Phoenix Sub Zero

His head still throbbed, his vision seemed less than clear and his lungs hurt from fighting the air-mask regulator. He had forgot to plug in the hose as he moved toward the aft compartment, which indicated how out of it he was — usually that was all an air-mask user could think of, the next air station — and once he nearly had to pull off the mask to breathe, finally finding a plug in the overhead of the crew’s mess just before fainting. He stood there, doing nothing but breathing. He forced himself to move on, taking the steps down to the tunnel level, stepped through the hatch, emerged into the aft compartment’s middle level and unplugged from the tunnel hose station, dragging the hose up the ladder to the upper level, not sure whether to believe his ears as he got closer to the top of the ladder because he could hear the roaring of steam and the whining of a turbine.

At the top of the ladder he stepped off, took a few puffs from a hose station and moved past maneuvering, freezing in a double-take as he saw that the room was unmanned. Except by the four corpses on the deck. The reactor-control panel and electrical panel were splashed with blood. He looked up from the maneuvering room door and took in the scene of huge CB Mcdonne rushing by, hose in one hand, steam plant procedure book in the other.

“Captain! Get to lower level and start a condensate pump!

Then stand by to start a main feed pump. I’ll get you on the Circuit Two.”

Kane nodded, body aching as he descended the vertical ladders to the lower level two decks down. When he stepped off the ladder his foot splashed into water. He looked around. The compartment couldn’t really be called flooded, but the leaks would need to be pumped, and soon. The equipment was splash-proof but not designed to run under water. He waded aft to the condensate bay, found the motor starters, pressed the first start button. The pump motor spun up to full speed. He started the other three, then waded for ward to the feed-pump bay, waiting for Mcdonne to get a turbine generator up to speed and on the grid so that the feed pump could be started. Finally Mcdonne’s voice boomed through the ship to start the pump. The unit was twice the size of a phone booth and loud coming up to speed. Kane tried to find a phone to see what else needed doing in the lower level. He rang the upper level. No answer.

The nightmare thought struck Kane that something had happened to CB Mcdonne. Without the XO, he would not be able to finish bringing up the plant by himself. Mcdonne was an engineer from Purdue, Kane an English major who’d put up with the nuke program just so he could command but never doing more than the minimum to get by. Since his engineer exam he had forgotten half of all he’d ever known and he hadn’t been involved in a plant startup in eight years.

But when he reached the upper level, CB was in maneuvering at the electrical panel, concentrating on switching breaker switches. After several minutes he stepped to the reactor-control panel, adjusted the rod height, then waved to Kane to follow him.

“We’re up in a normal full-power lineup. Let’s get the burners and scrubbers back on line and clean up the atmosphere. This mask is a goddamn pain.” So, he silently added, was their desperate situation.

Chapter 21 Monday, 30 December

PORTSMOUTH, VIRGINIA

NORFOLK NAVAL SHIPYARD

GRAVING DOCK 4

Pacino looked up from the dock as the wind suddenly picked up, nearly blowing off his hardhat. The wind gusted, then calmed, then again roared through the dock. He checked his watch — almost 11:00 p.m. and the water level in the dock had barely risen to the bottom of Seawolfs cylindrical hull after flooding for almost an hour. The ship looked eerie, almost surreal under the harsh floodlights, but also somehow important, like a NASA shuttle lit up for launch. The green of the hull added to the unreality. Pacino still could barely believe he was going to sea within hours — the dull disconnected feeling of being in the shipyard with a helpless vessel hadn’t left him yet. The frantic mood of the preunderway checklist did not, somehow, feel right here in a graving dock. A pier should be the place a submarine left from to go on a vital mission, not this giant hospital for ships. Still, he felt good that he would get to take the ship down one last time. Up to now he hadn’t focused much on the mission. It was all he could handle just to get the shipyard out of his hair, but now that the boat was really cleared for sea he felt a certain familiarity. He had lived this before. This was what he’d been created to do, a task reserved for him alone — that only he could do.

He began to rebuke himself for being so self-important when Captain Emmitt Stevens rolled up in the white pickup truck. Stevens was grinning as he got out and joined Pacino at the dock lip.

“I think you’ve spent the whole yard availability mooning over your ship from this handrail.”