worked. They had DC power aft.
“So far, so good. Bring up the lights,” Nelson said.
The lights flashed into fluorescence overhead, the patches of light from the battle lanterns no longer needed.
“Think they came on up forward?”
“Who knows?”
“I’m gonna try the EPM and see if I can spin the shaft. If I can, we just might be able to get out of here.”
“Assuming there’s somebody awake up front.”
“Big assumption. I’ll be back …”
When the lights came on in the forward compartment, Kane allowed a wide grin.
“Hey, XO, Tommy Schramford has the stick. Now we just need to be able to talk to him.” XO Mcdonne said nothing, sweat pouring down his forehead in the frigid cold of the room.