Collapse Depth

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.