The Submarine Al Akrab, 1745
The colossal explosion that had broken Goldsborough’s bones did not spare Al Akrab, who ended up being even closer to the blast than the hapless destroyer. The mine had been expelled out of tube eight with a full impulse charge and had armed almost immediately. The magnetic field from Al Akrab was decreasing as the two ton mine spun out into the darkness. She should have been safe. But Goldsborough’s field was an increasing field, and the mine had detected it even as it rejected the submarine’s field. Al Akrab’s attempt to turn right had been late, due principally to the submarine’s lack of knowledge about the range to the destroyer. The Captain had estimated 1500 yards; the true distance was less than half that. The enormous warhead had gone off between them.
Water is incompressible. An explosion underwater creates a spherical pressure wave in all directions, but especially towards the surface, the area of least or decreasing pressure. The mine had exploded somewhat below and on the starboard quarter of the submarine, only 180 yards distant. The blast created a ball of rock solid hydrodynamic force that punched the stern of the submarine up, flattening her stern planes and rudder, and dislodging her propellers. The sudden up angle on the stern, combined with her burst of speed, had driven her down with stunning force to
the bottom, with enough impact to bury her hull almost all the way back to the sail into the mud on the side of a small canyon. Al Akrab caromed off the side and banged down seventy five feet onto the bottom of the canyon. The sudden impact of the submarine caused mudslides on both sides of the canyon, and a silent flow of ancient mud and slime buried the Al Akrab’s hull over three quarters of her length. Only the top third of her conning tower, and the battered remains of her stern, projected above the mud when it all stopped moving.
The submarine hit so hard that every piece of machinery that was not shock mounted came off its foundations, wrecking her engineering plant, her air compressors, and most of the hydraulic equipment in the boat. The forward torpedo compartment was crumpled and flooded instantaneously, the interior a jumble of dislodged torpedoes, weapons handling gear, and crushed bodies. Two fuel tanks under the bow split open and would have sent great gouts of diesel oil to the surface had it not been for the deep layer of mud that swiftly encased her hull.
The after torpedo room and steering engine compartment had also been split open by the force of the blast and the destruction of the outside appendages. The weapons officer had been stepping back through the after torpedo room hatch when the world ended. The open hatch crushed him against a bulkhead as the sea slammed into the auxiliary motor generator and switchboard compartment, shutting down all AC power in the boat, leaving only the DC emergency circuits.
The primary salt water cooling main ruptured in the electric motor room; at nearly 300 feet of depth, the pressure from the six inch diameter pipe blasted a column of icy seawater off the overhead strong enough to tear down the cableways running along the length of the compartment. Those who could get to their feet after the crash clawed their way through the bobbing beams of the battle lanterns and the surging, chest high tide of water and oil towards the forward hatch into the diesel engine room. It took ten men in the engine room to close the hatch against the pressure
of the air being compressed in the motor room by the rising water, and they managed it only just in time, straining and sweating with all their might on the hatch, closing their ears to the screams of the injured left behind to die in the swirling, drowning tomb that had been the motor room. One man opened the hatch at the forward end of the engineroom leading into after battery, but slammed it shut instantly when he saw the choking green cloud of chlorine gas illuminated by the single battle lantern in the compartment.
In the control room, the Captain and every other man had been pitched headlong down the length of the compartment by the crash, fetching up in a tumble of arms, legs, bodies, and dislodged equipment heaped up against the forward bulkhead. The Al Akrab was jammed into the canyon with a fifteen degree down angle, her attitude created by the weight of the flooded forward compartments jammed into the mud, and the offsetting buoyancy left in the engineroom. Her down angle was solidified by the mudslides that followed the crash.
Four battle lanterns in the control room remained on their mountings after the impact. Their dim beams illuminated the wreckage of the control room, the periscopes hanging out of their foundations, the big fire control consoles jammed at odd angles against the cylindrical hull, deckplates upended everywhere, and some small streams of water hissing into the compartment from small cracks in the interior piping.
The Captain’s trajectory to the forward end of the compartment had been broken by the body of the sonar chief, who had been catapulted against the bulkhead an instant before the Captain landed on him. The Chief was unconscious, the top of his head a bloody mess of fractured skull and blood-matted hair, with thin trails of blood coming from his mouth and ears. The Deputy was obviously dead, his head caught in flight between the periscope shaft and a stanchion in the middle of the control room. The Musaid was slumped into the space between the two planesmen’s chairs; the planesmen were motionless in their seat, their
smashed faces bleeding over the remains of the control consoles. They had been belted in, but the impact had broken their necks on the control yokes.
