“Are we going to run the diesel?” Salem asked as he reconnected his eye socket to the optics.
“Bazzi just started it. Listen, behind you, to the air flow through the mast.”
“So we’re charging the battery?”
“Yes,” Asad said. “And starting the distillate unit.”
“All on one diesel?”
“He just started a second.”
“The ship is well engineered and practically automatic, don’t you think?”
“So far,” Asad said.
Salem swiveled the periscope optics in a lazy circle around the Leviathan while his eye grew sensitive to the moonlit, starry night.
An alarm whined.
“What is it?” Salem asked.
“I’m not sure,” Asad said. “Help!”
One of the linguists darted to Asad’s side from his seat at the tactical displays. Asad, Latakia, and their translator held a rapid conversation.
“Hydrogen level in the after battery compartment,” Asad said. “Bazzi has a similar alarm and has asked Yousif to look in the compartment.”
“Look for what?” Salem asked. “Hydrogen atoms?”
“Local gauges, ventilation levers—”
“This is a danger, right?”
“Yes.”
A second hydrogen alarm whined. Salem reached for a cubby that held emergency air breathing masks and pulled one out.
“Should we be wearing these?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I think not. It’s more of an explosive hazard than anything, I believe.”
“This is a crisis. Think clearly,” Salem said.
“Bazzi doesn’t know what the alarms mean for propulsion space levels. He’s quite concerned.”
Darkness enshrouded the room except for emergency lighting and panels. New alarms howled in protest.
“Obviously,” Salem said.
“Bazzi just shut down our AC power,” Asad said. “He believes the gas is an explosive risk.”
“Can’t we use just the forward battery compartment for power?” Salem asked.
“The cells are in series. If you take half of them out, you have half voltage and can’t run anything.”
“This is a deepening concern.”
“I’ll have Latakia head back to help him,” Asad said.
“Right. Is there anything we should do up here?”
“Keep the ship at depth. Perhaps you should keep looking out of the periscope to make sure no ships are coming to run over us.”
Salem kept himself occupied by tracing circles around the conning platform. The world on the surface of the Mediterranean Sea was quiet. He pulled his face from the eyepiece and glanced at Asad, who wore the earmuffs of a sound-powered phone set.
“Nothing new to report?” he asked.
“They still suspect that they forgot to position the louvers and valves for ventilating the battery room, but they haven’t yet figured out the right positions.”
“Does it really take this long?”
“With emergency lighting, piecemeal translations of whatever manuals we’ve found, and valves hidden in recesses, nooks, and corners, yes.”
Salem returned his eye to the periscope optics and recommenced his circular dance around the conning platform. The sea was desolate.
Then, something caught his eye.
“Asad?”
“What is it, Hana?”
“Take a look,” Salem said while backing away from the periscope. “It looks too bright to be a star.”
“That’s a starboard running light! And above, mast head lights. What’s our magnification?”
“I don’t know,” Salem said.
“Then we don’t know how close it is. We’re going back down to avoid collision. Latakia, take us down.”
Asad darted to the ship’s control station.
“We have no propulsion,” he said. “Bazzi cut the engines from the battery. No pumps to draw in water.”
“Get us down!” Salem said.
“We still have momentum and hydraulic power to drive down,” Asad said. “I’m opening valves to flood tanks.”
Numbers on the depth meter indicated that the Leviathan slid below the approaching surface vessel.
Asad’s backlit silhouette appeared before him.
“We need to ventilate the ship,” he said.
“I know,” Salem said. “But it appears that doing so without being struck by traffic is a challenge.”
“We can’t use the diesels,” Asad said. “The explosive risk is too great.”
“Then how?”
“There’s a low pressure blower for pushing air out of the ballast tanks. But I’m unsure if we can route the exhaust elsewhere. If we don’t, we’ll end up surfacing.”
“Is there a problem with running electronic machinery because of the hydrogen?” Salem asked.
“There will be a risk. The less strain we place on the battery, the better.”
“Is there no other way to ventilate the ship?”
“Fans,” Asad said. “But we must be surfaced to use them. They aren’t strong enough to push air out against the backpressure of seawater.”
Salem pinched his forehead.
“Work with Bazzi, come up with a plan, and get it right,” he said. “Head back there and return when you’re confident we can at least ventilate the battery cells.”
Asad returned with a plastic-laminated diagram in his hand. In the red lighting, Salem glanced at its dark spaghetti-like traces.
“Hana, we believe we’ve solved the battery compartment air flow issue. Here, I’ll show you.”
“Have you decided if the blower or fan is better?”
“No, not yet.”
“But either will work, right?” Salem asked. “And either way, we must surface?”
“Yes, Hana.”
“When we reach the surface, you’ll remember to have the men grab the contaminated dry stores and throw them overboard. We may as well make use of this time surfaced.”
“Are you sure we want people topside?”
“No,” Salem said. “You’ll have men pass the stores up through the hatch with the last man tossing them down the side. And make sure the stores are punctured so they sink.”
“A wise choice.”
Salem feared the risks and consequences of having the Leviathan attract attention through noise, detectable visual presence on the water’s surface, and time spent in its compromised status.
“Are we ready to ventilate?” he asked.
“Just awaiting Bazzi’s recommendation on the best option between the blower and the fans. It’s a trade-off between noise, ventilation rates, strain on the battery, how we choose to surface—”
“I’ll make this easy,” Salem said.
He walked to the control station and pinched two knobs between his index fingers and thumbs. He extended them and rotated them upward, surprised by their ease of motion.
High-pressure air hissed, echoed, and knocked open valves that enabled a dissonance of air shrieking through pipes. Pulling Salem’s stomach to the deck plates, the Leviathan shot to the surface, bobbed, and rocked.
“Decision made,” Salem said. “Use the fans.”
Commander Flint listened to the voice from his sonar room over the loudspeaker and raised his eyebrow.
“You’re kidding,” he said.
“No sir, they’re no shit on the surface again. They did an emergency blow, and we didn’t hear a damned thing to suggest why they did it.”
Baines, the executive officer, stepped into the control room.
“The Leviathan blew to the surface, sir?”
“We lost them but then regained them while they were snorkeling. Then they quit snorkeling abruptly, went deep, and then about fifteen minutes later, they blew.”
“That’s bizarre, sir.”
“Based on our best solution, they weren’t really close enough to that freighter we were tracking to warrant an emergency deep maneuver, but then again, they had no business trying to snorkel that close to it.”