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Book Three: Disaster At Sea

The seamount that Alabama struck was shaped like a tree stump, a flat-topped ocean floor feature called a guyot. Made out of dark brown volcanic basalt that had hardened into place a million years before, it was slightly over 10,000 feet high, but it was atop and in the center of a much larger, much rounder feature that rose from the sea floor. It had all only recently been identified by oceanographers, mapped in precise detail by the oceanographic research vessel White Holly three weeks before the collision. White Holly had meticulously mapped the guyot and transmitted the results to the NOAA, which in turn transmitted the information to the mariners of the world so they might update their charts. With the exception of the precisely aimed beams of sound from the White Holly’s fathometers, no part of the mount had ever been touched by man until the Alabama crashed into it, eighteen thousand tons of steel travelling faster than twenty knots.

Thanks to Jabo’s 4MC announcement, and Kincaid’s quick reaction to it, the ship had achieved a slight up angle and some slight upward momentum, which reduced fractionally the total amount of force transmitted through the hull. The ship struck the seamount with its front, port side.

The first thing damaged was the forwardmost part of the ship: the fiberglass dome that protected the sonar sphere. Dome and sphere were ripped from the hull.

Next, the three front main ballast tanks hit. These tanks were always exposed to sea pressure, designed to be either all the way empty, when the ship was surfaced, or all the way full of seawater, when the boat was submerged. As the collision crushed them, it didn’t flood the Alabama, but it did greatly affect the ship’s ability to come to the surface, as they could no longer expel water from them and completely fill them with air, to make the ship buoyant. But the tanks did save the ship in another way. By absorbing so much of the shock, they functioned like the crumple zones on a car, absorbing energy even as they were destroyed, so that when the ship’s pressure hull finally came in contact with the hard basalt, it was not breeched, and the “people tank” remained largely in tact. The ship came to a complete, sudden halt.

Most of the immediate damage to the ship was done by that sudden deceleration. Since the ship’s equipment was designed to withstand the shock of battle, the pumps, motors, and electrical panels remained safe. A breaker on the propulsion lube oil system did trip, momentarily causing the throttles to shut. Two pitometers, eighteen inch rods that struck from the bottom of the ship and measured speed through the water, were sheered off, which problematically caused every digital indicator inside Alabama to show that the ship was still travelling at Ahead Flank even has it sat motionless near the ocean bottom. But other than that, at the moment of impact, the machinery of the Alabama held up remarkably, miraculously, well.

The human beings of the Alabama suffered more damage. In general, men who were sitting down or in their racks withstood the collision with few injuries. Men who were walking through the ship were less fortunate, at the mercy of where they were on the boat, and, most importantly, what piece of equipment was directly in front of them as they were propelled forward into it by the ship’s sudden stop. Hallorann, in Machinery One, was saved from crashing into the diesel engine by the navigator, as he collided with his swinging body and held on.

Chief Palko, the ship’s leading electrician, fractured his skull as he was thrown against the bulkhead between the missile compartment and the forward compartment. He’d been going forward to the scullery with a toolbox in hand to take a look at one of the ship’s two dishwashers, which had stopped running during the night. After the collision, he lay groaning, unconscious, bleeding from his nose and ears.

Two crewmen were killed within seconds of the impact. Missile Technician Third Class Simpson had been standing atop the ladder from Missile Compartment Third Level to Lower Level when the collision occurred. Out of every eighteen hour period at sea, Simpson roamed the missile compartment for six, a billy club on his belt and a clipboard in his hand, watching over all twenty-four missiles much like a zookeeper watches his animals, monitoring their temperature, their humidity, and their general well-being. He was preparing to climb down into missile compartment lower level when the ship hit. He was thrown forward, then fell down the ladder. His chin struck the deck plate just forward of the ladder, snapping his head back as he fell and breaking his neck. He was dead before he hit the deckplates.

The other death was Petty Officer Juani, the torpedoman on watch whom Hallorann had seen laughing at his computer screen immediately before discovering the dying navigator. Earlier that watch he’d done some minor maintenance on one of the idle torpedo trays, re-attaching a nylon roller that had come loose during the last time they “indexed” the torpedoes, or moved them around the space. While he had placed the large tool box back in its proper position, he had failed to lash it in place with the nylon straps that were there for that purpose. When the ship hit the seamount, the tool box shot forward, aimed at Juani’s skull with an assassin’s precision. His entire head was flattened, and he was dead without ever realizing what had happened.

Almost everyone not hurt critically was shaken or dazed. As quickly as they could, they picked themselves up, and without waiting for an alarm or an announcement, moved toward their stations to fight to save the ship.

The hull itself was badly deformed where it struck the seamount, but remained intact, a testament to the overcaution of the submarine’s designers and the strength of HY80 steel. A large breech through the actual wall of the hull would have been impossible to staunch, and the forward compartment, at that depth, would have filled completely with seawater in minutes until the ship could never rise again. In the language of submarine design, the ship didn’t have enough “reserve buoyancy” to overcome a completely flooded forward compartment, even with an emergency blow of all main ballast tanks, even if all the main ballast tanks had survived the collision.

But along the port side of the ship, one of the ship’s four torpedo tubes was deformed, its perfectly circular opening pushed into an oval, an oval that the round brass breech door no longer sealed. The sea pressure was so great at that depth that the water entered the hull through that crescent-shaped gap with an almost explosive force, a roar that sounded more like an oncoming freight train than flowing liquid. Seaman Hallorann, still clutching the navigator’s body a few feet away, heard it and assumed at first that it was a high pressure air leak, because that was the only sound he’d heard in his life that could compare. He let go of the navigator’s body, got to his feet, and stumbled into the torpedo room to fight the flooding.

Jabo flew forward when the ship hit, completely destroying a stationary bicycle that was mounted to the deck in front of him, and briefly losing consciousness. When he awoke, he felt the steep, odd angle of the stopped ship, and he heard people running above him, at the berthing level. He was groggy, and thoroughly entangled in the remains of the bike, but as he got to his feet, he determined that the worst thing wrong with him was a badly torn uniform. He wondered if he’d missed an announcement while knocked out. He realized with a start that he must know more about what had happened to the Alabama than any man onboard. Any man, that is, other than the navigator. The navigator, he realized again, the navigator did this. He’d tried to kill them all. He’d also set the fire in the laundry, and killed Howard with the Freon. Now, with the whole crew fighting for their lives, who knew what else he might be capable of. He had to tell someone. His ears popped painfully as the flooding caused a pressure change; he swallowed to clear them.

He stood up in the lower level between the two rows of missiles. He was okay. Whatever was wrong with the ship, he was going to fight.

He ran forward through the passageway between the two rows of missiles. He felt strong and in control, grateful to be of sound mind and body after the collision. He was an officer of the United States Navy’s submarine force, and he wanted to get quickly to where there was the most danger, to fight it in the way he was trained. And, if along the way, he found the navigator, he was going to beat the shit out of him.

At the end of the compartment, he came to Petty Officer Simpson’s body at the bottom of the ladder. His head was at almost a right angle to his body; there was no question he was dead. Jabo again felt a surging rage toward the navigator.

He considered grabbing the nearest 4MC and alerting control about the body, but quickly decided not to. Simpson was dead, there was nothing anyone could do about that, and he was sure that control was being overwhelmed with information. He didn’t want his report to distract Kincaid from his real priority: saving the ship. With a twinge of guilt, he climbed over the sailor’s dead body and shot up the ladder.

The hatch to the forward compartment was right at the top of the ladder. Just as Jabo started to climb through it, one hand on the top sealing ring, the watchstander from Missile Control Central, on the other side of the hatch, heard the rush of water in the forward compartment. Anticipating the order to rig for collision and flooding, he jumped from his chair, ran into the passageway, and slammed the three-hundred pound steel hatch shut, breaking every finger on Jabo’s left hand.

When Kincaid heard his friend and roommate yelling on the 4MC, he was startled. But he followed his recommendation.

“Dive make your depth one-six-zero feet!” he said. The Diving Officer immediately gave the orders to the helm and lee helm, and they both pulled back on their controls. The ship rose, giving Kincaid just a moment to wonder what the fuck Jabo was doing. Then they hit.

Kincaid was thrown forward into the Dive’s chair. The Dive was actually wearing his seat belt, one of those small miracles of the day that might have prevented immediate and total catastrophe. He was thrown forward and jackknifed across the nylon strap, but not propelled headfirst into the ship’s control panel, not knocked out when the ship’s survival depended on his quick actions.

Kincaid got to his feet and jumped back onto the conn. The lights in control flickered but stayed on. The chief of the watch climbed back onto his stool and hurriedly cut out the dozen or so wailing alarms that dotted his panel. Not everyone else had gotten up; a number of men were sprawled across the control room, bleeding and unconscious. Paper was everywhere; while the ship’s equipment had been designed to withstand such an impact, the ship’s innumerable three-ring binders had never been shock tested, and the control room floor was awash in paper. Paper and blood.

There was a bang followed by a roar below his feet, in the torpedo room.

While Jabo had feared that Kincaid, the Officer of the Deck, would be inundated with frantic reports, the opposite was true. He had almost no information, just indications: the bilge alarms in the torpedo room, the horrifying sound of the ship’s hull scraping the earth, the roar of the flooding below decks. He knew intuitively they had collided with something, but the repeaters in control all said they were still going flank speed. In a drill, the communications were carefully choreographed, and the exercise always began with a 4MC announcement. Had Petty Officer Juani in the torpedo room lived, he might have made such an announcement, telling control about the flooding in the torpedo room. But he was dead, and Hallorann was fighting his way into the space past a frigid blast of water.

Kincaid waited what seemed like an eternity for someone to say something informative on the 4MC, to give him something he could announce, pass along, sound the alarm, get the crew moving. But he’d been around long enough to witness real casualties at sea, and he realized that a cogent announcement might not come any time soon. More importantly, he realized that whatever was wrong, he was the Officer of the Deck, and he wasn’t doing any good by standing there with his thumb up his ass waiting for someone to tell him that something was wrong. He muttered, “fuck it,” and grabbed the 1MC.

“Flooding in the forward compartment!” he announced. “Rig ship for flooding and general emergency.”

He hung up the mike, his heart racing and sweat running down the back of his neck. As calmly as he could, he turned to the chief of the watch, one of several watchstanders in control who were staring at him, waiting to see what would happen next.

“Chief of the watch,” he said. “Sound the alarm. Ahead Full.”

In lesser casualties, one of the major purposes of the ship’s clanging alarm was to wake up all the off-watch crewmen to get every hand devoted to fighting the casualty. That was unnecessary in this case; the only men of the ship’s 154 man crew who weren’t awake were unconscious with head injuries. But the clanging alarm did serve the purpose of triggering an automatic response from the well-trained crew, getting systems aligned in the safest possible configuration, and getting every man moving toward the position where he could do the most good. The highest ranking and second highest ranking men on the boat crossed paths without a word to each other leaving their staterooms, the captain on his way to control, the XO on his way toward the sound of rushing water.

Duggan opened eyes and heard the frantic reports of all three of his watchstanders. No one in maneuvering had noticed that he was knocked out.

“Sir, the electric plant is in a half power line up,” reported Patterson.

“Throttles are still shut,” said Tremain.

The EWS growled a report into maneuvering, but Duggan was processing it all slowly, his vision hazy. He couldn’t keep up.

