To Kill the Potemkin

3

Barracuda steamed through the Atlantic at twenty-four knots, four hundred feet beneath the surface. There was no wind, no waves, no turbulence. At four hundred feet the water pressure was so great there was no cavitation behind the prop. No bubbles, no energy lost to drag. As the screw turned, the ship moved ahead with maximum efficiency. Three precise inertial navigation gyroscopes recorded every movement of the ship in three dimensions. Without contacting the surface, the navigation computer determined Barracuda's exact position.

The crew settled into the patrol routine of repetitious drills — damage control drill, collision drill, atmosphere systems failure drill, weapons drill. When not practicing for calamity or battle, they were kept busy continuously maintaining machinery and studying technical journals for rating exams and promotions.

Muzak wafted through the ship. Two days out of Norfolk Cool Hand Luke was rolling in the mess. Air conditioners maintained a comfortable seventy-two degrees.

From the conning station the captain looked around the brilliantly illuminated control room. The green hue of fluorescent lighting, accented by the CRTs, gave the compartment an unearthly glow.

Springfield was not a religious man, but he often thought the control room had the solemn atmosphere of a church — an inner sanctum of high technology. Men watched their instruments with the faith of true-believers. Every act was a ritual prescribed by regulations, perfected by repetition. Barracuda represented the highest order of human artifice, and Springfield thought it ironic that such engineering genius was devoted to a man-o'-war. If Barracuda resembled a church, it was the church militant.

"Lieutenant Hoek," the captain was now saying to the weapons officer, "you have the conn."

Fred Hoek felt as if he had just stuck his finger into an electric socket. As he moved his heavy frame up a step to the conning station, his heart was palpitating and his face was white. He put on a headset.

"Aye aye, sir. I relieve you of the conn."

Lt. Hoek scanned the displays in the conning station. Sweat began to collect on his upper lip. He was in heaven. He was radioactive. He had the conn.

Springfield strolled over to the reactor displays that monitored the chain reaction taking place at six hundred degrees fifteen feet away. Instinctively, he fondled his film badge, a strip of sensitive celluloid that measured the amount of radiation he was receiving. Like everyone else, the captain turned in his badge once a month to a hospital corpsman, who processed the film in the darkroom and determined how much radiation each crew member was receiving.

In the stern of the ship, in the steering machinery room. Machinist's Mate Barnes was standing his watch amid the jungle of pipes and compressors that moved the rudder and stern planes. Barnes worked at an exquisitely compact lathe, turning parts for the constant maintenance and repair of the ship's intricate machinery. From the engine room came the high whine of turbines and the throttling noises of high pressure steam.

"Howdy, Barnes."

It was Sorensen, standing in the hatch in a pair of red Bermuda shorts, thongs and wraparound sunglasses. He held out a set of schematic diagrams. "I'll need this in Naples."

Barnes shifted his goggles to his forehead and looked at the diagrams. "No sweat. Ace. Throw it on the bench." He turned back to his lathe.

"Barnes."

"Yeah."

"Don't fuck it up."

Portside was a small door with a brass plaque that shone brilliantly amid the flat navy gray of the compartment: "WELCOME TO SORENSEN'S BEACH. NO VOLLEYBALL ALLOWED. PLEASE KNOCK." Sorensen went in without knocking.

Designated in the ship's plans as storage space for electronic parts, Sorensen's Beach was barely six and a half feet long by four feet wide. Stooping under the low tapered ceiling, he switched on a pair of bright sunlamps and pulled a plastic mat and wooden beach chair from a cabinet. Taped to the door was a travel poster. Santa Cruz, California. Sun, surf, sand, pier, golden bodies.

"Surf's up."

He turned on the tape recorder and out flowed the mellow tones of Dave Brubeck's "Home at Last."

From a pile of magazines he grabbed the one on top, a dogeared Playboy. Tapping his feet, he flipped through the pages to the centerfold.

After a while the same old tits and ass became monotonous. He dropped Playboy and picked up Newsweek. Bad news. Riot, revolution, war, assassination. A general strike in France. He liked the naked women better.

The chaos of life ashore made him crazy. Millions of half-wits running around in confusion, like an ant colony gone amok. Greed, selfishness, corruption, lives without passion, without purpose.

Underwater, the madness disappeared. Inside Barracuda's pressure hull Sorensen had found a purpose and an identity. On the ship life was orderly, pure, simple, and defined only by the implacable laws of physics. The sub demanded total discipline and absolute dedication. Every man had a job to do and did it with his whole being or not at all.

