Terminal Run

The problem was, when they did, how long would they stay with a flooded torpedo room and the damage from the detonation of that torpedo? As the ship broached and came back to a zero angle, Farragut couldn’t help wondering how the torpedo, which had been so far astern, had managed to do this much damage. There must have been a second torpedo they hadn’t seen, he thought, and it had pursued them from directly astern. After the ship reached the surface she sank again, to two hundred feet, then returned sluggishly to the surface, the deck rolling in the swells. Farragut ditched his helmet, hit the quick release on his harness, and jumped out of the ship-control console, and turned on the control room battle lanterns. The litter of dead or unconscious bodies was ghastly, but what made his heart pound even faster was the fire roaring out of the aft bulkhead.

Farragut grabbed an extinguisher and ran to the fire, the unit empty while the fire continued to grow. It was only a fist grabbing his coverall sleeve that stopped his frenzied search for another fire extinguisher. He looked up to see the XO’s grime smeared face. Only her eyes and her grimacing teeth shone white.

“Farragut!” she shouted at him, her words coming in slow motion from the adrenaline of the moment. “The torpedo room is completely flooded and we’re flooding aft. She won’t last more than a few minutes. We have to abandon ship. Get to the forward escape trunk and open both hatches. Then get back here and help me with the wounded.”

As Farragut ran out of the space to the forward ladder, Phillips went to Captain Dixon’s cubicle. She knelt at his body and pulled off the Cyclops helmet, gently pulling the boom microphone out of his cheek.

“Sir? Sir? Can you hear me,” she asked, touching his face, then slapping it.

Dixon opened his eyes, the room blurring and spinning. “Donna,” he croaked.

“Sir, the ship was hit. The flooding in the torpedo room is catastrophic. We’re flooding through a twenty-one-inch open torpedo tube. I secured the hatches, but the bulkheads are leaking and we’reshipping water through the shaft seals and the main seawater system.”

“Can we restart the reactor?” he asked, his eyes glazed.

“Captain, the ship is doomed, we’re sinking fast. We have to abandon ship, sir. Farragut’s opening the escape trunk now. We need to get you out of here, sir. We’ve only got a few minutes to get you out of here.”

“You go,” Dixon said. “I’ll stay behind and hit the self-destruct. The Reds won’t salvage the Leopard, not on my watch.”

Dixon faded back into unconsciousness. Phillips pulled him to his feet, and when Farragut returned, they carried him up the ladder to the upper level.

“Get him through the hatch, Farragut,” she ordered. “I’m going to look for other survivors.”

Commander Donna Phillips had taken command of the operation to abandon ship, and had personally walked every passageway on the ship, making her way through the flooded lower-level engine room and pulling the injured to the access hatches. The junior officers stationed there lifted the barely breathing to the deck above. The torpedo room hatches had been shut and dogged. The flooded space was a total loss, the dozen crew members there consigned to the deep. The dead crewmen littered the deck of the operations compartment, and as the last of the living were hoisted out of the hatch, Phillips hurried to the control room, hoping with the flooding there was still power from the battery. With the flooding continuing, it was possible the battery compartment would explode, but the control room uninterruptible power supply should at least keep the ship-control circuits active until they too were underwater.

Control was a wreck. She found the sub-sunk buoy and coded in a sub-sunk message, typing quickly that they had attacked the surface force and been blindsided by a counterattack, and that the captain was down and she intended to self-destruct the ship. She loaded the buoy and armed it. She flipped back the toggle switch cover and hit the switch. The light energized to show the buoy was away. It would start sending their position to the overhead server, and with better luck than they had had so far they would be rescued.

There was only one thing left — she found the panel cover over the self-destruct circuit and punched in the code to open the cover. The panel came open, revealing a simple arm toggle switch, a red mushroom button, and a dual timer display. One was a timer setting, the second the time left to auto destruct She set the timer for ten minutes, armed the circuit, and punched the mushroom button. The second display counted from ten minutes to 9:59, rolling downward. Phillips shut the cover and took one last look around the room, then dashed to the ladder to the upper level and out the hatch. She tapped twice on the hatch ring’s steel, her farewell to the Leopard, then dived off the hull and swam to the nearest life raft.