Scorpion in the Sea

EIGHTY-TWO

The Captain awoke slowly, prompted back to consciousness by the throbbing pain in his shoulder and a sensation of breathlessness. He was stretched out on the sloping deckplates, his legs wedged into a grid space to keep from sliding on the wet deck. He was not quite stuporous, but close to it as the oxygen levels shrank in the humid, dark confines of the wrecked control room. He could now definitely smell chlorine gas. His eyes felt like burning coals in the hollowed sockets of his face. The light from the two battle lanterns that were still working was very weak.

During the course of the night, he had maintained contact with the surviving engineers in the engine room, shifting over to sound powered phones when the intercoms died for lack of power. They had begun preparations for escaping to the surface after darkness fell above, at around 2200, but the sudden appearance of minehunting sonars had aborted their preparations. The sonars were close enough to be heard through the hull. At 0130 they drifted away, but at 0150 there had been another mudslide, and the Al Akrab had slipped further down the canyon’s slope in a long, groaning rumble of metal, ending up still pitched nose down and canted over to port. The mud had continued to move outside the hull for an hour after the submarine stopped moving.

The Captain had listened to the mud and tried to visualize where they were. He was convinced they were in a ravine or canyon cutting the bottom. He was almost sure that the reason the sonars had drifted away was because the submarine had been buried by the mudslides. If that were true, the escape trunks were already useless. He wondered if the engineers realized that. They were further aft; perhaps they had not detected the moving veil of mud. He looked over at the diving control console, at the still figure of the Musaid, who had died sometime around 2100. It was now almost daybreak on the surface. It was time to put an end to it.

He pulled the sound powered phone headset over to him, and slipped the earphones over his head. His movements were slow, and it took a few minutes of fumbling before he could snap the chest strap holding on the earphones.

He glanced up at the pressure gauges of the main air banks. Both he in the control room and the survivors in the engine room had been tapping the primary ballast air banks to restore oxygen to their compartments. The gauges for the forward group showed less than fifty percent air remaining. The Captain had decided hours ago how to put an end to the Al Akrab. He called the engine room. The Engineer answered.

“What is the pressure remaining in your air tanks?”

“We are at forty-two percent, Captain. We must begin the escape procedure very soon, or there will not be enough air to bring her up. The oxygen levels are very low. We are all getting stupid back here.”

“I understand,” replied the Captain. “The forward tanks are at sixty percent. We can blow the ballast tanks at this depth with thirty percent of the air tanks, so we have enough air to try it once, and to let it blow for a good minute. But you will need more oxygen to get your wits about you. We can share some of our excess air with you. Open the interior ventilation valves on the main induction pipe. I will cross connect one of our air tanks to main induction, bleed down some of our extra air, and we can refresh your whole group. Then we will begin the escape procedure. We will just have to take our chances on the surface with the Americans. It will be daylight in one hour.”

“As you command,” said the Engineer, with the first hint of enthusiasm. The Captain sighed, and took off the headset, and crawled over to the bank of valve operators on the port side of the control room, past the bodies of the Musaid and the two planesmen.

The valve bank was on the downhill side of the boat, so he had to climb up onto a hull strake to reach the valves. The pain in his shoulder brought him wide awake. He had to rest for a minute until his head stopped spinning. The main induction pipe ran from the snorkel mast in the control room straight back into the engineroom to the diesels. There were two additional large valves that allowed snorkel air from the surface to be bled into the boat while feeding the diesels, to refresh the crew’s atmosphere after weeks of submergence. One of these valves was in the engineroom; the other was in the control room. They were hydraulically operated valves, but they had handwheels as well. Upstream of the two ventilating air valves was the main induction valve itself. Above main induction was the snorkel mast, with its bronze float ball seated firmly at the top of the snorkel tube, held fast by tons of seawater pressure.

The Captain watched the valve indicator panel, which was still lighted by the battery circuit, although growing dim. He saw the indicator change showing that the engineroom had opened the ventilating valve off the main induction line. It was a large valve, six inches in diameter. His plan was simple. He would now open the six inch ventilation valve in the control room. Then he would crawl forward and release the dogs on the forward hatch of the control room. Seawater would thunder into the control room, flooding it in less than a minute. As the control room filled, the remaining air would be driven back up into his ventilation valve, down the main induction pipe to the engineroom, filling the engineroom with new air.

They would never suspect. They would sit up on the deckplates, turning their faces to the stream of air flowing in, and they would still be sitting there when after about a minute the air was followed by a six inch stream of seawater at full depth pressure. Not a hundred men could close that valve against such a stream, and it would be all over in a minute.