The Captain came to amid the sounds of a deep rumbling noise all around the hull. The submarine shifted slightly towards a more even keel, sliding him off the inert form of the Chief, and rolling him onto the grid that had supported the deckplates. His left arm hung useless by his side from a numb shoulder socket, and his lips were a puffy, bloody mess, as if someone had smashed him in the face with a pipe. He tried to get up, but his feet were tangled in the maze of pipes and cables ordinarily covered by the deckplates. No one else seemed to be moving, and the air in the compartment was already becoming heavy and wet. He tried again, and this time managed to pull himself out of the wires, and onto a single deckplate that had not been broken loose. He crawled over to the diving station, and touched the Musaid, who groaned. The Captain tried to turn the senior Chief around with his good arm, but then realized that both of the older man’s shoulders had been dislocated by the impact. His arms were dangling straight down; in the gloom they looked longer than they had been. The senior Chiefs head slumped back down on his chest, his breathing shallow and ragged.
The Captain turned away. He tucked his useless left arm into the waist of his trousers, ignoring the beginnings of a throbbing pain from his shoulder. He crawled through the wreckage of the control room to the intercom box, which was hanging by its cable from a stanchion. Someone stirred and made a groaning noise in the jumble of bodies piled up against the forward bulkhead, but he ignored the sound. He keyed in the engineering spaces.
“Engineering, Control room,” he croaked. His battered lips made it difficult to speak.
“Control, Engineering,” replied a frightened voice. “Thank God. We thought we were alone. We are trapped back here!”
“This is the Captain,” he replied, trying to put some authority in his voice. “Report.”
There was a moment of silence, and then the Engineer came on the line.
“Sir. We have lost after steering, after torpedo, after auxiliary generator, and the motor compartment. We are in engineering control; the compartment is flooded up to the foundations of the diesel engines. The after hatch is shored and holding. There are fifteen men surviving here. We cannot come forward. After battery room is filled with chlorine gas.”
“Is the engineroom holding watertight integrity?” asked the Captain.
“Sir. There are some small leaks, but we are plugging them. There is a lot of oil vapor in the air, and we are having to tap the ballast air cylinders to keep sufficient oxygen. Sir. We cannot stay here for very long.”
The Captain paused. The engineers had one of the sub’s two escape trunks in the overhead of the diesel room. They were at 350 feet, which was on the edge of the free ascent envelope, but it was feasible, using the Russian variant of the Momsen hoods.
But now there was the larger, strategic question. If the men escaped, and survived the ascent to the surface without exploding their lungs, they would be captured and the plot exposed to the world. He shook his head to clear it. He needed time to think.
“Maintain watertight integrity; bleed air as much as you need. I am sending someone forward to determine the status.”
“Engineering, aye.”
The Captain switched off the intercom. He had a pretty fair idea of the conditions forward of the control room, and had no intentions of opening any of the hatches, especially not the hatch leading forward from the control room. The steel hatch was blowing a fine spray of water around the hatch clips. The passageway to the forward berthing and weapons compartments was obviously flooded, which meant that everything forward of the control room was probably flooded. He knew without even checking that there was probably no one left alive up there, but he
wanted the engineers to believe that he still had access forward. He did not want them panicking and using the escape trunk. He glanced up at the overhead, to where the spherical, bronze hatch to the forward escape hatch chamber was visible in the dim light of the battle lanterns.
He sat back down in the wreckage of the control room, adjusting his dangling arm with his good arm, and then rubbing his face. It was over. The mission had failed. He had failed. All those months of training, the weeks of stealth, the dread of detection, the heart in mouth operations to plant the mines in the river, all for nothing. He should have listened to the weapons officer when he had recommended dumping the accursed French mine into the mid-Atlantic. The geometry had been wrong; the destroyer had been much closer than he thought, and the damned thing had gone off practically at their back.
There was only one element of the mission remaining: the Americans must not be able to prove who had done this. There was no way he could allow those men in engineering to make their escape. The mission had failed, and now it was their duty to bury the evidence of the conspiracy with the Al Akrab. He limped back over to the intercom unit.
“Engineering, Control.”
“Engineering.”
“This is my plan: it is still light up there; we do not know if the destroyer survived the explosion. My estimate is that he did not. But there was a helicopter. Soon there will be more American naval forces in the area. If any of us try to escape now, we will be shot as soon as they see us on the surface. We will wait until late tonight. We still have full ballast air tanks, and forward battery power to operate the blow system. We will wait until 0100 or thereabouts, and then blow all the ballast tanks and bring her to the surface. With only those end compartments flooded, she will come up. Then we will escape into rafts and take our chances.”