Few could give that much, but certain men blossomed and thrived in the artificial environment of a submarine. For Sorensen it was liberation. He had joined the navy on his eighteenth birthday and never looked back, never wondered what his life might have been like under open skies. Now, after ten years, he realized that he couldn't stay below forever. For one thing, navy regulations were against it and eventually he would be promoted to chief and stuck in a sonar school where he'd probably drink himself to death…

He dropped the magazine and put on a whale tape. He liked whales and recorded them frequently. On this tape the whales were hooting up a storm. What could interest a bunch of whales so much, he wondered. Lunch? Whale sex?

In the torpedo room Chief Lopez was feeding a fly to his pet, a brown Mexican scorpion named Zapata. The scorpion lived in a glass cage mounted over the firing console and was the subject of many whispered rumors and legends.

Lopez dimmed the lights in the compartment and switched on an ultraviolet bulb in the cage. The scorpion glowed an iridescent blue. Lopez leaned his full face closer to the cage, sweat running into his heavy beard, eyes flaring like an aficionado de toros awaiting the kill. The fly buzzed around, banged into the glass and finally dropped to the sand. The scorpion moved. Lopez imagined he could see a drop of venom leaking from its tail.

The rest of the watch stood around quietly while Lopez acted out the ceremonial feeding. The torpedo-men knew better than to make smart remarks about Lopez and his bug.

In the galley the Filipino cook, Stanley Real, had worked for hours on a sauce demi-glace. Stanley fancied himself a chef de cuisine rather than a navy cook. He was trying to explain the difference to Cakes Colby, the steward.

"This sauce it is cook for three days."

Cakes thought Stanley's fuss over the sauce was ludicrous.

"It looks like gravy to me, Stanley."

The cook waved a slotted spoon in Cakes's face. "Once, they say to me, cook for the President Marcos. On the Andrew Jackson in Subic Bay the President Marcos eat his dinner on the ship. Big missile sub, yes, the Andrew Jackson. The President Marcos he come and he run his hand all up and down the missile, like he love it, then he eat. He like what he eat. He call me from the galley to the officers' mess and he say come cook for me in the palace of the president. No no, I say, I am loyal to the U.S. Navy. I am qualified as a submarine, first class, I say. I am citizen of the U.S.A."

Cakes was making his last cruise. The only member of the crew to have served in World War Two, he had seen a lot of cooks in twenty-five years, but never one like Stanley Real.

"Good God, Stanley. Where do they find guys like you?" Cakes muttered as he locked away the officers' flatwear in a cabinet. "Whatever happened to white beans and ham hocks?"

In the forward crew quarters, in a bunk on the third tier, Fogarty lay sleepless, all in a sweat. In two days his world had changed so completely that he seemed to have forgotten who he was. The discipline of the sub often required him to react without thinking, as if he were a robot, and he lay now in his bunk pretending that his brain had been replaced by a reactor. Someone pulled the control rod a little ways out of his head, and he speeded up. Pull it all the way out and he speeds up so much, he melts. Push it all the way in and he stops, he scrams.

Fogarty understood that on a submarine there was no margin for error. A moment's hesitation could mean disaster. Fogarty knew that in time the discipline would become automatic, but the learning was painful. Two hours out of Norfolk, as the crew raced through their first damage-control drill, he had banged his knee on a bulkhead while scrambling through a hatch, and it still hurt. Yet the bruises to his body were nothing compared to what was being done to his brain. He was being bombarded by information. A whole new world was being revealed to him in the sonar room — the sea and all its multifarious sounds — and he was close to overload. Sitting watches with Sorensen was an exacting experience. In his casual way, Sorensen was a perfectionist who never tolerated mistakes. Off watch, Fogarty frequently found himself running from one end of the ship to the other during endlessly repeated drills. Not a single watch had passed without a drill, and he felt as if he had a terminal case of jet lag. Night and day had been replaced by the rotation of the watches; his circadian rhythm was off. He knew it was five o'clock in the morning — four hundred feet up there was weather, a sunrise, a sky — but on Barracuda there was only machinery, a handful of radioactive metal and one hundred men.

The compartment was dark. His bunk was a tidy cocoon. To his right he could feel the acoustic rubber insulation that lined the pressure hull. To his left a flimsy gray curtain gave him a sense of seclusion. He heard the whir of air conditioners, and the sounds of sleeping men packed together as carefully as the uranium pellets in the reactor.