The engine room watchstanders continued to call in reports. In everyone’s tone was this request: someone please tell us what the fuck is going on. Except for Duggan, the men in maneuvering were all on their feet, facing their panels, cutting out alarms. About one quarter of the electrical control panel was dark; one of the turbine generators had for some reason tripped off. Patterson, without an order, deftly shifted the electric plant into a half power line up, where everything was powered by a single turbine generator. The lights for all the electrical busses again glowed blue. Duggan looked down at the EOOW’s small desk, which was covered in blood. He touched his forehead, felt a large gash. He’d slipped when the boat grounded, slammed his head into the desk, right onto the metal bracket that held the 7MC microphone. Blood streamed down the sides of the desk onto the deck.

Reports continued pouring in, the impact had knocked dozens of things off kilter. Blood ran into his eyes, he wiped it off with the back of hand, felt the slick smear of it against his face. As his eyes focused Duggan saw yellow lights all over maneuvering, warning lights, and a few red alarms: one for the knocked out turbine generator, one for the pressurizer level detector, and one for salinity in the feed system. Every time a watchstander announced one and cut out the alarm, another one would come in. It was almost overwhelming, especially coupled with the chorus of concerned, urgent announcements being made by his team in maneuvering, as they tried to sort out their own problems. And the splitting pain in his skull.

But at the very center of the center panel, reactor power held steady at 50 percent: a lower bell must have been ordered and answered during his unconsciousness. And the electrical plant, while slightly degraded in its half-power line up, was functioning, with all busses energized. The lights were burning and the screw was turning. And Duggan, on his first day as a qualified watchstander, knew that was important enough to pass along.

“Quiet!” he said, his first words in maneuvering since the casualty. The watchstanders silenced immediately, expecting guidance, or orders to prosecute the casualties that beset the engine room. Instead, Duggan grabbed the bloody 7MC microphone in front of him, a direct, amplified link to the control room and the officer of the deck.

“Control, maneuvering….the reactor is critical. The electrical plant is in a half power line up. Ready to answer all bells.”

Jabo stood at the hatch for an agonizing second, screaming, while the missile tech struggled to open it. Finally it flew open.

The pain in his hand was blinding, unbearable, but it was the sight of his hand that almost made him pass out: his fingers were flattened and dangling uselessly from the first knuckle on. The flattening had made his fingers unnaturally large and floppy and all the blood had been pressed from them; it looked like he was wearing an oversized white glove. Jabo looked away and fought to stay conscious.

“Jesus Christ, I’m sorry sir,” said the missile tech. He had glimpsed Jabo’s mangled hand and was looking away, too, pale and in shock.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Jabo. Hot tears of pain ran down his face. He wanted to move toward the sound of the flooding, but the pain in his hand kept him frozen in place. Another missile tech ran out of MCC with a first aid kit and a roll of gauze. He looked down at Jabo’s flattened hand.

“Oh fuck,” he said. His hands dropped.

“Wrap it up,” said Jabo through gritted teeth. He knew gauze wouldn’t stop the pain, but at least it would make his useless fingers stop flopping around. And it would keep people from staring at the fucking things. “You got any Motrin in that thing?”

The missile tech dug a small white bottle out of the bag, and shook out two pills, looked at his hand, and shook out two more, and handed them to Jabo. He swallowed all four without water. They wrapped his hand, taped it, and Jabo ran forward.

The XO and Jabo got to the torpedo room at the same time. They stared at each other. Jabo started to tell the XO what he knew about the navigator, but the roar from the flooding was too loud. The XO pointed and they moved aft into Machinery One, right by the diesel, where they could hear each other, barely, over the noise.

“Holy shit!” said the XO, as they entered.

“The navigator did all this!” shouted Jabo. He involuntarily raised his bandaged hand.

“How?”

“He drove us toward a seamount!” Jabo realized he’d dropped the NTM message, probably when the hatch shut on his hand. “He set the fire and killed Howard!”

The XO rapidly processed that information and concluded it was important, but, at the moment, not urgent. “Get a phone talker in here,” he said. “It will be too loud in the torpedo room. Let’s go.” He started marching toward the casualty.

“But XO!” Jabo actually grabbed his shoulder. “Don’t we need to find the navigator? Stop him from doing anything else?”

The XO paused and raised an eyebrow. He pointed over Jabo’s shoulder. Jabo turned and found himself at eye level with the waist of the navigator’s dead body, right where his belt buckle would have been had it not been digging into the soft flesh of his neck. “Jesus Christ!” he said, startled so bad he almost fell down as he recoiled from the corpse.

“Shit, sorry about that Jabo,” said the XO. “I thought you saw him.”

“All stop!” ordered Kincaid just as the captain arrived control. Kincaid shot a look to him as he appeared, because his was not the conventional order to give in a flooding casualty, not what a drill monitor would look for. But the captain nodded; it was the right call. With their severe down angle, forward motion would only make the ship go deeper. And they were already very deep.

“Shit, we’re not slowing down,” said Kincaid.

The captain looked where Kincaid was looking, the red digital numbers of the bearing repeater where speed wasn’t budging from Ahead Flank.

“We’re not moving,” he said.

“What…?”

“We’re motionless,” said the captain. “The pitometers are probably sheered off.” It had happened to him once before, when he took the Tecumseh through the Panama Canal on his JO tour.

“Fuck,” said Kincaid. Loss of forward motion was a catastrophe in almost any casualty.

The captain took just a second to look out over the control room and take it all in: the alarms, the odd down angle of the ship, the wailing of the alarms, the reports of injuries that were starting to trickle in, and, above all else, the roar of rushing water below their feet. Within seconds he knew that, before it was all over, they would perform an emergency blow.

But he also knew that the emergency blow was not a “get out of jail free” card, not a reset button that would put them up on the roof, basking in the sunshine, allowing them to start writing the incident reports and cleaning up the mess. Performing an emergency blow was the damage control equivalent of launching all their ballistic missiles. You had better make sure you do it right, because the consequences are pretty fucking dramatic. And you only get to do it once.

“Back two-thirds,” ordered Kincaid, and maneuvering quickly answered. It was another non-conventional reaction that was laden with common sense. If a forward bell would drive the ship deeper, then a backing bell should pull it up. The captain could feel the rumble in his feet as the screw began turning backwards. The BRI still indicated a huge forward speed; the digital indicator was officially useless to them now. He stepped down to look at the bubble in the glass that indicated the ship’s angle; as he watched it went from thirty-one degrees to thirty-three. It was what he feared.

“Take it off,” he said. “It’s pulling the angle more.” The water that had entered the forward compartment was acting like an anchor, pulling the front of the ship down. Pulling the rear of the ship up with a backing bell only exaggerated the angle.

“All stop!” said Kincaid, and the bell was quickly answered. “Captain, the ship is rigged for flooding and general emergency.” Kincaid was collected, remarkably so, thought the captain, and he was glad that an experienced hand was on watch when the shit hit the fan. “Depth is continuing to increase,” said Kincaid, and the captain’s eyes followed his to the bearing repeater above the conn: while the speed indication appeared fucked, depth was accurate. He was certain that while they weren’t moving forward at all, they were deep, and getting deeper.

“All the auxiliary tanks are emptied,” said the chief of the watch. He’d been furiously pumping them with the trim pumps, emptying the tanks in an attempt to make the ship lighter and rise. But a submarine is more like an airplane than it is a hot air balloon; its motion through the water, more than any other factor, makes it rise or fall, as water flows across it’s control surfaces like air across a wing. And at the moment, in their motionlessness, their submarine was just an 18,000 ton object drifting slowly downward, slowly tracing the downward slope on the other side of the guyot that had nearly killed them.

“Sounding!” said the captain. The quartermaster jumped toward the console.

“Sixty fathoms beneath the keel,” he reported. Whatever they’d hit was sloping away beneath them. Which was good news, because it meant they wouldn’t bottom out again. And bad news: because there was nothing to stop their descent.

“We could flood the aft tanks,” said Kincaid. “Bring the angle down…”

“No,” said the captain. In this case, Kincaid’s common sense response wasn’t the right one. “It would bring the angle down, but it would reduce our reserve buoyancy that much more…we can’t afford it.” There were calculations they could run to determine exactly what reserve buoyancy they had at this depth, with the tanks at these levels, but the captain knew intuitively that they were too close to the edge of that envelope to bring any water onboard that they didn’t have to. He was almost certain they’d lost the forward MBTs, which massively reduced their potential buoyancy. And with every second, with water pouring into the front of the boat, the situation got worse.

“Captain…” Kincaid was looking toward the emergency blow valves above the COW panel, the chicken switches.

“Not yet,” said the captain. “Not with this angle. We’ll end up with our tail out of the water, unable to move, water still coming in forward and pulling us down. At this depth…the blow might not even get us all the way upstairs. We need to stop the flooding. And we need to get this angle off.”

“All the aux tanks are empty,” said the COW again.

“Use the trim pump to move water aft,” said the captain. The diving officer gave the order.

The forward trim pump took a suction on the forward variable ballast tanks and moved that water the length of the ship, to the aft tanks. This was water that was already on board, not new water, so it had no net effect on the ship’s buoyancy. But it moved the ship’s center of buoyancy aft. The rear of the ship slowly began to descend and the angle of the ship decreased.

“Is that working?” said the Captain.

The diving officer scanned his indications, finishing with a look at the bubble indicator that was the old fashioned, but most accurate way to look at the ship’s angle. He stared at that for a full minute.

“Angle is coming down,” he said. “Slowly.”

The captain glanced at Kincaid. In a normal situation, the trim pump moving water from all the way forward to all the way aft like that, for that long, would have an immediate and noticeable affect on ship’s trim. But now…it indicated that the trim pump could barely keep up with the flooding in the torpedo room. And as the flooding continued and the ship remained nearly motionless, it continued to descend, backwards, its nose pointing at gradual slope, following it down.

“We have to slow down the flooding,” said the captain, to the entire control room. “What the fuck is going on down there?”

There was only noise. Not a wall of noise, but a solid impenetrable mass of noise. Stepping into the torpedo room was like walking into a furnace with flames of pure, roaring sound.

Only after overcoming that sound did Jabo notice the sheer amount of water in the space: dark, frigid water that was roaring in from the port side, deflected by one of the torpedoes in storage, crashing against the port bulkhead. The water had long since filled up the bilge and was up over the deckplates, sloshing around his feet. He saw Juoni’s body laying face down in the water, another death. And he saw another enlisted man, alone, the canvas bag of a DC kit across his shoulder, lugging a submersible pump.

“Any one try this yet?” yelled the XO. He had his hands on the flood control switches at the back of the space. They controlled hydraulic valves that shut every opening to the sea in the space. He threw them forward; nothing happened.

Jabo ran over to him. “I didn’t hear it, but it’s so loud…”

The XO shook his head. “Nothing happened…I was watching the panel…” he pointed to the torpedo room control panel. A number of valves were represented by green “Os” indicating they were open. The flood control system should have shut everything tight.

“Problem with hydraulics?” shouted Jabo.

The XO shook his head. “Problem with something.”

Two men jumped down the ladder. The looked around briefly, wide eyed, stunned as Jabo had been by the violence of the noise. The XO grabbed each by the shoulder to get their attention. “Set up a hand pump!” he shouted, pointing to the flood control station. “See what that can do.”

They nodded and started back up the ladder to go the Crew’s Mess to get the necessary equipment. “While you’re up there, get an officer down here to be phone talker.”

They nodded again.

“Who’s that?” said the XO, noticing for the first time the lone enlisted man in the space who had set down the submersible pump and was attempting to rig it by himself. He was soaking wet, but his head was down, completely focused on the task.