“But, Sir: surely the forward compartments are also flooded—that impact—”
“Only forward torpedo is lost,” interrupted the Captain
quickly, the lie coming smoothly. “And some of the fuel tanks in all probability. We hit mud. There are thirty of us still alive up here. I have brought the survivors into the control room area and sealed the forward hatch in case the berthing compartments forward let go, but for now they are holding. Many are injured, and there is not enough air for everyone to use the escape trunks, so eventually we must bring her to the surface. The rest of the boat remains intact, and we can use the torpedo air flasks to blow some of the water out of even the forward torpedo before we attempt to surface with the main ballast tanks. You can attempt to do the same thing with the electric motor room. The other compartments are small. If we cannot bring her up with ballast tank air, then you can use the after escape trunk, and we will attempt to do the same from the forward trunk. But for now, we must remain quiet until darkness falls. Only then can we make our escape.”
There was a long moment of silence. Then the engineer responded. His voice sounded tired.
“Engineering, aye, Sir,” he said. “We will await your orders.”
The Captain switched off the intercom, and looked around the wrecked control room with its jumble of bodies. Across the room the Musaid stirred again, moaning in pain. Everyone else was still. He realized that he had been hearing a strange slithering sound outside on the hull. He wondered about it briefly, and then realized that they must have landed in some kind of canyon or wadi. That slithering sound had to be the sound of sand and mud. The sea was burying them. He nodded to himself. It was fitting.
He looked at his watch. It was just past 1800. If he waited for seven hours, the shifting mud of the St. Johns canyons would solve his final problem, hopefully forever. He sat down, resting his back against the periscope well casing, and closed his battered eyes.
USS Goldsborough, 1815
A very light breeze came up a few minutes after 1800, and Goldsborough slowly aligned herself with it, her bow acting as a large weathervane, pointing her settling stern into the wind. The smoke from the funnels had stopped, and now only a diminishing feather of steam was escaping from the forward stack.
The list to port had become more pronounced. There was a haze of acrid, grayish smoke coming from the central superstructure aft of the bridge as dozens of small electrical fires continued to smolder in the debris of wrecked electronic equipment. Except for the moans of the injured, the ship was eerily quiet.
Mike sat in his chair, fighting to keep his concentration on damage control and away from the increasing pain in his legs, pain that had begun as a throbbing lance in each ankle and that was now spreading, up his lower legs, his thighs, and into his abdomen, as if it were trying to rendezvous with his pulsating head. His two phone talkers scribbled furiously as reports came in from various stations about cracks in the hull, broken fire main piping, leaking tanks, and residual electrical fires. The after emergency diesel engine had been dismounted, and the forward one had had a fire in the switchboard, thus there was no electrical power in the ship. The ship’s four steam powered turbo-generators had died with the engineering plant.
Mike could not find a comfortable position in the chair, and regretted getting into it. The battle dressing on his head was heavy and sodden. He occasionally wiped drops of blood off his forehead, and was having trouble keeping his head up. His useless feet were propped up on the chair’s footrest, but they were not up where he would like them. His ankles echoed each heartbeat with a stab of pain.
The Chief Hospital Corpsman, known as Doc, had made it to the bridge about forty minutes after the explosion, accompanied by two volunteers who still had operational
legs and feet. The Doc had been dozing on the examining table in Sick Bay when the ship was hit. He had been thrown into the overhead of sickbay, but had landed on the table mattress as he and it hit the deck at the same time. He had a large black eye and a bloody nose, but was otherwise unhurt. His assistant, known as the Baby Doc, had been sitting on a pile of soft, kapock life jackets up on the mess decks, and was unhurt.
The Doc had seen to the men lying around the pilothouse deck, especially the moaning man with compound fractures, and then had offered a morphine shot to Mike. Mike had declined. He had never been one to take medicine, and he knew the morphine would knock him out. He needed to remain not only conscious but competent. He had settled for some heavy duty Tylenol. The Chief Corpsman tied a couple of soft splints around Mike’s ankles, while Mike tried unsuccessfully not to cry out.
“How bad are the injuries?” Mike had asked, his voice a strained whisper after the Doc had finished working on his ankles.
