Authors: Todd Tucker
ONE TAP means TANK IS FLOODED
TWO TAPS means TANKS IS PRESSURIZED
THREE TAPS means TANKS IS DRAINED
On the plate outside of each trunk of
Alabama
, someone had long ago scratched “ZERO TAPS means I’M DEAD.”
For several decades the submarine force relied on a fleet of submarine rescue ships, each with the hull designator ASR. These vessels were of World War II vintage, and were in effect modified salvage ships who could hover over a sunken boat and release divers. Submarine rescue theory of that era was startlingly crude, and revolved around “free ascent”—the process of having men egress a sunken boat and swim to the surface, arms crossed, and exhaling in concentrated, forced gasps to minimize the effects of decompression and the formation of lethal nitrogen bubbles in the blood. Every old submarine base had as its central landmark a tall, cylindrical “dive tower” where recruits could practice this procedure, a rite of passage for generations of submariners. It was officially estimated, and universally doubted, that a man might actually survive free ascent from a depth of up to 300 feet.
The Navy lost two nuclear-powered submarines in the 1960s. First was
Thresher
, lost at sea in 1963, followed by
Scorpion
, lost in 1968. This led the Navy to seriously reevaluate its rescue capabilities, given the depths at which modern nuclear submarines operated, and the DSRV, or Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle, was born. The Navy built two of these ships,
Mystic
(commissioned in 1970) and
Avalon
(1971), and positioned them both at the North Island Naval Air Station in San Diego. They were, in effect, deep-diving miniature submarines that could fit inside the belly of an Air Force C-5 cargo plane, to be flown within hours of a submarine disaster to its last reported location. Once on the scene, they had to operate with a mother vessel, either an ASR, or another submarine. They were not perfect, but their capabilities vastly exceeded that of the old ASRs operating by themselves. The DSRVs could operate at depths up to 5,000 feet, and rescue up to 24 men at a time.
The DSRV program lasted until
Mystic
was decommissioned in 2008. The program was officially replaced by the SRDRS program, Submarine Rescue Diving and Recompression System. The very title of the program addressed one of the DSRV program’s greatest weakness: the fact that another vessel was needed to rescue submariners at pressure. The main vehicle of the SRDRS program, named
Falcon
, was self-contained, and not reliant on another vessel. But in some ways the program was a step backwards.
Falcon
could only conduct rescue operations in water up to 2,000 feet. And it could only rescue 16 men at a time. Finally, the old DSRV program was abolished before the cornerstone of the SRDRS program was even completed: the decompression system. For years, during the Cold War, some had believed deep water submarine rescue to be so unlikely that they deemed the DSRV program a cover operation, and claimed that
Mystic
and
Avalon
were actually spy ships. With the last hope of a sunken submarine being the
Falcon
and its half-complete support systems, it seemed the Navy had almost given up on the concept as well.
But with the message launched from
Alabama’s
BST buoys,
Falcon
was hurriedly loaded aboard the USNS
Navajo
, a seagoing tug, and raced westward, toward the location of
Alabama
. The water at their destination was far deeper than 2,000 feet, they already knew, and they would be approximately twenty-four hours to the scene. Getting
Falcon
to the site of the bleating BST buoys seemed almost a hopeless gesture. But the Navy had to do something, and deploying
Falcon
was all they could do.
• • •
Captain Soldato was the fifth person notified about the BST buoys, forty-six minutes after they were launched, at 5:30 in the morning. He’d been dreaming of his grandson when the phone rang, dreaming about the first time they’d fished together, off a pier in Groton Long Point, Connecticut. His grandson was tiny then, small even for the six year old that he was, and was fishing with his line barely off the pier. But he’d hauled in a massive Tautog, a fat, glistening black fish that weighed at least eight pounds. His grandson had literally jumped up and down with excitement when they landed the gasping fish on the pier. The dream was free from any psychedelic or odd associations like dreams often have: the tautog didn’t start talking, or flying. It was more like an exact replay of an exceedingly pleasant moment, a home movie that his memory had wished to replay.
He was so groggy that the Group Nine duty officer had to ask him twice to switch to a secure phone. As Soldato stumbled out of the bedroom, Cindy stirred and frowned, alert on some level that bad news had arrived.
