With McKennitt’s damage control team focusing on the de-energized panel, Bloomfield slipped away unnoticed and nosed his way aft along the port side of the big turbine generator. The port main engine was only a few frames aft, and he was suddenly curious as to whether Coleman had gotten the word to restore it. As he came in sight of the number two main engine, he was shocked by what he saw.
The big engine was completely assembled and appeared ready to go, but a gathering of petty officers who should have been starting it up looked anything but ready. Hovering over an open technical manual laying flat on the engine casing, the sailors were actually studying the emergency start-up procedure while a torpedo was traveling up Providence’s stern. All were nuclear mechanics, but none had more than a single stripe on his sleeve. They were third-class petty officers with no leadership in sight.
“What are you men waiting for?” Bloomfield approached them. “Didn’t you hear the captain’s order? Restore this engine to service immediately!”
They stared back at him blankly, and it soon became obvious to Bloomfield that they had no idea where to begin. They had obviously heard the order over the 1MC and were trying to comply as best they could. Like all good nukes, they had consulted the technical manual. There was just one problem. No written procedure existed for an emergency start-up of a main engine with a potentially bowed rotor. NavSea would never publish such a procedure because of the liability involved in damaging a multimillion dollar engine. Any experienced nuke would have known that. Bloomfield knew it from his junior officer days, long ago, when he spent several years qualifying as a ship’s engineer. The procedure was not written anywhere. It only existed in the minds of those who had done it before. And Bloomfield had done it before, twelve years and eighty pounds ago, when he had served as the main propulsion assistant on the USS Phoenix.
“XO,” one of the sailors pleaded. “You’ve got to help us, sir! We can’t find Mr. Coleman and we can’t find the procedure either! I don’t think it exists, sir!”
Strangely, Bloomfield felt calm and composed in front of the distressed sailor. It felt good to be needed again. He hadn’t felt needed for a very long time, and it almost made him smile in spite of the imminent danger that threatened them all.
“XO?” the sailor said, obviously wondering if he had heard him.
“You men put that manual away,” Bloomfield said in a steady but authoritative tone. “And do everything that I tell you to …”
“You're not getting away from me a second time, asshole!” Van Peenan snarled as he rushed Dean and kicked him again in the ribs.
Dean winced and had trouble breathing from the pain. His ribs had almost certainly fractured again. By now Dean realized that Van Peenan meant to kill him. Putting two and two together, he surmised that he had not actually fallen down the ladder as previously thought. Van Peenan had pushed him, and now the mad engineer was trying to shatter his skull with the same lethal implement used to fell Coleman.
Dean waited for the next lunge, then sidestepped it, managing to get to one side of the starboard seawater pump. As Van Peenan tried to get around it, Dean moved to keep the pump between them. As Van Peenan doggedly attempted to get around, Dean managed to counter every one of his moves. When Van Peenan went right, he went left. When Van Peenan went left, he went right. The crazed engineer’s curses were swallowed up by the din of the engine room’s spinning equipment as the ship answered full speed, and Dean began to think he could play the game indefinitely, or at least until help showed up. He probably could have, too, if he’d looked up in time to see the metal wrench hurtling through the air before it hit him squarely in the temple. The blow from the thrown object knocked him senseless and sent him stumbling into an equipment locker where he noisily fell to the deck.
Dean felt woozy as he feebly staggered to his feet, subconsciously aware that Van Peenan had recovered his weapon and now stood within striking distance.
He had to get away. As much as his head hurt, and as dizzy as he was, he had to try. In a fervent effort to escape, he drove himself to run forward along the deck as fast as he could, his boots clomping on the metal deckplates as he ran.
He could hear Van Peenan running after him.
“No sense in running, you little shit!” Van Peenan called from only a few steps behind. “I’m going to bash your fucking head in!”
Dean felt the breeze on his neck from a swipe of the heavy wrench. The wrench had missed, but it was only a matter of time before Van Peenan caught him. Dean kept running, heading for the next bay forward. He ran between the auxiliary seawater pump housings as Van Peenan wound up for another stroke. Anticipating a smashing blow to his skull, Dean was surprised when he suddenly heard his pursuer stumble and fall noisily onto the deck behind him, the wrench ricocheting off the bulkhead and falling into the deep bilge below the catwalk.
Dean turned to see Van Peenan lying motionless on the deck. A few feet aft, Coleman’s body quivered, his arm lay extended across the path. The injured officer had obviously tripped up Van Peenan as he had run by, causing the engineer to fall and hit his head on a solid steel eye used for looping block and tackle. Dean couldn’t tell whether Van Peenan was alive or dead, but either way, he wouldn’t be getting up for a while. The protruding metal object had knocked him out cold.
Coleman, still dazed from his own injury, tried to speak, but he could not. Hobbling over to him, Dean helped him roll onto his side.
“Are you okay, sir?” Dean said, wincing at his own aching head and ribs.
Coleman mumbled something but it was unintelligible. The concussion to the back of his head had shocked his senses. His jerky eyes indicated that he was having trouble seeing, and he was probably suffering from memory loss too.
In his shaky condition Coleman didn’t see or feel Dean remove the crumpled log page from his clenched fist. He also didn’t see when Dean tossed the wadded page into the dark and grimy bilge water below.
“Torpedo's two thousand yards away now, Captain!” Miller reported after emerging from the sonar shack’s sliding door. The fidgety weapons officer had nothing to do now that Providence’s target had been eliminated, so he occupied his time by nervously pacing in and out of the sonar shack, more of a distraction than anything else to the row of sonarmen beyond the door.
Edwards wanted dearly to jump down the aft ladder and make for the engine room. Something had to be very wrong back there, and with no response from Coleman, he couldn’t be certain of anything. But he held back. His place was in the control room, and he needed to trust his officers to carry out their orders. With that in mind he had dispatched two of the junior officers manning the tracking consoles and sent them aft in an effort to locate Coleman.
“We need flank speed in two minutes, Captain, or we’re not going to make it,” Fremont commented.
The information only added to Edwards’ sense of helplessness. There was nothing he could do at this point but wait and pray. If the men in the engine room had not yet begun to start up the main engine no interference on his part could get it started in time.
Coleman was a good officer, he kept telling himself. He had to trust his acting-engineer to come through for him.
Just as Edwards was convincing himself to reach for the engineering microphone to ask Maneuvering for another update, he felt the deck suddenly decelerate. The log showed Providence’s speed falling below twenty knots.
“Maneuvering answers all-stop, Captain!” the helmsman cried as he twisted the engine order telegraph back and forth. “They’re not responding! What the hell are they doing?”