The Doc was one of those old-young men that seemed to inhabit the Chief Petty Officer ranks of the Navy. He was only thirty four, but looked about forty five. After the past hour, he looked about sixty. His face was haggard behind the multicolored hues of his black eye, and his eyes barely disguised his shock at the scale of the injuries.
“We have four dead above decks, at least four dead in the main holes, and easily one hundred fifty serious injuries, Cap’n,” he said with a sigh. “I’m not counting superficial injuries like mine—but broken limbs, concussions, burns. The Baby Doc is working with a crew of four volunteers, and I’ve got these two guys. But we’re running outa stuff pretty quick, especially morphine and the other pain killers. I hope to Christ we got some help coming.”
He adjusted his stance on the wet deck to remain upright, and saw Mike glance over at the inclinometer. Ten degrees to port.
“I think we do, Doc. The helo that was with us has undoubtedly been on the radio to the carrier, and there were
supposed to be two Spruances coming out in the next hour if they could get them past the wreck in the channel. I’m still waiting for the snipes to get me a diesel generator so we can use a radio.”
The Chief Corpsman shook his head.
“The snipes are pretty fucked up, Cap’n,” he said. “Anyone who was below decks is either busted up or walking around in shock. I saw the XO trying to round up people to patch and plug, but a lot of them just looked at him, even though they weren’t busted up. The four guys who died below were in two fireroom, where a steam line let go and —well, you can imagine. Nobody’s been down there yet—the temperature in the space is still over 300 degrees. One fireman got out by diving into the bilge and coming out the escape trunk, but the steam got the others.”
He looked around.
“It’s kinda weird—the ship don’t look that damaged, but she’s literally had the slats kicked out of her. I’ve seen hundreds of little leaks.”
“Yeah, I’m very worried about the hundreds of little leaks,” Mike said, scanning the horizon again for signs of help.
The two fishing boats who had been southwest of them were small specks on the horizon, and there were no pleasure craft around. The sun was slanting into the low western horizon. He looked back at the Doc.
“As you make your rounds, get people to stuff something in the leaks, any kind of thing to slow down the water. Get ’em to tie rags around the busted piping, and stuff anything that’ll stick in any leak below the waterline. I’ve had no reports of a big hole anywhere, and I know they’re doing some shoring in Mount Fifty Three’s magazine, but it’s the little stuff that’s putting this list on. If it keeps up, we go down. It’s that simple, Doc. You’re ambulatory. Spread the word.”
“I will and I have been, Cap’n,” said the Doc, somewhat defensively. “But people are dazed. They pick up a rag or some shit to stuff in a crack and they just look at it. But we’ll keep on it.”
“Thanks, Doc, I know you’re hard pressed.”
As the Doc hurried down below, Mike was startled by the sound of a gasoline engine starting up on the main deck. Mike realized that the Exec must have organized a portable fire pump gang. The P-250 fire pumps were gasoline engine driven, and could either pump water into fire hoses or suck water up out of a flooding space and pump it overboard, or both at the same time. Mike was comforted to hear the ragged little engine running at full blast. Goldsborough carried two more of the P-250’s, and he found himself waiting impatiently for the other two to light off.
He leaned back in the chair. He was in the peculiar position of having almost nothing that he could do. Ordinarily he would have been sending a stream of orders to organized damage control teams, but with so many casualties, the DC organization had broken down completely. The Exec was out in the ship somewhere, organizing small teams of men who could function to attack the flooding problem below decks. The two Docs were trying to cover the ship to treat the wounded. The rest of the crew was dazed, crippled, or lying in shock at their stations. Mike kept passing down orders to anyone they could contact to work the flooding problem first. Beyond that, there was little he could do but wait.
He had tried moving, but his head hurt so badly he could no longer even lift it. He wondered if he had suffered a concussion. The bandage on his head felt like a wet mattress, and from the looks the men on the bridge were giving it, he must have been a sight.
The situation was indeed weird, just as the Doc had described it. Normally there would be a throng of men scrambling all over the ship, fighting the flooding problem, digging through debris, dewatering and de-smoking, and helping out the injured. There would be noise and confusion and officers milling around trying to restore order. But the ship was almost silent except for the noise of the firepump engines. There were too many injured men lying about the decks in small clumps, some bandaged, but most with their legs up on blankets as the two medical teams
made their way through the ship and tried to make men comfortable and to fight off shock. Beyond the blown out windows and the mess on the deck, the bridge equipment had not suffered much. Mike remembered the wreckage of CIC, where large equipments had been bolted to a false deck in some cases, but topside, at least the part of it he could see, the guns were in place, the radars still on the mast, the lifelines tight. Only the clumps of men lying against bulkheads, or supine on a nest of extra lifejackets, showed the scale of the disaster.
