Voyage of the Devilfish

“Maneuvering, Captain,” he said into a mike, “unload the turbine generators as much as possible and load the battery.

I want every ounce of steam we have going to the main engines. And raise T-AVE to 520 degrees — you’ll have to override the cutback.”

A speaker in the control room overhead boomed harshly through the previous quiet.

“UNLOAD THE TG’S, LOAD THE BATTERY, MAXIMIZE MAIN ENGINE STEAM, T-AVE TO 520 AND CUTBACK OVERRIDE, CONN, MANEUVERING, AYE.”

Pacino strained to check out the speed indicator. Thirty-five knots and steady. He watched to see if he was getting a bit more speed from the reactor but it was no good. The incoming torpedo would be at the hull at any minute. The torpedo pinged louder. Pacino looked at the geographic plot, then at Position One on the firecontrol screens. Position-One’s officer was trying to get a solution on the torpedo, but without maneuvering the ship it was all a guess. The weapon could be five thousand yards away or five hundred.

“Conn, Sonar,” Pacino heard in his headset, “torpedo still incoming, range-gate narrowing. Within one thousand yards.” Pacino shook his head. He’d gotten two hits on the enemy, so what? The enemy weapon was zooming in at over 50 knots and Devilfish was only doing 35. That put torpedo-impact less than two minutes away. Pacino looked toward the rear of the control room at the ship’s framed Jolly Roger flag with the Devilfish’s motto sewn above and below the grinning skull and crossbones of the pirate flag. The motto read:

IF YOU AIN’T CHEATIN’ YOU AIN’T TRYIN’

Every watchstander in the control room of the Devilfish had frozen, waiting for torpedo-impact. The sound of the torpedo’s screw was now louder, huge fingernails scraping a giant blackboard. While Pacino stared at the flag, and its motto, an idea came to him. He mounted the periscope stand and called to the Chief of the Watch at the portside ballastcontrol panel: “Emergency blow the forward group.”

“Blow forward, aye,” the chief said, his tone betraying how odd he thought the order. Nonetheless, he reached for one of two large levers, hit its plunger and pushed it up to the stop.

Immediately a sudden loud roar filled the control room, the sound of ultrahigh-pressure air roaring into the ship’s ballast tanks and blowing out the water. Dense fog filled the room, condensation from the leakage around the blow valve. Visibility shrank to less than a foot. The chief grabbed a small lever and pulled it to the right, sounding the alarm throughout the ship for an emergency surface.

OOH-GAH, OOH-GAH, OOH-GAH. It was not the submarine’s klaxon horn of John Wayne movies. The alarm was generated electronically and sounded like it came from a cheap video arcade game amplified to a distorted, earsplitting volume. The chief pulled a hand-held microphone from the panel: “SURFACE, SURFACE, SURFACE.” Pacino shouted over the violent roar of the emergency blow system: “Chief, emergency blow aft.”

“Emergency blow aft, aye sir. Blowing aft.” The noise got worse, the roar louder than a torpedolaunch, and instead of a quick crash it was a sustained kind of scream. The fog in the room grew thicker. The ship-control party pushed their faces close to the panels to read their gages. In the Devilfish’s main ballast tanks, filled a moment before with seawater, high-pressure air forced the seawater out. The tanks went dry fifteen seconds after the aft-system blow, and suddenly Devilfish was hundreds of tons lighter. Nothing would keep her submerged for long now.

“Secure the blow,” Pacino ordered. The room went quiet again, only the sound of the pinging and torpedo screw could be heard. The depth gage clicked once, twice, several times. The fog began to disperse. The deck floated upward, becoming steeper a degree at a time. Pacino’s voice reverberated throughout the ship on the circuit-one microphone: “This is the captain. We are emergency blowing to the surface to try to avoid the torpedo. We may get lucky — if it’s like ours the weapon will be programmed not to go above a ceiling. If we can get shallow fast enough and above the ceiling we may be able to get away from it.” The deck inclined up and up, 20 degrees, 25, to 45 degrees. The sternplanesman held full dive on the stern planes. Without the planes on dive the boat would certainly have been vertical. The ship’s speed indicator showed 40 knots.