In his study, he picked up the antiquated-looking secure phone that the Navy had provided him and connected with the duty officer. They both turned plastic keys simultaneously, switching the phone to secure mode.
“Captain, we have flash traffic from a BST buoy in the western pacific.”
Soldato was now fully awake. “Which boat?” he asked. But he already knew.
“Seven-thirty-one. The Admiral is calling an emergency meeting in the secure conference room in thirty minutes.”
Soldato hung up without saying another word and donned his uniform silently to avoid waking Cindy, who had fallen back asleep.
• • •
Angi was running. It had rained during the night, cooling the air to a perfect running temperature. It was still dark, but she planned to run fourteen miles, which would take her a good two hours, and she had timed her start so she could enjoy the sunrise as she ran. She was already nostalgic about running, knowing she’d have to give it up soon. She’d come to the sport late, never ran in high school, but took it up with a vengeance in her junior year at Vanderbilt, after completing her first 5K. Her boyfriend at the time had talked her into it, and she decided she very much liked the feeling of running by him, and those sorority girls wearing make up for a race, and, even more, those posturing fraternity boys, who gasped for breath as she glided by. She’d run seven marathons in her life, a dozen half marathons, and more 5Ks than she could count. Now it would be taken away from her. She could get one of those jogging strollers, she supposed, after the baby was born…but sometime between now and then she would just have to stop for a while. In the meantime, she would enjoy each run like it was her last.
She ran her usual route, out of her neighborhood onto Trigger Road, feeling good in her legs, with only a slight twinge in the right knee that occasionally gave her problems. She was fast and strong, enjoying the first part of the run down to the Trigger gate that was all slightly downhill, the perfect warm up. The run to the gate was about a mile and a half, just about the amount of time it took for her to begin sweating mildly, breathe properly, and to feel the soreness in her feet and hips disappear. She was alert for any sign that her pregnancy was affecting her running—or that her running was affecting her pregnancy—but so far, so good. She just felt fast. She cruised down the hill toward the gate, her stride lengthening.
There were a few cars at the gate, some government vehicles, some civilian contractors showing up early. Only two gates were open, so even though it was early, the cars were backed up, their brake lights casting long, red reflections on the damp asphalt. She approached the back of a minivan and recognized it immediately; the Soldato’s. What would bring him to base so early? She wondered. There was no telling when your world consisted of eight submarines and all that could go wrong with them.
She ran past it, and confirmed that Soldato was driving, but he was worriedly fumbling with something in his passenger seat, maybe getting out his military ID for the gate guard, and he didn’t see her. She ran about another one hundred yards to the gate and turned around, ready now to really get into the meat of her run. She was facing Soldato now.
As she neared him, he saw her, then recognized her. She lifted her hand to wave, but the look on his face stopped her cold. He looked like a man who was staring absolute calamity in the face, and when their eyes locked, she knew beyond any doubt that it involved Danny.
He drove through the gate and left her behind, standing on an empty road outside a submarine base, on the side of the gate where no one knew anything.
• • •
In Maneuvering, Duggan pulled a cloth flash hood from an EAB, twisted it a few times, and tied it around his forehead, banzai style. He pushed on the center of it, felt the blood soaking through, hoped it would at least keep the blood out of his eyes so he could do his fucking job.
He heard the twin bangs of the BST buoys as they launched, not knowing what it was: they all jumped at the sound. He knew he lacked perspective, was the least experienced guy in the maneuvering, but was certain their crisis was dire. He knew it from his training, and he knew it from the tense fervor with which the three enlisted men in maneuvering were now performing their jobs. When the odd order for the three-second emergency blow came across the 1MC, Duggan felt his heart sink. It seemed to him an improvisation, tinged with desperation.
The depth gage in maneuvering was just inches from his head. It looked like an antique, a large analog dial. But like everything else in maneuvering, Duggan had studied the gage, and he’d always taken comfort in the fact that while crude-looking, that depth gage was a completely reliable pressure gage that was attached, by means of a long, thin pipe, directly to the ocean that surrounded them. In a world of electronic and digital intermediation, his depth gage represented an undeniable, hardwired reality.