“Not sure,” said Jabo. “I think it might be that new kid.”

“Help him out.”

Jabo waded toward him.

“Sir, ship is at 900 feet,” said the diving officer.

“Aye,” said the captain. Reports were steadily coming into control, all the spaces reporting their rigs, and from the EOOW, who reported he was ready to answer any bell that they ordered. All over the control room, alarms sounded from virtually every system on the boat. But their focus had gone entirely to the number that was most fundamental measure of a submarine’s peril: depth.

“Nine-fifty,” said the Dive.

“Aye,” said the captain again. He was running a dozen calculations in his head. To completely emergency blow now, he was certain, to expend all their high pressure air, would be a catastrophic error. With all the water they’d taken aboard, it might not even get them to the top. And even if it did, the ass end of the ship would be sticking out, the screw turning hopelessly in the air. The flooding would continue, and without propulsion to aid them, they would certainly sink again. If they were lucky they’d have enough time to transmit an SOS so a salvage ship could find their wreckage. He computed the ship’s reserve buoyancy in his head, the capacity of the emergency high pressure air banks, a rough estimate of the rate of flooding based on the rate at which it competed with the trim pump.

“Ship is at test depth, sir,” said the dive. No one reacted, but everyone stared at the depth indicator to watch something they’d never seen before. They drifted down another foot, and the ship had exceeded its test depth.

“Captain…” said Kincaid.

“Blow the forward tanks for three seconds,” interrupted the captain. “That’s it…not another second.”

“Emergency blow the forward tanks, three seconds.”

“Emergency blow the forward tanks three seconds, aye sir,” said the chief of the watch. He stood and put his hands on forward switch only. It was an unusual posture; they were trained to completely blow the tanks dry if they ever needed too. To blow only one tank for a limited time was like trying to use half your parachute. The COW hesitated, then threw the single valve forward.

High pressure air flowed roared through the valve, rushing into the forward main ballast tanks and the valves that sat atop them. Those valves turned, and for three seconds they admitted the ship’s highest pressure air, the air that had nearly ruptured Hallorann’s ear drums on his first day in the engine room. Released into the forward tanks, the air expanded. While the tanks were destroyed at the bottom, enough of the tank remained intact at the top that the air expanded and pooled there, forcing seawater out through the bottom. After three seconds at that sea pressure, a bubble of air roughly the size of a car developed in each of the front three main ballast tanks. It expelled from the ship an equivalent volume of water, and they almost instantly became buoyant again. The action also shifted the center of buoyancy aft, which pushed the front of the ship up.

After three seconds, the COW pulled back the valve. The indicator lights for all three tanks turned amber again.

“Angle is coming up!” said the Dive, confirming what the captain felt in his feet.

Beneath them, thousands of gallons of seawater that had flooded into the torpedo room rolled aft. One positive effect of this was that it further shifted the ship’s center of buoyancy, accentuating the angle that the captain wanted to generate. But it also covered everything in its path in a rolling wall of cold, salty seawater. A great many of the things it touched had electricity coursing through them. Some of them, like the battery well, were designed to be watertight. Many of the machines, however, were designed only to be “splash proof,” and could not be submerged long without consequences.

“We’re still going down,” said the Kincaid, quietly, straining to mask the worry in his voice. The angle was coming up but the ship was still sinking.

“Give it time,” said the captain. He’d pictured it in his mind like one of those computer animations the shipyard engineers used, a graph of the ship’s depth versus time as air flowed into the front tanks, lifting the front of the ship up, the ship’s overall buoyancy turning positive. But there was downward momentum to overcome, and the captain knew it would take a few long seconds for the ship to rise. He’d tried to calculate the bare minimum amount of air he could expend and achieve positive buoyancy, and he hoped he was right. He had two bold, horizontal lines in the diagram he was constructing in his mind. The higher one was test depth, which they’d already exceeded. Beneath that line was crush depth, which if they exceeded they would never again rise above. But between those lines was a third line, a third important depth limit. And the Captain knew that before their momentum changed, they would cross it.

“Still deeper,” said the Dive. “But the rate is slowing…”

“We caught it,” said the captain. “We’re going to come up.”

Suddenly, a new alarm rang through control, one no one had heard before, a primitive buzzing sound that came from the corner of control by the main ladder. On each side of control came a dull pop, one that made Kincaid jump. Something bumped against both sides of the hull. All but the captain were startled.

“What the fuck was that?” asked Kincaid.

“The BST buoys,” said the captain. “We’re going to be famous.”

Once the ship exceeded its test depth by a predetermined percentage, the explosive bolts that held the BST buoys to the outside of the hull detonated, and the buoys were released. Like so many key systems on the boat, there were two of them, redundant and identical, and both functioned flawlessly. Highly buoyant, they shot upward, untethered to the ship, until after twenty-one seconds they popped to the surface. A mechanical accelerometer sensed their stoppage, and the transmitters of both buoys began broadcasting a powerful, repetitive distress signal along a frequency that had been reserved by the Navy for just that purpose. The recorded message consisted of an SOS, a sequence of numbers that identified the Alabama, and the message SUBSUNK.

Three radio rooms placed on three different continents were manned around the clock by radiomen whose only job was to await a signal that, much like the message ordering the launch of nuclear missiles, they all hoped would never come. Like the buoys themselves, the listening posts were designed with redundancy in mind: one was at the Marine Corps base in Okinawa, Japan. The second was in Holy Loch, Scotland. And the third was deep within the United State’s Strategic Command, in Omaha, Nebraska. All three listening posts began alarming simultaneously, even the one in Holy Loch, which was half a world away. Quickly the message was decoded and handed to a duty officer at each station, who in turn notified his commanding officer, who in turn notified the Chief of Naval Operations. The CNO made a call to the president’s chief of staff, and the president of the United States was then awoken with the news that a United States Submarine was in distress. From the time the buoys were launched until the president was awoken took a total of sixteen minutes.

Throughout the history of the submarine fleet, there has always been a degree of fatalism inherent in the various theories of submarine rescue. Alabama, like all ships in her class, was fitted with three Logistics Escape Trunks, or LETs, designed to mate with a Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle and allow the egress of crewmen. Assuming total disaster and loss of power, each LET had affixed to it a steel plate describing a series of hammer signals men in and outside the trunk could use to communicate with each other. It read:

On the plate outside of each trunk of Alabama, someone had long ago scratched “ZERO TAPS means I’M DEAD.”

For several decades the submarine force relied on a fleet of submarine rescue ships, each with the hull designator ASR. These vessels were of World War II vintage, and were in effect modified salvage ships who could hover over a sunken boat and release divers. Submarine rescue theory of that era was startlingly crude, and revolved around “free ascent”—the process of having men egress a sunken boat and swim to the surface, arms crossed, and exhaling in concentrated, forced gasps to minimize the effects of decompression and the formation of lethal nitrogen bubbles in the blood. Every old submarine base had as its central landmark a tall, cylindrical “dive tower” where recruits could practice this procedure, a rite of passage for generations of submariners. It was officially estimated, and universally doubted, that a man might actually survive free ascent from a depth of up to 300 feet.

The Navy lost two nuclear-powered submarines in the 1960s. First was Thresher, lost at sea in 1963, followed by Scorpion, lost in 1968. This led the Navy to seriously reevaluate its rescue capabilities, given the depths at which modern nuclear submarines operated, and the DSRV, or Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle, was born. The Navy built two of these ships, Mystic (commissioned in 1970) and Avalon (1971), and positioned them both at the North Island Naval Air Station in San Diego. They were, in effect, deep-diving miniature submarines that could fit inside the belly of an Air Force C-5 cargo plane, to be flown within hours of a submarine disaster to its last reported location. Once on the scene, they had to operate with a mother vessel, either an ASR, or another submarine. They were not perfect, but their capabilities vastly exceeded that of the old ASRs operating by themselves. The DSRVs could operate at depths up to 5,000 feet, and rescue up to 24 men at a time.

The DSRV program lasted until Mystic was decommissioned in 2008. The program was officially replaced by the SRDRS program, Submarine Rescue Diving and Recompression System. The very title of the program addressed one of the DSRV program’s greatest weakness: the fact that another vessel was needed to rescue submariners at pressure. The main vehicle of the SRDRS program, named Falcon, was self-contained, and not reliant on another vessel. But in some ways the program was a step backwards. Falcon could only conduct rescue operations in water up to 2,000 feet. And it could only rescue 16 men at a time. Finally, the old DSRV program was abolished before the cornerstone of the SRDRS program was even completed: the decompression system. For years, during the Cold War, some had believed deep water submarine rescue to be so unlikely that they deemed the DSRV program a cover operation, and claimed that Mystic and Avalon were actually spy ships. With the last hope of a sunken submarine being the Falcon and its half-complete support systems, it seemed the Navy had almost given up on the concept as well.

But with the message launched from Alabama’s BST buoys, Falcon was hurriedly loaded aboard the USNS Navajo, a seagoing tug, and raced westward, toward the location of Alabama. The water at their destination was far deeper than 2,000 feet, they already knew, and they would be approximately twenty-four hours to the scene. Getting Falcon to the site of the bleating BST buoys seemed almost a hopeless gesture. But the Navy had to do something, and deploying Falcon was all they could do.

Captain Soldato was the fifth person notified about the BST buoys, forty-six minutes after they were launched, at 5:30 in the morning. He’d been dreaming of his grandson when the phone rang, dreaming about the first time they’d fished together, off a pier in Groton Long Point, Connecticut. His grandson was tiny then, small even for the six year old that he was, and was fishing with his line barely off the pier. But he’d hauled in a massive Tautog, a fat, glistening black fish that weighed at least eight pounds. His grandson had literally jumped up and down with excitement when they landed the gasping fish on the pier. The dream was free from any psychedelic or odd associations like dreams often have: the tautog didn’t start talking, or flying. It was more like an exact replay of an exceedingly pleasant moment, a home movie that his memory had wished to replay.

He was so groggy that the Group Nine duty officer had to ask him twice to switch to a secure phone. As Soldato stumbled out of the bedroom, Cindy stirred and frowned, alert on some level that bad news had arrived.

In his study, he picked up the antiquated-looking secure phone that the Navy had provided him and connected with the duty officer. They both turned plastic keys simultaneously, switching the phone to secure mode.

“Captain, we have flash traffic from a BST buoy in the western pacific.”

Soldato was now fully awake. “Which boat?” he asked. But he already knew.

“Seven-thirty-one. The Admiral is calling an emergency meeting in the secure conference room in thirty minutes.”

Soldato hung up without saying another word and donned his uniform silently to avoid waking Cindy, who had fallen back asleep.

Angi was running. It had rained during the night, cooling the air to a perfect running temperature. It was still dark, but she planned to run fourteen miles, which would take her a good two hours, and she had timed her start so she could enjoy the sunrise as she ran. She was already nostalgic about running, knowing she’d have to give it up soon. She’d come to the sport late, never ran in high school, but took it up with a vengeance in her junior year at Vanderbilt, after completing her first 5K. Her boyfriend at the time had talked her into it, and she decided she very much liked the feeling of running by him, and those sorority girls wearing make up for a race, and, even more, those posturing fraternity boys, who gasped for breath as she glided by. She’d run seven marathons in her life, a dozen half marathons, and more 5Ks than she could count. Now it would be taken away from her. She could get one of those jogging strollers, she supposed, after the baby was born…but sometime between now and then she would just have to stop for a while. In the meantime, she would enjoy each run like it was her last.