He took a deep breath, and struggled one handed with the handwheel. Slowly, the wheel turned, and there was a faint hiss of air as the pressure equalized between the engineroom and the control room. He slid back down the bulkhead, and pulled himself over the pile of stiffening bodies to the forward hatch. He positioned himself at the bottom of the hatch, facing the vertical steel door with its six hatch clips jammed down onto bronze wedges. The steel surface of the hatch was sweating visibly, as the cold seawater on the other side condensed the stagnant humidity in the control room. There was a faint halo of seawater mist around the hatch, as water at depth pressure leaked by the hatch seals. He had to pull two bodies away from the hatch to get at the bottom clips.

They had almost pulled it off, he thought, as he placed an undogging wrench on the first hatch clip, and pulled down with his good arm. It barely moved under the intense pressure from the other side. He had to lift his whole body and hang on the wrench to make it begin to move off the wedge. The whole hatch groaned, and the mist of water hissing around the edges of the hatch grew into a hard spray as the clip slowly rotated. He stopped it while there was still a quarter inch of metal to metal contact.

They had done so well, staying undetected for weeks, silencing the fishing boat, evading the old destroyer, placing the mines in the river. He moved the wrench to the other side of the hatch, and fitted it to a second clip. Again he had to put his body weight onto the wrench to dislodge the clip. But the old destroyer had become his nemesis. He had dismissed it at first as being an unworthy foe, but it had returned twice to probe the waters of the Gulf Stream, and then again on the last, decisive day. The second clip began finally to move, and the hatch groaned again, the heavy steel beginning to deform. It began to bulge at the top, and the spray of water was now strong enough to reach all the way to the overhead of the control room. His right arm was soaking wet, and his eyes stung from the salt. He left the second clip barely attached like the first one and placed the wrench on the third clip.

But at least they had made the attack. Two actually, as the river mines had caught something in their jaws. The old destroyer had frustrated their attack on the carrier, although one torpedo had evaded the depth charges and hauled away to the east. He would never know if it found its target. But the final mine had found its target, even though it had killed the Al Akrab in the process. We will die like the scorpion we are.

He was sweating heavily now, his breath coming in short gasps in the oxygen depleted atmosphere. The hatch was bulging and creaking ominously now, and there was water streaming around half of its knife-edge coamings. The third clip would do it. He held the wrench on the third clip, and pulled himself right up to the hatch, face to face with it, the icy seawater streaming down his face now, washing his hair into his eyes, stinging his eyes with the salt, a cold ablution before death, a cleansing of his unworthy body and his eager soul. He took a deep breath, and called out for the last time “Allahu Akbar!” and pulled hard on the third clip.

Ninety tons of sea pressure slammed the hatch into his face and flooded the control room in thirty thundering seconds. The engineers, waiting for the air pressure to rise, heard a rumbling thump forward and then felt the sudden stream of air blowing out of the ventilation valve. The Chief Engineer was sitting on the oily deckplates of the engineroom, closest to the ventilation valve. His oxygen deprived brain tried to tell him that the noise from the control room was somehow wrong, that this was not the sound or the feel of oxygen rich air from an air tank, that it was something else, the sound of a ballast tank flooding, flooding, water not air, water was coming! He gave a shout and tried to untangle his legs and get up to reach the valve just as the column of water erupted out of the valve. The engineroom took a full minute to fill, the roaring black water snuffing out men and battle lanterns with equal efficiency. The maelstrom subsided when the sea pressure had compressed all the air in the engineroom into a tight, hot pocket up against the overhead. The submarine, now completely flooded out except for one battery compartment, rolled completely over on her beam ends, and slid further down the sides of the canyon, followed by another avalanche of mud that buried her fifty feet deep.

Two miles away, onboard the brand new minehunter, the USS Avenger, the audio frequency passive sonar operator listened carefully, and then signalled for his supervisor.

“Is there volcanic activity along this area, Chief?”

“Nope,” said the Chief, complacently. “The bottom contour map shows lots of canyons and ridges, so we probably get some seismic, but you gotta go to the mid-Atlantic Ridge to get volcanic. You’re probably hearing a mudslide, sort of a low rumble with what sounds like gravel chasing after it?”

“Yeah, that’s it. I heard a big bubbling sound, and then just what you described. Bearing 100, range medium. It’s all quiet now, though.”

“Yeah, that shit happens all the time. Disregard; it’s just mud. Things that go bump in the night, you know? It don’t mean a thing.”