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They waited again. This time, there was nothing. The room was now filled with a combination of thick smoke and steam, the water that had vaporized after hitting the flames; it was almost impossible to see anything. The battle lanterns could no longer penetrate the haze, each was just now a dull, smeared glow, like a tired sun behind fog. Jabo moved forward cautiously, felt his way forward with his bad hand. If he was going to get burned, shocked, or sliced, he wanted it to be the hand that was already fucked up. He knelt down, feeling everything, looking over the front part of the space.

He turned to the phone talker who was kneeling slightly behind the hose teams. The men stared at him wide-eyed, pointing their hoses at him like he was the condemned man in front of a firing squad. “To control,” he said. “The fire is stopped. Send in an overhaul team.”

He turned to the nearest nozzleman. “You’re the reflash watch.”

He nodded, breathless, too exhausted to acknowledge the order with words.

Jabo looked again at the dangling body of the navigator, then unplugged his EAB and walked to the ladder.

• • •

The XO stomped into control, covered in water and the stench of the fire. He stopped at the top of the ladder, plugged in his EAB, and took a few breaths, ready to report to the captain. Just as he was about to speak came the announcement that the fire has stopped.

He started to talk again but before he could, the captain held his hand up to silence him. Had he not been wearing his EAB, the XO would have known he was concentrating, looking at the CODC console in front of him.

The XO moved behind him: the screen was filled with columns of green numbers. The lower you looked, the more exotic the data became, derivatives of derivatives. First came depth, speed, then pitch, roll, acceleration on each axis, the rate of acceleration on each axis. They were almost motionless forward, the XO saw, but they were moving slightly upward. He could see from the history on the screen that this was a recent change: they were now positively buoyant. Books would be written, the XO knew, about why the captain hadn’t emergency blown immediately. Time would tell whether or not this was looked at as a wise decision or a disastrous one. The captain waited one more second, looking at the very bottom of the screen, where the rate of change of acceleration was increasing. They were accelerating, ever so slightly, in the upward direction. Then he saw something else, an asymptote they been approaching in the calculus of their motion through the sea. The captain stood up straight.

“Chief of the watch, emergency blow.”

“Emergency blow, aye sir.” The chief of the watch stood and this time threw open both chicken switches, the giant valve handles that channeled high pressure air into the main ballast tanks. It made a huge noise, and frost covered the valve handles as the giant pressure change reduced the temperature of the air that passed through. Almost immediately, the ship took a steep down angle, which was intuitively alarming for the experienced men in control: generally a downward angle meant you were travelling deeper. But in this case it was just because the forward main ballast tanks were nearly destroyed, and more air was filling the aft tanks, pulling that end of the ship higher.

The captain looked at the console again. They were zooming upward. And the rate was increasing. Once they started moving upward, they had another factor in their favor. The ship became more buoyant at shallower depths. As sea pressure decreased, the ship expanded, making it displace more water, and more buoyant.

“Five hundred feet, sir,” said the diving offer.

“Very well,” said the captain.”

“Four hundred…three hundred…two hundred…one hundred…”

There was a sound as the ship broke through the surface of the ocean, the sound of water breaking against the side of the hull. It crashed back down, then settled out.

“Raising number two periscope,” said Kincaid. He quickly spun around. “No close contacts!” he said.

There was a murmur of relief in control.

The captain turned to the XO. “Are you here to tell me what the hell is going on?”

“The navigator is hanging from a pipe in machinery one by his belt. Jabo tells me he did all this.”

The captain nodded, tried to digest what the XO had said. “Any reason you can think of we shouldn’t ventilate the ship?”

The XO turned to Lieutenant Maple, who was on the phones with Machinery One. “Hot spots?”

“They reported no hot spots while we were on our way up.”

The captain turned to Kincaid. “Prepare to ventilate with the low pressure blower — we’ll get the diesel up and running when we can, if we can. Who knows what the damage is down there.”

“Prepare to ventilate with the low pressure blower, aye sir.”

An ET leaned around from the small ESM console behind the conn. “Sir, I have a military freq broadcasting near us. Very near.”

“Jesus Christ,” said the XO. What next. A military frequency? He immediately thought of the Chinese.