She ran her usual route, out of her neighborhood onto Trigger Road, feeling good in her legs, with only a slight twinge in the right knee that occasionally gave her problems. She was fast and strong, enjoying the first part of the run down to the Trigger gate that was all slightly downhill, the perfect warm up. The run to the gate was about a mile and a half, just about the amount of time it took for her to begin sweating mildly, breathe properly, and to feel the soreness in her feet and hips disappear. She was alert for any sign that her pregnancy was affecting her running — or that her running was affecting her pregnancy — but so far, so good. She just felt fast. She cruised down the hill toward the gate, her stride lengthening.

There were a few cars at the gate, some government vehicles, some civilian contractors showing up early. Only two gates were open, so even though it was early, the cars were backed up, their brake lights casting long, red reflections on the damp asphalt. She approached the back of a minivan and recognized it immediately; the Soldato’s. What would bring him to base so early? She wondered. There was no telling when your world consisted of eight submarines and all that could go wrong with them.

She ran past it, and confirmed that Soldato was driving, but he was worriedly fumbling with something in his passenger seat, maybe getting out his military ID for the gate guard, and he didn’t see her. She ran about another one hundred yards to the gate and turned around, ready now to really get into the meat of her run. She was facing Soldato now.

As she neared him, he saw her, then recognized her. She lifted her hand to wave, but the look on his face stopped her cold. He looked like a man who was staring absolute calamity in the face, and when their eyes locked, she knew beyond any doubt that it involved Danny.

He drove through the gate and left her behind, standing on an empty road outside a submarine base, on the side of the gate where no one knew anything.

In Maneuvering, Duggan pulled a cloth flash hood from an EAB, twisted it a few times, and tied it around his forehead, banzai style. He pushed on the center of it, felt the blood soaking through, hoped it would at least keep the blood out of his eyes so he could do his fucking job.

He heard the twin bangs of the BST buoys as they launched, not knowing what it was: they all jumped at the sound. He knew he lacked perspective, was the least experienced guy in the maneuvering, but was certain their crisis was dire. He knew it from his training, and he knew it from the tense fervor with which the three enlisted men in maneuvering were now performing their jobs. When the odd order for the three-second emergency blow came across the 1MC, Duggan felt his heart sink. It seemed to him an improvisation, tinged with desperation.

The depth gage in maneuvering was just inches from his head. It looked like an antique, a large analog dial. But like everything else in maneuvering, Duggan had studied the gage, and he’d always taken comfort in the fact that while crude-looking, that depth gage was a completely reliable pressure gage that was attached, by means of a long, thin pipe, directly to the ocean that surrounded them. In a world of electronic and digital intermediation, his depth gage represented an undeniable, hardwired reality.

The big ship reacted almost instantly to the emergency blow; Duggan could feel the angle in his feet. They were starting to point up. But, he could see on his depth gage, the ship’s depth didn’t immediately respond. They continued to drift down, albeit at a slower rate. Then their descent seemed to stop, and they hovered for a moment. And then, almost imperceptibly, they began to rise. Duggan realized that he’d been holding his breath; he exhaled loudly.

“Going up?” said Barnes.

“Yes.”

“Thank God.”

Duggan sat back down in his chair and thought to himself: whatever happens now, we’re moving up. Things are improving.

A blaring alarm on the electrical panel yanked him back into the crisis. Patterson cut out the alarm and scanned his panel. “Erratic voltage,” he said, and Duggan could see it. All the AC voltage meters were drifting around. Electrical voltage was one of the most static indicators in maneuvering, seeing the needles move around made the panel seem funhouse bizarre. Patterson reached to the center of his panel, on instinct: the ground detector. He turned a switch and took a reading. “Fuck,” he said.

Duggan didn’t wait for Patterson to announce it to him, he could see it himself. He keyed the 7MC mike to control. The ground detector was an exponential meter that could measure the resistance of a specified electrical bus to ground in Ohms; the normal reading was 8, the symbol for infinity. On the panel now the readout was in the thousands of Ohms, and dropping. He knew what had happened, and while he couldn’t have done anything about it, he cursed himself for not anticipating it: the floodwater had grounded some piece (or pieces) of equipment.

“Lowering grounds on the port AC electrical bus,” he announced into the 7MC. “Commencing ground isolation.” He released the microphone key and spoke to Patterson. “Start dropping busses.”

The roaming electrician appeared at the entrance to maneuvering to assist, a checklist on his clipboard.

“Dropping the port non-vital bus,” said Patterson, without waiting for an order. He turned a black switch on his panel, and the blue light for the bus went dark. But the Ohmmeter continued to drop. He flipped the switch back on.

“Port DC bus,” he said. He was moving fast, as the grounds continued to drop. With every switch he threw, equipment was de-energized, potentially affecting the casualty control efforts. But there was no question that they should do it. If that ground got to zero, it meant a complete short: an electrical fire. The old submarine saying was: if you don’t find the ground…the ground will find you.

“It’s got to be on the port vital bus,” said Patterson. They’d tried everything else, so by process of elimination, it had to be. But the equipment on that bus was, by definition, vital. The ground isolation had to proceed slightly more deliberately lest they make a bad situation worse.

Duggan grabbed the 7MC again. “Commencing isolation on the port vital bus.”

The roaming electrician flipped to a new check list. “Number two main feed pump.”

“No,” said Duggan. “Start with whatever is in the forward compartment. That’s where the floodwater is.”

He scanned the list. “Ten loads in all forward on that bus. First on the list is forward ventilation.”

“Start there,” said Duggan.

“Too late!” said Patterson. The needle on the ground detector was swinging counter clockwise, plunging like a punctured balloon. They all stared at it. Just a moment passed before once again they heard the adrenalin-inducing crackle of the 4MC speaker.

Fire in the forward compartment!

Jabo was working right next to Hallorann, trying to supervise the frantic efforts of about six men crammed into a very small space in the front of the torpedo room. The work consisted of two efforts: removing the water that had poured into the space, and stopping the flooding.

Hallorann was working with two others to remove water. They’d already sunk a submersible pump into the torpedo room bilge and hooked it up to the trim header. It had been an exhausting task. The submersible pump was heavy and everything had to be done in a soaking, frigid torrent of sea water. Hallorann had only recently learned to operate the pump, working on his quals, but he’d taken control of the operation, attacking the flooding, shoving the pump into the deepest part of the bilge. His hands were so cold that at one point he dropped the spanner wrench into the flooded bilge; without hesitating he went completely underwater to retrieve it. He came up shivering and soaking, with the wrench in hand, and they completed the connection. When they turned the pump on, he felt a small sense of triumph when the outlet hose went rigid; they were getting water out of there and it felt good. By then, the second submersible pump had arrived from the Crew’s Mess. The crewmen went to work hooking it up, the effort and the cold water sapping them of strength.

Just a few feet away from him Jabo watched and worried. He wanted to help but his left hand was completely useless. The submersible pump would make a small difference in the overall rate of flooding. Their great depth worked against them in two ways: the massive sea pressure made the rate of flooding huge. And it slowed the rate at which they could pump water overboard. The water was well above the deck plates now, sloshing at their ankles, and Jabo realized that the ocean wasn’t trying to infiltrate their little world, like a parasitic invader. Instead, they were the invaders, the foreign body, and now the ocean was trying to consume them, the way a white blood cell surrounds and kills a bacterium. The second pump would help some, a decrease in depth would help a lot, and slowing the rate of flooding would help even more.

To that end, an array of damage control kits had been brought to the scene. Some consisted of wooden plugs designed to be hammered into place, designed for punctured pipes. Once in the hole, the wood would swell and seal it, and hammering a wooden plug into a gushing hole was a skill every submariner mastered.

Unfortunately, the flooding they faced wasn’t a round hole that could so easily be sealed. As far as Jabo could tell, the torpedo tube breech door had been deformed to form a hole the shape of a thin crescent. They’d tried to hammer wooden plugs into it, but it did little good.

The XO appeared at his arm. “What about the outer doors?” He had to shout.

“They’re fucked up!” he said. The XO nodded. He couldn’t hear him, the sound was too loud. They moved to the back of the space, Jabo still holding a conical DC plug in his hand.

“I’m assuming it’s fucked up,” said Jabo. “It must be or water wouldn’t get in. Whatever we hit fucked it up.”

The XO looked at the panel, and Jabo followed his eyes.

“I know — it indicates that all the outer doors are shut. The indicators must be fucked up too.”

“How is it doing in there, at the breech?”

Jabo waved his arms in frustration. “I’m getting nowhere with these plugs.” He threw the plug down. It bobbed on the surface of the water.

The XO stared at it, lost in thought for the moment. “Maybe the outer door is just fouled,” he said. “Jammed it in the dirt or something. Can we cycle it?”

Jabo shook his head. “The interlocks won’t let us because the breech door doesn’t indicate shut.”

“Hand pump it,” said the XO. “If it’s fouled we should exercise it, all the way open, all the way shut, maybe clear what ever is in there. Fuck the interlocks.”

“But what if…what if it makes the flooding worse? Opening that outer door all the way…”

“If that makes any difference, we’ll know as soon as we start cracking it open. And frankly, Jabo…” he looked around to see if anyone else was in earshot. He smirked at the DC plug that was bobbing in the water. “Frankly Jabo, I’m about fucking out of ideas.”

“Okay, let’s do it,” said Jabo. He looked over at Hallorann and yelled. “You’re an A-Ganger, right?”

Hallorann looked up from the second submersible pump which he’d just completed hooking up. He pushed the START button and raised his fist in exhausted satisfaction as it started. “Striker, sir. I’m an A Gang striker.”

“Close enough,” said the XO. “Get lined up to hand pump this door outer door. Pump it all the way open, then all the way shut. Do it as fast as you can.”

“Yes sir,” said Hallorann. He was already moving towards the rear of the torpedo room, where the hand pump equipment was staged.

“I’m going to go to control and brief the captain,” said the XO, and he too started moving aft. Jabo moved forward, back to the gushing water.

As they moved, a warm, acrid smell suddenly cut through the damp coldness of the sea. Jabo stopped and the XO froze half way up the ladder. Then, from an unseen corner of machinery one, there was a electric blue flash. The XO dropped to the deck, grabbed the 4MC, and called away the fire.

The XO got out F-10, the nearest fire hose. Once he had it out of the rack, he pulled an EAB from a locker under the diesel control panel and tightened the straps around his head. Smoke was already thick in the compartment. He looked up the ladder; no one was coming down yet and he couldn’t operate the hose by himself. Everyone was fighting something, the crew was at its limits.

He turned around, Jabo was at the door to the Machinery One, putting on his own EAB. The dead body of the navigator swung between them. Christ, this is getting awful, he thought. He waved Jabo over. “Get on the front of that hose!” he said, pointing.

Jabo trotted over and picked up the hose in a funny way, stuck the nozzle in his left armpit and put his right hand on the bail. He turned around and nodded at the XO who had his hand on the wheel ready to pressurize the hose. The XO unplugged his EAB and walked over.

“What the fuck are you doing Jabo?”

Jabo held up his hand. The bandages were soggy and had come undone, his mangled fingers dangling.

“Jesus Christ, that’s disgusting.”

“Missile compartment hatch, by MCC,” said Jabo, “slammed it shut on my hand.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Like a motherfucker,” said Jabo. He looked him over; his eyes were slightly glassy. The XO thought he might be going into shock from the pain.

The XO glanced over his shoulder, two other men were coming down the ladder, both in EABs. He couldn’t tell who they were, or even what rank they were. He saw by their reactions that one of them saw the navigator’s body, the other didn’t.