“Captain,” called one of the signalmen from the signal bridge. “I think I see a coupla heloes coming.”
“From which direction, Sigs?” asked Mike.
“From the east, Sir.”
The carrier was east of them. The helo must have gone back, dumped its sonobuoys, and hopefully loaded up with doctors and medical supplies. The big SH3’s could carry up to eight men in the passenger compartment if they had to.
Mike scanned the horizon. He tried to lift his binoculars out of their case, but the movement sent his head spinning. He finally saw the two dots coming in, low off the water. As he was watching, the Exec came back up on the bridge. His uniform was wet, filthy, and stank of fuel oil. He looked exhausted, and more than a little afraid.
The dots materialized into heloes, who began their flare to a hover, approaching the port side, sliding back down towards the stern, and then they came sideways back up the port side to hover near the bow, slow dancing with each other as the pilots sized up the situation. Mike grabbed the Exec’s wet shirt, and pulled him nearer.
“The fantail must be clobbered,” he shouted over the noise of the rotor blades. “Can you go forward and direct them to put their stuff on the fo’c’sle?”
“Yes, Sir,” shouted the Exec.
He took a deep breath, appeared to be about to tell Mike something, but then turned and disappeared out the back door to the pilothouse. Moments later he appeared on the forecastle, and helped to drag injured men back behind the gun mount. He then climbed up the steel rungs on the side
of the Mount Fifty One and positioned himself where the pilots could see him, waving his arms slowly up and down to attract their attention. His wet shirt and trousers were whipping hard in the rotor downblast. He held his arms level like a crucifix, and then bent them inward, making the signal to advance.
The first helo moved right in, as the Exec used arm signals to bring him up, advance him, and then hold him level over the deck that the pilot could no longer see, while the winch-man began to lower khaki clad men wearing life vests and protective head gear down to the destroyer’s deck. The first helo unloaded ten people, an emergency load, and then banked away to stand off. The second helo came in and unloaded three more people, and then several loads of medical supplies in gray boxes with red crosses stencilled on their sides. Both heloes then banked away back towards the darkening skies in the east.
Mike watched from the bridge as the Exec gave the medical team a quick briefing, and then they all fanned out and began administering to the wounded littering the decks. The Exec came back up on the bridge with a doctor wearing the eagles of a Captain, Medical Corps, USN.
“Cap’n,” said Farmer, “this is Captain Worthington, senior medical officer on the Coral Sea.”
Mike blinked weakly at him, afraid to move his head very much. The doctor’s eyes widened when he saw the Captain’s blood smeared face, bandaged head, and ballooning ankles. When Mike leaned forward to greet him, he saw that the back of the Captain’s chair was soaked in blood. He did not shake Mike’s hand, but bent down immediately to examine Mike’s ankles while he talked.
“Skipper,” he began, while undoing the splints, “the helo that was operating with you radioed in about an hour ago that you had been torpedoed by some kind of submarine out here, and that the explosion looked like a small nuke. They did a—sorry about that,” as Mike gasped in pain—“they did a quick survey, saw bodies and smoke everywhere, and the ship listing, and came running back to the
farm to get some help for you. They’re on their way back now for some more people—how bad are your casualties?”
Mike took a deep breath. “Eight dead and over a hundred fifty with serious injuries,” he said in a small voice. His vision was beginning to blur.
“Jesus H. Christ!” exclaimed the doctor, stopping what he was doing with Mike’s bandages. He stood up, and unsheathed a small portable radio from his belt, pulled up an antenna, and spoke into it.
“Big Mother 501, this is SMO, over?”
He put the radio up to his ear, and then back to his mouth.
“501, this is SMO, inform Mother that there are over one five zero, repeat one five zero casualties here, and we need all the medics we can get!”
“And morphine-pain killers, and plugging and patching gear,” added Mike weakly from his chair. “And—”
The doctor nodded at him silently while he listened to the radio, and relayed the additional requirements. He listened again, said, “Roger, wait one,” and then turned back to Mike.
“The CO has asked me to ask you: is your ship in danger of sinking? Apparently the beach is bugging the hell out of him.”
Mike took a deep breath, and looked at the Exec. The heloes had arrived before he could get a briefing from Farmer, but Goldy was continuing to list to port, and she was not rolling in the light chop that was beginning to blow up. She felt like an old, rotted, watersoaked log in a lake, responding to the wave action about half a wave late.