His mind refused to shut down. Electrical circuits popped like flashcards into his imagination, demanding recognition. When those were exhausted he started going through the signatures of Soviet submarines, retrieving the sounds from memory. The Russian ships were noisy, but he had had no real idea how loud they were until Sorensen played a tape of a Hotel-class fleet ballistic missile submarine. Fogarty thought it was the most frightening thing he had ever heard.

Fogarty could hardly believe that he was lying in a bunk with the sound of Soviet machinery running through his head. All his life he had waited to get on a nuclear-powered sub. When he was eight years old he had been electrified by the news that Nautilus, the world's first nuclear-propelled submarine, had put to sea. When Nautilus went under the polar icecap and surfaced at the North Pole, Fogarty made up his mind that he was going to become a submariner. He read 20,000 Leagues Under the sea and Run Silent, Run Deep so many times his paperback copies fell apart. His father, who had served on a submarine in World War Two, encouraged both his sons to join the navy, but it was young Mike who fell in love with subs. In high school Fogarty had puzzled over the mysteries of nuclear reactors and spent hours in the library buried in Jane's Fighting Ships. He built model submarines, marvelous, handcrafted working miniatures with radio control that struck terror into the hearts of toy sail-boaters on Lake Minnetonka.

At first Fogarty had been impressed by the enormous power and fabulous mystique of the nuclear sub. Nautilus and the ships that followed her had conquered the great ocean and opened a new frontier. He very much wanted to be part of it.

At an early age he had learned to distinguish the different types of submarines. First, there were the SSNs, fast attack subs, hunter-killers like Nautilus and Barracuda. Then there were the FBMs, the Fleet Ballistic Missile subs, the city-killers that had captured the public's imagination after the first one, the USS George Washington, was launched in 1960.

The missile subs had frightened him. The idea of a ship that by itself could destroy a civilization drove a wedge of doubt into his adolescent mind. It seemed crazy to him that such a wonderful device could be turned to such a terrible purpose. Though he never wavered from his ambition to join the Submarine Service, he grew increasingly haunted by dark visions of nuclear war with the Russians. In the end World War Three would be resolved by submarines. If and when the war occurred, the primary function of attack submarines like Barracuda would be to find and sink enemy missile subs. If they succeeded and sank the enemy "boomers" before they could fire their missiles, at least something might be preserved. In effect the SSN was a defensive weapon, an anti-ballistic missile system. Fogarty wanted very much to believe that serving on such a ship was a decent if not noble endeavor, but a little corner of his mind remained unconvinced. When he was old enough to enlist, he argued with himself. In the years he had spent studying submarines and naval warfare he had developed an understanding of the consequences of nuclear war, in particular nuclear war at sea. He realized that if the American and Soviet navies started sinking each other's ships with nuclear torpedoes, rockets, depth charges and mines, they also could very likely kill all marine life and thereby doom life on earth.

Such questions bothered Fogarty, but in the end he realized there was only one place to find the answers. Besides, no matter what, nothing was going to keep him off a sub.

Boot camp, sub school, sonar school, and here he was, breathing air-conditioned air, listening to Muzak and sitting watches with the great Sorensen himself. In sonar school the scuttlebutt had been that Sorensen was the only American enlisted man whose name was known to the Russians. He doubted that, but who could be sure? In any case he didn't have to deal with Sorensen the legend but Sorensen the taskmaster, who had no intention of making Fogarty's life easy.

Leave your mind behind.

In the maneuvering room Master Chief Alexander Wong, the head nuc, and the three men on watch were discussing the high-paying civilian jobs waiting for them when they got out of the navy. Surrounded by the maze of instrumentation that accompanied controlled nuclear fission, the nucs — nuclear engineers who had completed a course at one of the navy's nuclear power schools — figured they had it made.

When the captain walked in, though, they stopped talking and stared at their displays. Springfield stood for several minutes in silence, hands on hips, watching the engineers. Without warning he reached over Wong's shoulder to the main control panel and flipped a bright red switch. The control rods dropped into the reactor vessel and the reactor scrammed. The neutron chain reaction came to a complete stop.

With no chain reaction, no more heat was created in the reactor. If the engineers continued to use the residual heat to make steam the reactor would cool too quickly and crack, spewing radioactive material all over the compartment.

The reactor control team responded instantly.

"Close main steam feed," ordered Wong.

The technician sitting at the steam panel spun a wheel and the steam supply to the engine room was cut off. With no steam, no power was delivered to the turbines. The ship was now without main propulsion power. As the prop stopped turning, the ship lost way and began to sink. The trim was off and the ship slowly sank at an angle, stern down.