He shouted at them. “You two get on this hose…one on the wheel the other one get on this fucking nozzle!” He turned back to Jabo. “Go to Crew’s Mess, see the doc. You are of limited usefulness to me. At least get something for the pain.”

“XO, I’m fine…”

“Do what I fucking tell you, Jabo, go get fixed up. Your fingers are going to fall off and clog the trim pump.”

Jabo climbed the ladder one-handed and walked the short distance to Crew’s Mess. Master Chief Cote had turned it into a makeshift trauma center, with men laid out on each of the six small tables, IV bottles hanging from the pipes that ran overhead. Men with lesser injuries were seated in chairs, slumped over with the profound fatigue brought on by fear and pain. The bins of the small steam table, normally filled with mashed potatoes and green beans, were overflowing with medical supplies, bandages, tape, and gauze. A nylon case was rolled out, an array of shiny scalpels glinting in the fluorescent light. Beside it the ice cream machine had somehow been almost ripped in half; melted white soft-serve ice cream leaked into a bucket beneath it. Cote was putting a splint on the broken leg of a groaning petty officer. He looked up at Jabo.

“Where were you sir?”

“Torpedo Room. And Machinery One.”

“Don’t they need you down there?”

Jabo held up his hand, but tried not to look at it himself as his two fingers dangled loosely at a weird angles. “XO sent me up here.” He felt a little stupid presenting the master chief an injured hand; the room was filled with broken bones and what looked, to Jabo’s untrained eye, to be serious head injuries. But Cote put down the small scissors he was using and walked over to take a look. Jabo noted that the front part of the master chief’s poopie suit had been stained dark with the blood of his shipmates.

“Take care of these other guys first, master chief.”

“These guys aren’t going anywhere, Lieutenant. If it’s alright with you, I’d like to have as many people fighting this fucking casualty as I can. Maybe I can get you back in the fight.”

“Alright,” said Jabo. Cote took his hand.

“What happened?”

“Missile Compartment hatch got slammed on it.”

The master chief touched each one of his fingers in turn. “Feel that?”

“Not a thing.”

He squeezed another, and Jabo winced in pain.

“These two,” said the master chief, pointing to his middle finger and ring finger. “They’re pretty fucked up. The other ones look okay, although your pinky maybe broken too.”

“Can you tape them up or something?”

“They’re so mangled…and if you’re going back down there, the bandage will get soaked through instantly….”

“What do you think?”

Cote looked him in the eye. “We might have a better chance of saving them if I cut them off. Make it as clean as I can, get them on ice. Plus, that will probably make you more effective on the scene.”

“Do it,” said Jabo.

“You’re sure?”

“Yep,” said Jabo. “Cut them off and stick’em in ice.”

“Alright,” he said, “You’re the one with a college degree.” He walked over to the ice cream machine and grabbed his scalpels and a syringe that Jabo hadn’t notice before.

“Novocain,” he said. It’s all I’ve got. Well, I’ve got morphine too, but you won’t do us much good if you’re in la la land. Give me your hand.”

Jabo stuck it out and the master chief moved fast, sticking the needle in the middle of the back of Jabo’s hand, and depressing the plunger. There was a momentary sharp sting, bad enough to penetrate even the pain that was pulsing through him, but quickly a wave of relief swept through, so strong that he almost gasped. “Oh fuck that feels better,” he said. He hadn’t realized how bad he was still hurting until the drug made it go away. Jabo felt nothing when he removed the needle.

“Okay, tough guy, you still sure about this?” He’d selected a scalpel from the middle of the pack.

“Do it, master chief.”

Cote hesitated. “At least sit down. I don’t want you passing out and falling into the blade or anything.”

All the seats were taken by men hurting too badly for Jabo to ask them to move, so he sat on the deck, his back against the starboard bulkhead, and the master chief got on his knees in front of him. “Look away while I do this,” he said, and Jabo gladly complied. He couldn’t feel anything in his hand or fingers, but he felt the master chief’s grip on his elbow grow stronger as he cut through the fingers. He felt him tugging, turning his arm slightly, trying to saw through the broken bone. He was reminded, nauseatingly, of his father carving a chicken.

“Okay, almost done,” he said. Jabo was still looking away, but he felt gauze being wrapped around his hand, from about the wrist down, and then he heard tape being ripped off a roll.

“Can I look now?”

“Sure,” said the master chief.

The wrapping job was tight, neat and compact…it paid to have the job done by a man with thirty years experience. His three remaining fingers stuck straight out, and the gap in the middle was completely covered with clean white gauze. He looked like he was making the “devil” sign at a rock concert. He noticed a zip-lock bag of crushed ice in the master chief’s hand, some of it turning pink.

“Those my fingers?”

“Yes sir. We’ll keep them on ice, maybe get them surgically reattached when we pull in.”

“Don’t lose that bag,” said Jabo, getting to his feet.

“I’ll put your name on it,” said the master chief, already returning to the table and the sailor with the broken leg.

Hallorann had just grabbed the hand pump kit and was returning to the front of the torpedo room when he felt the bloom of heat on his back, as the motor generator exploded into a flash of heat and light. He turned briefly, squinting to see the XO disappear into the light, He fought the urge to follow, but he felt the weight of the canvas bag in his hand, knew that he’d already been given his orders.

He found his way to the front of the torpedo room, seawater now up to his knees, and acrid electrical smoke rapidly filling what was left of the space. The EAB fed him clean air but the smoke was growing impenetrable, a wall that he couldn’t see through. All the space’s battle lanterns had been turned on, and they shot beams of light through the smoke but did nothing to make the situation easier to understand.

Hallorann found the EAB manifold adjacent to the port torpedo tubes by touch, and plugged in. He had seen the hand pump rig in action exactly one time, and he’d never used it himself. He started pulling pieces out of the canvas bag. He would have liked to lay them out on the deck, but the deck was covered in water and he wasn’t about to lose some critical fitting in the deluge.

As quickly as he could, he hooked up the hoses and the pump. The parts were labeled but it was too dark to see them and the mask of his EAB was covered in mist from the flooding. He found the connections on the torpedo tube by hand, hooked up a hose to each. Behind him he could hear the stomping of booted feet, hose teams rushing to the fire, the crackle of water on fire.

He was not completely alone in the torpedo room. Two men still struggled to keep the submersible pump running. But no one appeared to be in charge. He had his orders, anyway, from the XO. The water was up to his knees now, he knew he couldn’t wait for a confirmation.

He removed the hand pump from the bag. It looked like a more rugged version of one of those large staplers used to fasten together hundreds of sheets of paper. There was a written procedure, he knew, but he’d never find it in the chaos, so he hooked it up by sight and feel, lining up what he knew were the inlets and outlets, lining up the pump to open the outer door.

A torpedoman showed up at his shoulder. “Hey! You’re lined up to open…”

“I know!” said Hallorann. “That’s the order. We’re going to pump it open, then pump it shut. They think it might be fouled.”

The torpedoman looked over his rig, verified it correct, and then threw open the two valves that aligned hydraulic fluid to the hand pump. As the hoses went slightly rigid, Hallorann began furiously pumping.

He watched alertly as he began to see if opening the outer door increased the rate of flooding. It didn’t appear to, based on the noise level, but the space was so full of water now it was hard to tell.

“How long?” said Hallorann to the torpedoman.

“A while longer til’ it’s fully open. Here.” They switched off while Hallorann caught his breath.

Twice more they switched. As the torpedoman was pumping, Hallorann saw a green circle light up on the torpedo control console. “It’s fully open!” he said.

The torpedoman quickly shut the two isolation valves and switched the positions of the hoses on the pump. He reopened the valves and began pumping. The green circle disappeared, as they were now pumping the door shut. His arms felt like rubber, but it was easier to get energized about closing the hole that was allowing water into the ship. He and the torpedoman switched off more frequently. When he wasn’t pumping, he stared aft, trying to get an idea of how the firefighting was progressing, but it was impossible to tell. There were still a great number of men in the space, that was all he could tell for certain, based on the noise, and the number of feet he could see illuminated by a single battle lantern as they descended the ladder.

The torpedoman stood up and Hallorann replaced him, pumping until his arm felt like it would break. He started to notice, to his excitement, that the noise of rushing water was starting to decrease. The water was up to his waist now. But the sound got higher in pitch and lower in volume as he pumped, like they were pinching off the flow. Finally, the roar stopped.

“It’s shut!” said the torpedoman, pointing to an amber line on to the torpedo console. “It fucking worked…we cleared it, and now its shut!”

The space was filled with a huge, dangerous amount of water, water that sloshed with the slightest motion of the crippled ship. But after twenty-three minutes, they’d plugged the hole.

Hallorann slogged forward and picked up the 4MC, which was just inches above the water.

“This is Seaman Hallorann in the torpedo room,” he said. “The flooding is stopped.”

“Captain, the flooding is stopped,” said Kincaid, even though everyone in control had heard the report.

The captain said nothing, but continued running it all through his mind, still trying to calculate if the time had come to perform the complete emergency blow. He was convinced now that the front main ballast tanks had been nearly destroyed in the collision, meaning the blow would only get them about half the effective buoyancy that it might if the ship were intact.

Secondly, the flooding had stopped, and they were moving water off the boat. Getting shallow would make it easier to do this — the reduced sea pressure at a shallower depth would make the all the pumps that much more effective.

But the fire — that changed everything. They wouldn’t be able to ventilate until the fire was stopped and overhauled. Any sudden influx of fresh air could inflame the fire, or cause hot spots to reignite, like blowing on a campfire.

As much as it pained the captain to stay at this depth, in this damaged condition, they wouldn’t emergency blow. Not for the moment.

“Captain?” said Kincaid.

“Continue prosecuting that fire,” said the captain. “And get water off the boat.” He looked around control. “Has anybody seen the navigator?”

Jabo ran forward, squeezed down the ladder to Machinery One past two fire hoses that were heading for the same destination. Almost out of breath, he plugged his EAB into the manifold at the bottom of the ladder. He took in the scene.

The fire raged. Flames licked up the aft bulkhead, orange and blue, and the compartment was filling with thick black smoke. Six men on two hoses crowded the space, aiming water at the base of the flame. The beams of the battle lanterns criss-crossed the darkness randomly, cutting swaths through the smoke. Several crossed in front of the dead pale face of the navigator, the only human face visible in the compartment, as everyone else’s was covered by an EAB. His was covered in water that ran in dirty, sooty tracks down his cheeks. His neck had stretched since Jabo first saw him, it looked almost like he was leaning over to get a better look at the men who were fighting the damage he’d caused. The hose teams had organized themselves, one on each side of the hanging body. Jabo’s feet were freezing, his shoes soaked through. The rest of him cooked, the space was becoming a furnace. Jabo took a deep breath, unplugged, and moved forward, found the XO.

He tapped him hard on the shoulder. The XO looked at him, eyes fierce.

“Good!” he said. “Take over. Can you?”

Jabo nodded, holding up his bandaged hand.

“Lieutenant Jabo is the man in charge!” the XO announced. He unplugged and moved to control.

The hose teams moved in closer. Jabo could not see what was actually on fire, but he assumed that the electricity that had originally fed the fire was gone: hopefully Maneuvering had secured that machine immediately. But the original heat from that ground had been enough to set ablaze all the wiring and insulation inside the motor generator, and some of the insulation on the surrounding walls. A chunk of lagging fell off a pipe over their heads, almost at their feet, trailed by a shower of orange sparks. The hose team next to him quickly doused it with water. The nozzle man stomped on it, breaking it up into ash and embers.

