Phoenix Sub Zero

In the eastern Atlantic, late evening Sunday became early morning Monday as the circling P-3 patrol planes ran out of fuel and departed station to head home, one of the planes remaining as it detected the sound of a Mark 50 torpedo explosion with no sound afterward except that of the other two pursuing torpedoes. But those two weapons were as lost as the lone P-3, never finding their target, searching until they ran out of fuel and shut down. After another half-hour on the search with no sign of a hull breakup, the ocean empty, the P-3 was so low on fuel it had to divert to Rota, Spain. The replacement P-3s arrived an hour into the morning, but by then the sea was calm and quiet except for the lonely noises of a few passing whales and a school of clicking shrimp.

Several messages were transmitted to CINCNAVFORCEMED, which at first ordered the aircraft to continue the search, but the fleet of P-3s could not be maintained airborne indefinitely.

Between maintenance problems and crew fatigue, the planes’ numbers steadily dwindled. By sunrise Monday, only the Burke-class ASW destroyers patrolled the area, and they heard exactly nothing.

The DSRV deep-submergence rescue vehicle Avalon and the supporting equipment and crew that had been flown to Naples for the Augusta wreckage-site search was called away just as submergence operations had commenced. The Avalon’s mission was redefined to go down to the hull of the USS Phoenix.

Assuming she could be found.

Chapter 20 Monday, 30 December

EASTERN ATLANTIC

David Kane opened his swollen eyes and tried to focus. The light was too dim. The headache was worse, compounded by the straps of the mask cinched around his head. It took him some five minutes to rise to his knees, another several to find a seat where he could rest. While he sat on the control seat for attach console position one, not a soul stirred in the dim room. Finally he decided to remove the mask and fumbled with the rubber straps for some minutes before it came off. His first breath of the ship’s air sent him back to the deck, its high carbon-dioxide level like a nail in his skull.

Eventually he struggled back into the mask. He didn’t remember what had happened.

Forty feet aft and fifteen feet below Kane, Executive Officer Mcdonne leaned over the prone figure of Tom Schramford. Mcdonne slapped the engineer’s Plexiglas mask. Schramford was alive but showed no response.

Mcdonne hurried on to the aft compartment to check the damage to the reactor plant. It had to be healthy or they would have to try a dead-stick, ascent to the surface with the emergency blow system, and if that didn’t work … wait for rescue. The alternative of a submarine escape, Mcdonne had decided, was just not viable.

Mcdonne moved into the compartment through the large hatchway and felt the stuffy, humid heat of the shutdown steam plant as it cooled, its only heat sink the atmosphere of the compartment. He entered maneuvering first, sickened at the sight of the blood on the panels. The crew aft had taken the grounding as hard as the control-room crew.

Mcdonne pulled the cold body of the electrical operator off the panel, his hands covered with congealing gore that he wiped on his coveralls as he stared at the panel in the dim light of the battle lantern. He rotated a selector switch on the panel near a DC voltmeter, selected the battery and held his breath. If the battery were still okay the trip up would be less awful. The needle zipped up to 280 volts. Mcdonne let out his breath, reached down to the console and snapped the battery-breaker switch to shut the breaker and bring up the DC grid.

Immediately the lights overhead flickered on and blasted brightness into what had been a nightmare tomb of the sunken submarine. Mcdonne didn’t stop there. He shut the breakers to the DC fuses, then the breakers to the motor-generators, the machines on the deck below that were as big as his car, each built to convert DC battery power to AC to run the minimum ship’s loads in an emergency with no reactor power. The MG sets spun up, and when output voltage and frequency stabilized he shut the output breaker switches and powered up the AC electrical grid. No fires, no explosions, no sounds of arcs of sparks. The battery had been charged up prior to their arriving onstation to search for the Destiny, so there would be plenty of power to start — as long as the gear was healthy.

Mcdonne went forward to the reactor-control cabinets and bent to the scram breakers, his belly straining. When that didn’t work he plopped down on his rear end and pulled up the large levers shutting the breakers, bringing power into the reactor’s control-rod drive mechanisms. The inverter cabinets hummed with the power. Still no fireballs or shorts.