Wong grabbed the intercom. "This is a drill, this is a drill. Reactor scram, reactor scram. All hands to damage-control stations. All hands to damage-control stations. This is a drill. This is a drill."

Sorensen felt a shudder run through the ship and was out the door and past Barnes before alarms began sounding in every compartment.

In the torpedo room the alarm burst in on Lopez and his ritual. Leaving the fly untouched, the scorpion retreated to a corner of its cage. "Son of a bitch," Lopez said, "what is it this time?"

In the mess Strother Martin had Paul Newman trapped inside a church. "What we have here is a failure to—" and the film stopped dead.

In the forward crew quarters Pisaro stood in the hatch. "This is a drill. Off your asses and hit the deck."

Sleepy sailors stumbled out of their bunks and into their shoes. Like firemen, many slept in their clothes, ready for such a moment. Fogarty delayed long enough to zip up his jumpsuit. Pisaro swatted him on the butt as he rushed out.

The passageway was jammed. The new seamen collided with one another in the hatches and banged into hard steel at the turns. Grunts and howls of pain rattled around in the dim light.

Fogarty was dizzy. More than anything on the ship, the reactor terrified him. Every minute aboard he knew he was being irradiated. Yet now he was rushing through the ship because the reactor was shut down.

Throughout the ship, damage-control teams put on asbestos suits and checked fire extinguishers. Everything loose was fastened down. Everything already fastened down was double-checked.

In the galley Stanley was indignant. The cook could not have explained the physics of a reactor scram, but he knew that with no power to his stove his sauce was ruined. He slopped the brown fluid into a plastic bag and swore in Tagalog.

Sorensen moved rapidly through the ship on bare feet, one step ahead of the confusion. In the control room Lt. Hoek still had the conn. As Sorensen passed through he noticed the blissful look on the young officer's face as he gave the commands to recover from the scram.

"Engineering, rig for battery power."

"Batteries on line and ready to go."

"Very well, switch to batteries."

"Batteries engaged."

"Very well. Blow forward trim tanks."

A sailor spun a valve and compressed air was forced into the tanks, expelling the water into the sea. The rate of descent slackened.

"Blow after tanks. Slowly, very slowly. Let's not spill the coffee."

Willie Joe was on duty in the sonar room when Sorensen burst in. The screens were clear. There was nothing around them but ocean, nine thousand feet of it under the keel.

"Okay, go," Sorensen said. Willie Joe quickly changed into a white asbestos suit and hurried to his damage-control station.

Fogarty came in, eyes red and swollen. Sorensen frowned.

"You have to get in here quicker than that, Fogarty. Much quicker."

"The passageway was blocked."

"No excuses. If people are in your way, jump over them, run through them. I don't care, just get in here."

"Aye aye."

The ship was still going down. Fogarty stared at the digital fathometer: six hundred fifty, seven hundred, seven hundred fifty feet. His face remained impassive. The sea didn't frighten him.

Sorensen liked his nerve.

At eight hundred feet the ship leveled off and stopped. The sea was quiet.

"Tell me what you hear," Sorensen said.

"The Atlantic Ocean," Fogarty replied. "The turbogenerator," he added quickly.

"That's all?"

Sorensen punched a button and the overhead loudspeakers came on. An intermittent scratching sound came from the sea.

"What's that?" Sorensen asked.

Fogarty listened. "I don't know."

"Turtles," Sorensen said cheerfully. "Fishing at one hundred fifty feet. Unusual for them to be so far north, but it sounds like they've struck it rich."

Still in shorts and wearing sunglasses in the darkened room, Sorensen scrunched up his face and contorted his voice, trying to reproduce turtle noises. He glanced up to make sure a tape was rolling.

"Attention all hands," Hoek's voice came through the intercom. "Prepare for slow speed."

Fogarty stared at the screen and fiddled with his film badge.

The ship began to move, making just enough way to maneuver. The turtle sounds faded. A moment later weird beeps and hoots came through the speakers.

"Right whales," Sorensen said, and began to hoot and beep himself. Every few seconds his fingers reached for the keyboard as he altered the combination of arrays, filters and enhancers, playing the sea like a vast water organ.

Fascinated, Fogarty asked, "What are you doing?"

Sorensen only tweeked and buzzed a little louder.

A minute later the whales went silent.

Fogarty said, "You turned the whales up, Sorensen. In sonar school they told us to filter them out."

Sorensen grinned. "I like whales." He flashed a smile. "Ever watch Star Trek?"

"A couple times. So?"