The hose teams were not tiring, Jabo saw, they were fighting the fire with a fury.

“Stop!” said Jabo, tapping each nozzleman in the small of his back with his closed fist. They all threw the bails forward, and the gushing water stopped.

They waited a few minutes, hoping that the fire had stopped. But like a good campfire, a tendril of smoke came from what was left of the machine, the smoke turned dark, there was a pop, a flash, and then more flames.

Without waiting for Jabo’s order, both nozzle men threw open their hoses and doused the fire again. Jabo counted to five, then hit their backs again.

They waited again. This time, there was nothing. The room was now filled with a combination of thick smoke and steam, the water that had vaporized after hitting the flames; it was almost impossible to see anything. The battle lanterns could no longer penetrate the haze, each was just now a dull, smeared glow, like a tired sun behind fog. Jabo moved forward cautiously, felt his way forward with his bad hand. If he was going to get burned, shocked, or sliced, he wanted it to be the hand that was already fucked up. He knelt down, feeling everything, looking over the front part of the space.

He turned to the phone talker who was kneeling slightly behind the hose teams. The men stared at him wide-eyed, pointing their hoses at him like he was the condemned man in front of a firing squad. “To control,” he said. “The fire is stopped. Send in an overhaul team.”

He turned to the nearest nozzleman. “You’re the reflash watch.”

He nodded, breathless, too exhausted to acknowledge the order with words.

Jabo looked again at the dangling body of the navigator, then unplugged his EAB and walked to the ladder.

The XO stomped into control, covered in water and the stench of the fire. He stopped at the top of the ladder, plugged in his EAB, and took a few breaths, ready to report to the captain. Just as he was about to speak came the announcement that the fire has stopped.

He started to talk again but before he could, the captain held his hand up to silence him. Had he not been wearing his EAB, the XO would have known he was concentrating, looking at the CODC console in front of him.

The XO moved behind him: the screen was filled with columns of green numbers. The lower you looked, the more exotic the data became, derivatives of derivatives. First came depth, speed, then pitch, roll, acceleration on each axis, the rate of acceleration on each axis. They were almost motionless forward, the XO saw, but they were moving slightly upward. He could see from the history on the screen that this was a recent change: they were now positively buoyant. Books would be written, the XO knew, about why the captain hadn’t emergency blown immediately. Time would tell whether or not this was looked at as a wise decision or a disastrous one. The captain waited one more second, looking at the very bottom of the screen, where the rate of change of acceleration was increasing. They were accelerating, ever so slightly, in the upward direction. Then he saw something else, an asymptote they been approaching in the calculus of their motion through the sea. The captain stood up straight.

“Chief of the watch, emergency blow.”

“Emergency blow, aye sir.” The chief of the watch stood and this time threw open both chicken switches, the giant valve handles that channeled high pressure air into the main ballast tanks. It made a huge noise, and frost covered the valve handles as the giant pressure change reduced the temperature of the air that passed through. Almost immediately, the ship took a steep down angle, which was intuitively alarming for the experienced men in control: generally a downward angle meant you were travelling deeper. But in this case it was just because the forward main ballast tanks were nearly destroyed, and more air was filling the aft tanks, pulling that end of the ship higher.

The captain looked at the console again. They were zooming upward. And the rate was increasing. Once they started moving upward, they had another factor in their favor. The ship became more buoyant at shallower depths. As sea pressure decreased, the ship expanded, making it displace more water, and more buoyant.

“Five hundred feet, sir,” said the diving offer.

“Very well,” said the captain.”

“Four hundred…three hundred…two hundred…one hundred…”

There was a sound as the ship broke through the surface of the ocean, the sound of water breaking against the side of the hull. It crashed back down, then settled out.

“Raising number two periscope,” said Kincaid. He quickly spun around. “No close contacts!” he said.

There was a murmur of relief in control.

The captain turned to the XO. “Are you here to tell me what the hell is going on?”

“The navigator is hanging from a pipe in machinery one by his belt. Jabo tells me he did all this.”

The captain nodded, tried to digest what the XO had said. “Any reason you can think of we shouldn’t ventilate the ship?”

The XO turned to Lieutenant Maple, who was on the phones with Machinery One. “Hot spots?”

“They reported no hot spots while we were on our way up.”

The captain turned to Kincaid. “Prepare to ventilate with the low pressure blower — we’ll get the diesel up and running when we can, if we can. Who knows what the damage is down there.”

“Prepare to ventilate with the low pressure blower, aye sir.”

An ET leaned around from the small ESM console behind the conn. “Sir, I have a military freq broadcasting near us. Very near.”

“Jesus Christ,” said the XO. What next. A military frequency? He immediately thought of the Chinese.

“Bearing?” asked Kincaid, still rotating around on the scope. “I don’t see anybody.”

“It’s loud and clear!” said the ET, his code book in hand. “SUBSUNK!”

“It’s us,” sighed the captain. “The BST buoys. We’re the sunken submarine.”

Jabo was still in machinery one when Master Chief Cote showed up holding his Polaroid in one hand and a large knife in the other, something Jabo suspected he’d been taking to sea since Vietnam. He carefully took photos from every angle of the navigator’s lifeless body. Then they pulled a stool over from the diesel control panel, and Jabo held it steady as Cote climbed up, and slashed through the belt that held the navigator. The dead man landed on pointed toes, like a gymnast, and then fell straight over on his face with a splash. There was no hurry to get him out of there, and moving the body was a pain in the ass in EABs, but Jabo and the master chief did it anyway, both of them, without saying it, feeling it important to get him out of there. They got two men on the upper side of the ladder to help pull him up, and then wrestled him into the freezer, where they sat him next to the heavy green bag that held Howard, the first man he’d killed.

It took four hours to get all the water off the boat, with both trim pumps and the submersible pumps working in concert, very efficiently at the shallow depth. Wipe down teams went in with bags stuffed with rags afterward, still encumbered by their EABs, wiping up whatever trace of water that remained. As they did so, maneuvering kept close track of electrical grounds, which slowly climbed into the normal range as the ship dried out.

It took six hours to ventilate the ship to the point where EABs could be removed. When the word was passed, every man pulled his mask off and breathed in the fresh Pacific air that had displaced the smoke, fear, and steam that had filled their ship for so long. The men looked at each other, having not seen each others’ faces in many hours. Their eyes met briefly, knowingly. They allowed themselves to acknowledge what they had all just gone through, then looked away, eager to move on, eager to keep busy with the endless activity needed to restore the ship to normal.

Shortly after EABs were removed, Jabo climbed the ladder in the middle of the control room, ready to shift the watch topside, to the bridge. There had been a lively debate about this in control. The XO thought they should keep the ship buttoned up, keep the watch in control, afraid that if the ship went down again with the bridge open, for any reason, they would not recover. The captain, on the other hand, wanted real human eyes topside as long as they were travelling under their own power, and was confident, after six hours, that the ship was securely on the surface. As was typical in these types of debates…the captain won.

Jabo would be the first on the bridge. He climbed until he could reach the opening ring of the lower hatch, spun it all the way counter-clockwise. Then he climbed another step, so he could push his shoulder against the hatch. A slight difference in pressure had developed between the ship and the world, and it took all of Jabo’s considerable strength to move the hatch against it. As it opened a crack, warm air rushed in, as if the giant ship were taking a deep breath.

The interior of the bridge trunk was lit by a single yellow bulb. It smelled good, like the sea, the smell of being close to home, because that was generally the only time the ship was surfaced, at the very beginning and the very end of patrol. He scurried up the next ladder, to the upper hatch. He spun the ring and opened it, revealing a circle of blindingly bright daylight above him. He climbed up a third ladder, toward the light.

As he climbed, something glistening in the dark cavity behind the rungs caught his eye.

He reached through with his damaged, left hand. He felt something slimy against the small bare patch of un-bandaged skin on his palm. He pulled the flashlight off his belt, curious, and looked again.

It was a small octopus, its head about the size of a grapefruit. It legs were writhing, trying to escape in a panic. It had found its way into the bridge trunk somehow, and was stranded when they surfaced. Jesus Christ, thought Jabo, startled, he’d never seen that before. It was a patrol of firsts. He carefully reached through the rungs and grabbed it, palming it like a basketball, and scooped it toward him. He held it against his stomach as he climbed the ladder the rest of the way, feeling its legs beating helplessly against his stomach. The thing was soft but strong, like one big muscle.

He climbed the rest of the way to the bridge. Getting up first was always a moment he savored. Jabo had no problem working in close quarters with minimal privacy for months at a time, it was one of the reasons he was a good submariner. But he always did treasure those first seconds on the bridge, when the OOD and all his responsibility still resided in control while he enjoyed the best view of any man on the submarine, surrounded by fresh air, water, and daylight. He was alone except for the octopus.

“Hello!” said Jabo, looking it over. It was fascinating, he could have stared at it for hours. Another time, he might have sent it below in a bucket, let the crew take a look at it, everybody would find it interesting. On some patrols, it might rank as one of the most interesting things to happen, a legendary episode, the time they caught an octopus and made it their mascot for a few weeks.

Jabo hefted it with his good hand, holding it in front of his face like Yorick’s skull. Its eight legs groped around his wrist and arm. Jabo leaned over as far as he could, and then he heaved the animal, shot put style. It landed in the water with a splash. Its legs spread outward like the petals of a flower, perfectly symmetrical, then closed powerfully. It shot forward and down, disappearing into the safety of deep water.

Within thirty minutes, they shifted the watch topside, and Jabo was the officer of the deck. He had company, Seaman Connelly as lookout. Connelly had a large bloody bandage on the side of his head, and a swatch of his hair had been ripped off.

“How’d you do that?” said Jabo.

“Not real sure, sir,” he said. “After the collision, I guess. The doc saw me after we removed EABs and slapped this bandage on my head.” He reached up and brushed it with the tips of his fingers. “How about you?” he pointed at Jabo’s hand.

“Hatch slammed on it.” He held his hand up.

“Fuck, sir, are those fingers gone?”

“Yep. Two of them.”

“Holy shit,” said Connelly. He stared at it a moment before putting his binoculars back to his face.

“XO to the bridge,” came an amplified announcement from the bridge box at their knees, and moments later they heard quick footsteps on the ladder.

The XO scaled the ladder and was soon standing beside them. He took a look around, especially at the bow. “Can’t really see any damage from up here,” he said.

“Look at the port bow wave,” said Jabo. “You can see it’s a little asymmetrical.”

The XO peered at the water for a few minutes. “You’re right. I can see that.” The bow wave on that side of the ship was frothier, compared to the smooth green swell on the starboard side. But other than that, all the ship’s damage was invisible, below the surface. “I can’t fucking wait to see it in drydock.”

“Is that where we are heading?” said Jabo.

“Still sorting everything out. But I’m pretty sure we’re not delivering anything to Taiwan.” He shot a look back at Connelly to make sure he wasn’t paying attention, or at least pretending not to pay attention. “Wouldn’t make good TV to make a delivery like that from a broken ship. Know what I mean?”

Jabo felt a pang as the XO said the words: broken ship. But that’s what they were. “So where are we going?”

“For now, where going to stay up here, within our assigned operating area. I expect a revision soon. Probably to the nearest submarine drydock, which, by my estimate, is Pearl.”

Jabo nodded. They were travelling less than eight knots. It would take them two weeks on the surface to get to Pearl.

“But listen,” said the XO. “Let’s get some immediate priorities set, officer of the deck. We need to feed this crew, and we need to rest this crew.”