The big ship reacted almost instantly to the emergency blow; Duggan could feel the angle in his feet. They were starting to point up. But, he could see on his depth gage, the ship’s depth didn’t immediately respond. They continued to drift down, albeit at a slower rate. Then their descent seemed to stop, and they hovered for a moment. And then, almost imperceptibly, they began to rise. Duggan realized that he’d been holding his breath; he exhaled loudly.
“Going up?” said Barnes.
“Yes.”
“Thank God.”
Duggan sat back down in his chair and thought to himself: whatever happens now, we’re moving up. Things are improving.
A blaring alarm on the electrical panel yanked him back into the crisis. Patterson cut out the alarm and scanned his panel. “Erratic voltage,” he said, and Duggan could see it. All the AC voltage meters were drifting around. Electrical voltage was one of the most static indicators in maneuvering, seeing the needles move around made the panel seem funhouse bizarre. Patterson reached to the center of his panel, on instinct: the ground detector. He turned a switch and took a reading. “Fuck,” he said.
Duggan didn’t wait for Patterson to announce it to him, he could see it himself. He keyed the 7MC mike to control. The ground detector was an exponential meter that could measure the resistance of a specified electrical bus to ground in Ohms; the normal reading was 8, the symbol for infinity. On the panel now the readout was in the thousands of Ohms, and dropping. He knew what had happened, and while he couldn’t have done anything about it, he cursed himself for not anticipating it: the floodwater had grounded some piece (or pieces) of equipment.
“Lowering grounds on the port AC electrical bus,” he announced into the 7MC. “Commencing ground isolation.” He released the microphone key and spoke to Patterson. “Start dropping busses.”
The roaming electrician appeared at the entrance to maneuvering to assist, a checklist on his clipboard.
“Dropping the port non-vital bus,” said Patterson, without waiting for an order. He turned a black switch on his panel, and the blue light for the bus went dark. But the Ohmmeter continued to drop. He flipped the switch back on.
“Port DC bus,” he said. He was moving fast, as the grounds continued to drop. With every switch he threw, equipment was de-energized, potentially affecting the casualty control efforts. But there was no question that they should do it. If that ground got to zero, it meant a complete short: an electrical fire. The old submarine saying was: if you don’t find the ground…the ground will find you.
“It’s got to be on the port vital bus,” said Patterson. They’d tried everything else, so by process of elimination, it had to be. But the equipment on that bus was, by definition, vital. The ground isolation had to proceed slightly more deliberately lest they make a bad situation worse.
Duggan grabbed the 7MC again. “Commencing isolation on the port vital bus.”
The roaming electrician flipped to a new check list. “Number two main feed pump.”
“No,” said Duggan. “Start with whatever is in the forward compartment. That’s where the floodwater is.”
He scanned the list. “Ten loads in all forward on that bus. First on the list is forward ventilation.”
“Start there,” said Duggan.
“Too late!” said Patterson. The needle on the ground detector was swinging counter clockwise, plunging like a punctured balloon. They all stared at it. Just a moment passed before once again they heard the adrenalin-inducing crackle of the 4MC speaker.
Fire in the forward compartment!
Jabo was working right next to Hallorann, trying to supervise the frantic efforts of about six men crammed into a very small space in the front of the torpedo room. The work consisted of two efforts: removing the water that had poured into the space, and stopping the flooding.
Hallorann was working with two others to remove water. They’d already sunk a submersible pump into the torpedo room bilge and hooked it up to the trim header. It had been an exhausting task. The submersible pump was heavy and everything had to be done in a soaking, frigid torrent of sea water. Hallorann had only recently learned to operate the pump, working on his quals, but he’d taken control of the operation, attacking the flooding, shoving the pump into the deepest part of the bilge. His hands were so cold that at one point he dropped the spanner wrench into the flooded bilge; without hesitating he went completely underwater to retrieve it. He came up shivering and soaking, with the wrench in hand, and they completed the connection. When they turned the pump on, he felt a small sense of triumph when the outlet hose went rigid; they were getting water out of there and it felt good. By then, the second submersible pump had arrived from the Crew’s Mess. The crewmen went to work hooking it up, the effort and the cold water sapping them of strength.