Collapse Depth

“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.”