“Can we feed them now?”

“The chop is working on it. The doc says there are just nine men bad enough he wants to keep them in bed. So we’ve cleared out bunkroom eight, that’s where we’re going to put them all. After that, he’s going to clear out of Crew’s Mess, and the chop says he can have sandwiches and soup ready in an hour. After that, hopefully, we can start getting some guys some sleep. We’ve already shifted back to a normal watch section, with a few modifications. We’ll change the watch in four hours, start cycling guys through.”

Jabo nodded. It felt good to be thinking about normal shit: food, sleep, watchbills. He contemplated for a moment which he wanted to do more: eat or sleep. He decided overwhelmingly he’d rather sleep.

“How ‘bout you?” said the XO. “How are you, Jabo?”

“I’m good.”

The XO reached for his bandaged hand and held it up. “Look at that. What are you missing, two of them? Can’t the doc super glue them back on or something?”

Connelly laughed at that and so did Jabo. “I don’t know,” said Jabo. “The doc’s got them somewhere in a bag of ice, says we might be able to re-attach them.”

“Make sure he gets you the right ones. I wouldn’t want you touching Angi with someone else’s fingers.”

A scratchy announcement came from the box again. “Officer of the Deck, ESM, we have a military band radar at 045 relative.” Connelly swung that way and Jabo raised his glasses. He couldn’t see anything yet.

The XO found another set of glasses in the bridge bag and looked in the same direction. “Nothing there yet.”

Another voice on the box: “Officer of the Deck, radio, we are being hailed on band nine, can’t quite make it out yet, they are very far out. But they are using our NATO call sign.”

“Well, at least it’s one of ours,” said XO.

“And they know who we are?” said Jabo. He was confused. He put down his glasses and the XO was nodding grimly, glasses still raised, waiting to see it.

Radio again: “Sir they’ve identified themselves: it’s a tug from the military sealift command, the USNS Navajo.”

“The Navajo?” said Jabo. “What the fuck is the Navajo?”

The XO sighed then finally put down the glasses and looked at his watch. “Our rescuers.”

The captain stayed in control until the watch was shifted and he was absolutely certain the situation was stable. Even then he found it difficult to leave until the XO went up the ladder. He made his way to Bunkroom Eight.

The doc had done an incredible job throughout, just as the captain expected. These old master chief corpsmen were a godsend, and they were getting harder and harder to find, no boat ever wanted to let theirs go. They were like the old klaxon diving alarms, passed from boat to boat, never allowed to retire or go to shore. Guys like Cote, who’d actually patched up Marines under fire in Vietnam….they were all years past their twenty-year point. Even the ones like Cote who loved it all — the navy couldn’t keep them at sea forever.

The bunkroom was quiet. The nine most injured men on the boat all seemed to be sleeping soundly, and the captain wondered if they had all been sedated or were at least doped up on pain killers. Three of the bunks had IV bags suspended from them. Cote was sitting on a small stool in the middle, writing on a clipboard that he was looking at through his tiny reading glass. Something that looked a lot like a fishing tackle box was on the deck at his feet, full of rolls of gauze, tape, and shiny stainless steel scissors. The scene was a portrait of utter competence.

“Doc.”

“Captain, hello…” said Cote. He started to get up.

“Don’t,” said the captain, raising a hand. “But do you have a second to tell me what’s going on?”

Cote put down the clipboard and stood up anyway, eager to tell the captain about the status of his most injured men.

“These three are probably the most serious,” said Cote, pointing to the forward three racks.

“Who are they?

“Palko has a fractured skull…he’s not moving. Rogers and Ferrero have concussions.”

Jesus, thought the captain, two a-gangers and the E-div chief.

“How bad?”

“Hard to say,” said the master chief. “That’s why I want to keep an eye on them. But all three were knocked out, I don’t know for how long. The good news is, that’s the worst injuries we’ve got.”

There was a pause between them where they both thought the same thing: except for the bodies in the freezer.

“What else?” said the captain.

The master chief pointed toward the three outboard bunks. “Here we’ve got two pretty severe bleeding cuts, that I stitched up, and they should be fine. I just want to keep them still for a while and make sure — since we really don’t know how much blood they lost. And the bottom rack there is Frazier with a complex fracture. He got thrown into the ice cream machine at the moment of the collision. Broke his ulna clean through and absolutely destroyed the ice cream maker.”

The captain pulled back the curtain with a finger, and Petty Officer Frazier looked back up at him, apparently the only sick man of the nine awake. “Hello Frazier.”

“Hello, Captain,” he said with a smile and the slightly elongated vowels of a man on heavy pain medication.

“How are you feeling?”

“Pretty good now,” he said. “The doc fixed me up with some of the good stuff.” He laughed a little as he said it.

The captain looked up at the doc. “How is that holding out? Do we have enough pain medication?”

Cote closed the dark curtain in front of Frazier’s rack, and Frazier didn’t protest. “I’m being careful with it,” said Cote. “For a lot of reasons. We’ve got tons of aspirin and ibuprofen…we’ll never run out of that shit. I’m already low on the more powerful stuff like Vicodin and Percocet. So I’m rationing that out. But the worst ones here…” he pointed discretely at Frazier’s rack. “I’ve got morphine.”

“Ok, good,” said the captain. “Who else?”

“Over here are the three worst burns,” said the master chief. “They’re all bandaged up but need to stay still. They are probably done until we pull in and get them to a hospital.”

The captain nodded. It was horrible…but better than he’d feared. It didn’t look like they would have any more deaths.

“Any others? Any walking wounded around here with an injury bad enough I should know about it?”

“The worst is probably Lieutenant Jabo,” he said. “Lost two fingers and went right back to the fire.”

“I heard about it,” said the captain.

“Captain, I know it’s not my place…but if I had any say in it, that young officer should really get some kind of citation for what he did today.”

The captain looked at Cote, and for a moment, the difference in their ranks fell away, and they were just the two oldest, most experienced men on the boat, two men with over fifty years at sea between them. And they both knew what the score was.

“Well,” said the captain. “That’s something you’ll probably have to discuss with my replacement.”

Data about Alabama trickled in to Soldato’s office, as he sat helplessly behind the desk that he despised, the plaques of the ships he loved on the wall behind him.

First came the word the ship was not sunk, via a transmission of the ship itself, a flash message saying virtually nothing other than that most important facts: the ship had suffered a severe casualty: collision, flooding, and fire, but was now on the surface and apparently moving under her own power. It was a message that raised more questions than it answered, but it was with absolute profound relief that Soldato read it. Not just relief for the ship, and for the men he knew onboard, but profound relief for his country: the United States had not lost a submarine.

Ten minutes later came a follow-on message that set his mood back: three men dead. Two enlisted, one officer. He thought of Angi Jabo at the gate again, and vowed that somehow, if the dead officer was Jabo, he would be the one to tell her. He thought about what it would feel like to drive to her house, ringing that door bell…then forced himself to put that thought away. Telling Angi about her husband’s death might very well be the last thing he ever did in a Navy uniform. The message, of course, contained no names, and Soldato would have no way of finding out more details until the ship came in. But he knew that the dead man was probably a junior officer…they were the first to the scene of a casualty. And the best ones, like Jabo, were usually the first ones to get there.

Information of a more banal nature dripped in. Group Nine got involved to handle the press that they would inevitably have to deal with when word got out: only Group Nine had dedicated PR staff, a group of three officers who set up a press “command center” at the Group Nine building. Anything involving the words “nuclear” and “collision” would have to be explained endlessly, and the anti-nuke groups were always ready to pounce on news like this. Thank God he didn’t have to screw with that, and he probably never would, since dealing with twenty-five year old journalists was deemed a crucial enough activity that only an Admiral was capable of handling it.

A message came in from Alabama with a warning about the collision, an uncharted seamount. Soldato referenced the chart he had in his office. He couldn’t find anything on that vast expanse of ocean that the ship might have run into. Group Nine wrote orders for Alabama to turn around and go the floating drydock in Pearl, entirely on the surface. Soldato approved the orders and they went to the Group Nine radio room to be transmitted. The Taiwanese wouldn’t be getting their nuclear warheads, at least, not from the Alabama.

He’d been at his desk for almost eight hours when Commander Bushbaum knocked and stuck his head in the door. “Sir, the Navajo is in visual contact with Alabama.”

Despite the fact that he’d been reading radio transmissions from the boat for hours, that made him feel good, a shot of optimism, the thought that of real human eyes seeing the ship on the ocean. “What do they see?”

Bushbaum shrugged. “Nothing out of the ordinary, but probably most of the damage is below the waterline. These guys are skimmers anyway, not sure they would know what they were looking at if something was wrong.”

“True,” said the Captain. He wished he was out there, on the bow of the Navajo, speeding toward his old boat with salt spray soaking through his uniform.

“The two OODs are communicating with each other on bridge-to-bridge, sounds like the Alabama is making about eight knots.”

Soldato looked up at that “They’re talking on VHF?”

“Yes,” said Bushbaum, a little startled by the strength of Soldato’s reaction. “They’re no longer on alert, and they’re using call signs anyway, so it’s acceptable.”

“Can we hear them?”

“Yes,” said Bushbaum. “It’s being patched through in Group Nine’s radio room….I was just down there.”

Soldato stood and darted past Bushbaum, who followed him. They took the drab Navy van in front of the pier up to Group Nine, whose headquarters looked as nondescript as a small insurance agency, or a public library built sometime in the late seventies. Only the prickly array of exotic radio antennas atop the roof gave away the fact that interesting things might occur inside.

Soldato flashed his ID at the guard with Bushbaum right behind him and with an electronic buzz at the inner door they were allowed inside. They descended down a narrow staircase into the part of the building that was reinforced and “survivable,” built to withstand a nuclear blast for at least a moment, so they could transmit to the boats of Group Nine the orders to launch their missiles and fight a nuclear war. The space was small, windowless, and packed with electronics. Perhaps not intentionally, it was exceedingly reminiscent of being on a submarine. The duty radioman nodded briefly as the two men entered. Soldato was surprised that he knew him: RM1 Hanson, he’d been a striker onboard Skipjack. He was one of those guys you knew would do alright, and he was a natural for the Group Nine billet: a kid confident enough in his abilities that he wouldn’t mind admirals and captains constantly looking over his shoulder.

“You’ve got 731 on bridge-to-bridge?” said Soldato.

“Yes sir,” said Hanson. He was wearing a working uniform and sat in front of an actual operational radio console, and it made Soldato’s spirits soar again, just to be in the room with someone who was actually accomplishing something, doing real work. “We’re not listening to it now, because we have all these priority one messages we’re sending back and forth, modifying patrol orders and alerting the other boats…”

“I understand,” said Soldato. “But can you patch it in for me? I need to hear it.”

“They’re really not saying much now, sir,” said Hanson. “Once the two OOD’s made contact, they didn’t have much to say to each other. And we can’t talk to them, we’re just patched through.”

“I understand,” said Soldato again.

Hanson shrugged, and looked down at his messages, which were becoming increasingly lengthy and administrative. As a radioman, he liked hearing the scratchy voices of men’s voices being carried on the airwaves too…so if the commodore wanted to hear it, who was he to say no?

He stood and leaned toward a controller that was over his main computer monitor, and flipped a toggle switch. Immediately the white noise of static came through a speaker behind them. He adjusted another switch, and the static quieted slightly, replaced by an occasional crackle that told them they were tuned to a radio signal. Soldato turned and found the speaker by his shoulder, turned a knob to raise the volume.