"Well, think of me as Mr. Spock, the Vulcan, all right? I'm not human, Fogarty, I'm an alien. I'm weird. When we're on watch, just keep your eyes on the screen and your ears on the big phone. And watch out for them Klingons, boy. They bad dudes."

Fogarty persisted. "In sonar school they called all marine noises signal interference. They said to filter them out."

Sorensen took off his glasses. "Listen, Fogarty. Forget school. Forget the navy. Read the sign: Leave your mind behind. This is the real ocean. If you're going to be a good sonarman, you listen to everything and you think about everything you hear. Are you following me?"

"I am."

"All right. I'm going to keep you on the first watch until you qualify. If you're any good that will be in about thirty days, just before we get back to Norfolk. If you aren't, I'll keep you just to make your life miserable. We're in for the duration, Fogarty. We're watchmates… Tell me, Fogarty, how come you volunteered for subs?"

"I quit school. I was going to be drafted, was at loose ends."

"But why volunteer for subs? Why not the Coast Guard?"

"I looked around. The Submarine Service had the best deal. Best food, best pay, most interesting working conditions—"

"Don't feed me a line of shit."

Fogarty shrugged. "Okay. I've wanted to get on one of these things since I was a little kid. That's the truth. I must have built fifty models of Nautilus when I was a kid."

"So what? Every kid in America builds models."

"Yeah" — Fogarty grinned—"but mine worked. Servos, radio control, watertight seals, the works."

Sorensen nodded. "I see. I suppose you were first in your class in sub school, too."

Fogarty shook his head. "No. Second."

"Shame on you. Where'd you screw up?"

Fogarty smiled. "Navigation. In the simulator I drove the sub right up onto the beach."

"Yeah, navigation is a bitch. That's why I like computers. When we fuck up we can blame it on them."

"That's what I told my instructor. He didn't buy it."

"So you came out second out of how many?"

"Four hundred."

Sorensen raised his eyebrows.

"Four hundred twenty-seven."

"Ah ha! Okay, you're a genuine sub freak. How come?"

"During the war my dad was a radioman on Yellowtail."

"No shit?"

"He's a very proud man. He always wanted my brother and me to join the Submarine Service."

"So where's your brother now?"

"He joined the Marines. It broke my dad's heart. He hates jarheads."

Sorensen chuckled, "Oh, boy, a tough guy."

Fogarty grinned. "What about you, Sorensen? Why are you here?"

"Me? I'm a native. I was born here."

"C'mon, tell me. Why did you join the navy?"

"You want to hear the story of my life, kid?"

"Yeah. Where's your home town?"

"Oakland, California."

"Home of the Raiders."

"That's right. Also the home of Fast Eddie, the pool Shark in The Hustler, of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels, Reggie Jackson, Huey Newton and the Black Panthers, former home of Jack London, noted oyster pirate and liar, to mention a few illustrious citizens. Ever been there?"

"No."

"Well, it's California, but it ain't Hollywood." Sorensen swallowed a long draught of coffee. "I had no sense, no real education, although I read a lot. I got married when I was seventeen. There I was with no job, nothing but an old lady who thought life was driving up and down East Fourteenth Street showing off your new car. Her brain was lost in the wrong decade. I needed a job, so on my eighteenth birthday I walked into a navy recruiter's office and said, 'Man, I built my first sonar when I was twelve out of a microphone, a plastic bag and a tube of rubber cement.' He said, 'Son, sign on the dotted line.' I signed. I was fresh meat for the fleet."

Sorensen paused to light a cigarette, and Fogarty asked, "Where's your wife?"

"She divorced me when I reenlisted. She hated the navy. A few years ago, the night before the ship was leaving for a sixty-day cruise, she told me she'd be gone when I got back. I didn't blame her. She was looking at two months of lonely nights in crummy bars in another crummy navy town, getting hit on by horny sailors, horny civilians, horny WAVE dykes. She didn't have much use for submarines, either. I think she went back to California. She still gets a piece of my check."

They continued at slow speed for two hours. Springfield stopped once to transmit a position report as part of the SOSUS deep submergence detection test.

Sorensen assigned Fogarty the elaborate, time-consuming task of checking all the circuits that ran from the sonar room through cables to the torpedo room in the bow. The sonars were mounted on the hull all around the bow and Fogarty spent an hour inspecting the main panel in the torpedo room.

Alone in the sonar room, Sorensen popped open his console and gazed at the maze of circuitry. Over the years he had modified it extensively, sometimes without authorization.

On his trip to Japan he had acquired not one but two of the miniature tape recorders, one of which he now inserted into a disguised panel. A quick twist of a screwdriver, and Sorensen became a criminal.