“That’s it,” said Hansen. “They’re not saying anything right now.”

They waited, until finally a voice came through.

Sturgeon, this is steelhead, do you copy?

“Sturgeon is Alabama,” said Hanson. He pointed to the frayed book of NATO call signs on his desk. “Steelhead is the Navajo.”

After a pause…Sturgeon, this is steelhead, do you copy?

Soldato held his breath awaiting a response. Even though he too was eager to hear something from the submarine, he scowled at the impatient tone of the second request from that skimmer officer on Navajo: my God, do you know what they’ve been through? What they must still be combating on their end? Give him a fucking second.

Finally, a response. Steelhead this is sturgeon, go ahead. But the sound was garbled, hard to hear, and trailed off.

Sturgeon, this is steelhead, are you changing course?

There was a long pause, and then the officer of the deck of the Alabama replied: Steelhead this is sturgeon, we are turning to port to heading zero-seven-zero, request you stay on station, over.

This time, the voice of the officer of the deck came in remarkably clear, despite the many miles that separated them. And there was no mistaking in it a mild Tennessee twang.

“Thank you Hanson,” said Soldato, turning toward the steps. Bushbaum reflexively turned to follow him, a look of confusion still on his face. “You wait here,” said Soldato. “Meet me in the van in ten minutes.”

“Aye aye, sir,” said Bushbaum, looking a little stung, a hint of reproach behind his eyes. He didn’t know what Soldato was doing, but it was something he didn’t want his Chief of Staff to hear.

And Soldato didn’t give a shit.

He strode out of Group Nine into the van, sat in the passenger seat, and pulled his cell phone from his pocket. He dialed a number that he had stored.

“Hello?” Angi picked up before the first ring was over, her voice weak with worry. He could hear a news station in the background. She was waiting for CNN to tell her what the Navy wouldn’t.

“Angi, this is Mario. I can’t tell you anything else, but…Danny is fine.”

The wounded submarine limped eastward on the surface, crippled but operating under her own power. For a time the Navy had two sea-going tugs standing by, but towing was a humiliation the proud boat was able to avoid.

The XO took over the navigator’s duties, and spent almost all his time in Control. While the navigator had been crushed by his responsibilities, the XO was energized. With a sharpened pencil tucked behind his ear, he studied the chart like a general looking for weaknesses in an enemy position. Between fixes and DRs, he updated the charts, coached the JOs on the conn, and told dirty stories about the glory days of Subic Bay and Olongapo.

Jabo was the last one into the Officers’ Study, having just left the watch. The captain and Chief Flora were there waiting to begin the qualification board.

As dictated by tradition, Hallorann had supplied the room with snacks and beverages; the coffee pot was full, and a pitcher of coke sat in the middle of the table. A mixing bowl full of Hershey’s Kisses was being passed around. Jabo was handed Hallorann’s battered yellow qualification book to review for completeness. He flipped through it, saw signatures from the men he knew so well in every blank. He stopped at one page and felt a pang seeing the signature JUONI, TM1, one of their dead.

Hallorann stood at the front, in a neatly pressed poopie suit, dry erase marker in hand. As Jabo took his seat, the captain said, “Ok, chief, why don’t you start us off?”

Flora cleared his throat. “Diagram our ship’s sonar system.”

Jabo fought back a chuckle. It was a very hard question…and Hallorann, when he saw that a nuke chief was on his board, had probably boned up on all the engine room stuff. But if he got through this…

Hallorann paused, and then turned to the board. He drew a crude approximation of the spherical array, and then the towed array. He took a red marker and drew acoustic beams emanating from it. When the drawing was complete, he turned and began to explain it to them.

Jabo’s mind wandered as he spoke; he could tell immediately that Hallorann knew the system passably well. Better than that — he seemed to actually understand what he was saying, and wasn’t just repeating back by rote something that he’d read. Jabo, and everyone else on the boat, already knew Hallorann was smart. They also knew that he worked his ass off. The only thing he had left to prove during the board was that he could function under pressure. And this, too, was something Jabo already knew, he’d seen Hallorann perform under much greater pressure than this, in the heat of a fire and the cold of nearly freezing ocean water pouring in under such pressure that the noise alone was a hazard.

“Any follow up questions?” said the captain when Hallorann paused. “Lieutenant Jabo?”

“What’s the status of the spherical array right now?” said Jabo.

Hallorann hesitated. “It’s out of commission, sir.”

They all chuckled at that. “That’s one way to put it,” said Jabo.

“Ok,” said the captain. “Lieutenant, I believe it’s your turn to ask young Hallorann a question.

Jabo paused. He was really pulling for the kid, wanted to ask him something hard enough that it would impress the captain, but not so hard that he would stumble and drop the ball. He thought about all that Hallorann might know, the things he’d learned at sea.

“Hallorann, can you explain how the torpedo room flood control works?”

Hallorann turned, erased the board, and started drawing a line diagram of the system.

Twenty-four hours before Alabama was due to pull in to Pearl Harbor, a tug pulled alongside to make a brief exchange. From the tug came three boxes of critical spare parts, a bright orange bag of mail, and some fresh food that the chop, in a small act of heroism, had somehow managed to requisition: fresh lettuce, tomatoes, apples, oranges, and real milk. The last container of milk was followed by a lieutenant commander in dress whites. Jabo waited for him at the bottom of the forward LET as the XO had requested him to do; he was Lieutenant Commander Carr of the Naval Investigative Service.

“Lieutenant Jabo, sir,” he said, feeling sloppy in his poopie suit.

He extended his hand. “Lieutenant Commander Carr. Nice to meet you lieutenant.”

Jabo led him to the navigator’s stateroom.

He looked it over. Flipped through the copy of Rig for Dive that was still on his rack. The messages he’d hidden. Nodded his head thoughtfully. He seemed more down to earth than the few other NIS agents Jabo had met before; he suspected based on his age and that air of confidence that he was prior enlisted. He also suspected that the NIS had probably sent one of their top men to get the initial groundwork done. He was a good listener, barely saying a word as Jabo told the whole story, from the leg stabbing before their departure to seeing the Nav’s dead body in Machinery One. He found himself recalling scenes he’d almost forgotten, like the time he’d heard the Nav talking to himself in the Officers’ Study. Jabo wondered if he was getting too comfortable, and forced himself to stop.

“Well,” said the commander. “I’m just here to do the preliminaries. There’s never been a case like this — sabotage on a nuclear submarine. So the final report will be signed by someone several pay grades above me.”

“But what do you think?” said Jabo. He found himself wanting answers.

“I think…based on my initial investigation…that you’re navigator was fucking nuts.”

“And that’s it?”

“Lieutenant, you’ve been in the Navy long enough to know what’s coming next. Something this major…there will have to be consequences. Maybe someone could have seen this coming. Maybe there were enough signs…” He jabbed his finger into his leg with a stabbing motion.

There was a rap at the door…the yeoman. Danny wondered how long he’d been standing there. He had a courtier’s aptitude for eavesdropping.

“Any outgoing mail, lieutenant?”

Danny shook his head.

“Are you sure? The bag is getting ready to go across and the captain specifically told me to ask you.”

Danny thought for a moment, wondering what that could mean. He’d already written a short note to Angi and put it in the bag, but that’s nothing the Captain would take an interest in. Then he remembered, the letter that had passed between them on their first day at sea.

“No,” he said. “No letter from me.”

The yeoman nodded and walked back to his office to seal the outgoing mail bag.

“Lieutenant, let’s go take a look at the body,” said Carr. “And then maybe you can help me find a cup of coffee.”

“Aye sir,” said Jabo, backing out of the stateroom.

Angi flew to Hawaii with a group of the other wives to meet the boat. During their layover in Los Angeles, she bought a newspaper where for the first time, she saw a story about the events onboard the USS Alabama: the vaguest possible description of an incident at sea, the Navy’s vaguest possible confirmation of fatalities, and a boilerplate description of a ballistic missile submarine. Captain Shields was mentioned by name, his official photograph positioned over a stock photo of a submarine, a Los Angeles class submarine that Angi could tell was misidentified as a Trident. The dead men were not named, but their families had been notified, and Angi thought it probably wouldn’t be long before the world knew. While waiting to board in LA, a first: a grandmotherly passenger recognized that she was pregnant, and put her hand on Angi’s belly.

During the long flight, Angi read through the rest of the paper, including an article on page four about the cooling off of tensions between Taiwan and China. The prime minister of Taiwan had made some conciliatory remarks toward the mainland leadership, and shortly after the Chinese had made a remarkable apology and agreed to pay damages to the shipping companies and the families of the dead crewmen of Ever Able. That article finished with a series of numbers about the staggering importance of China in the world economy.

The Alabama was scheduled to go into the floating drydock in the shipyard but would pull in first to the pier at Ford Island, a tiny dot of land in the middle of Pearl Harbor. By the time they got there, the tropical sun was low. The weather was, of course, beautiful. Just off the pier was the twisted, rusty wreckage of the USS Utah, sunk on December 7, 1941. Angi was surprised to learn that in addition to the famous Arizona memorial, just on the other side of Ford Island, there were uncelebrated reminders of the Japanese sneak attack everywhere in Pearl Harbor. Ford Island, in particular, isolated from the rest of Oahu, seemed frozen in time, as if they might at any moment hear the buzz of descending Japanese Zeros. The place was so fundamentally beautiful, Angi could see how a sneak attack had succeeded. It would be easy to be lulled by a place like this, deceived into a sense that nothing could ever go wrong.

She stood waiting at the small Utah memorial with a group of four other wives, including the captain’s wife and Cindy Soldato, and read and re-read the plaque a dozen times while they waited:

At first they were the only people there. As a group, they tried to fight off the fear that the ship’s plans had been changed, perhaps they were pulling into a different berth, or directly into the drydock. None of them expected the Navy to tell them anything if such a change were ordered.

Within an hour, though, two salty looking bosun’s mates arrived on the scene, and began pulling serious looking ropes from a line locker on the pier, a sight that set Angi’s heart soaring. One of them had a black radio clipped to his belt, and Angi

listened closely to the crackling communications on it, alert for any mention that would mean anything to her; the name of the ship, Danny’s voice, anything of the kind.

She heard a whistle from sea before she saw anything.

“There they are,” said Cindy, pointing.

Angi could see them then, a single dot on the horizon that soon grew. She saw that there were tugs on either side of the submarine, their jaunty profiles contrasting with the round, black mysteriousness of the submarine’s hull.

A jeep suddenly pulled up behind them on the pier, one captain driving another captain. The driver was Mario Soldato. Angi didn’t know the other one, but she thought she might have seen him around base, at some function or another. He wore gold dolphins and a command pin. She presumed he was Shields’ relief. Or, perhaps, Soldato’s relief. While the Alabama had survived catastrophe, Angi knew that many careers would not.

“Can you see them?” said Mario.

Angi nodded and Cindy stepped to her side. They got out of the jeep and walked to the Utah memorial with them to get a better view. Both captains, Angi saw, had binoculars.

After taking a look and focusing his, Soldato handed them to Angi. “Take a look?”

She lifted them to her eyes, taking a moment to find the Alabama in the view. Danny was on the bridge.

He was serious, but happy, she could see. He was pointing toward them with a massively bandaged hand. She wondered if he’d already spotted them, and recognized her the same way she had instantly recognized him. Without lowering her binoculars, she lifted her left hand and waved.

His smile broadening, he lifted his bandaged hand and waved back.

Angi put the binoculars down. With her free hand, she verified again that in her pocket was the ultrasound photo of their unborn baby girl.