Phoenix Sub Zero

“Atmosphere’s in spec,” Kane said. “Pull the masks off the men and stow them. Find the corpsman or one of his first-aid people and let’s get the casualties into the crew’s mess. Grab whoever you can find conscious to help you.”

“Reactor okay. Skipper? Everything up?”

“So far. Full power lineup, running the atmosphere equipment.

XO’s warming the main engines. He’s got the show aft. Once you get the casualties below we’ll see who we’ve got to man the watches, check out the hovering system and see if we can drive off the bottom. Go on, I’ll be putting the healthy folks on the gear, see how bad things are forward.”

Houser felt like asking where they would go if they got off the bottom, but he moved to his task, pulling one of the plotters up off the deck and taking off his mask.

Kane walked through the forward door to sonar, careful not to step on the prone forms of the sonarmen. He found Sanderson rubbing his forehead, in obvious pain.

“Senior. How do you feel?”

Sanderson started to glare until even that effort seemed to exhaust him. Kane pulled the chief sonarman to his feet and sat him in one of the control seats at the Q-5 console.

“I could use a strong cup of coffee.”

Kane slapped his back and went through the forward door into the passageway.

Aft, in the reactor-compartment tunnel, Tom Schramford rubbed his head, and pulled himself to his feet by grabbing onto a length of exposed XC piping. He unplugged the air mask, walked slowly aft and noted the overhead fluorescent lights were on. He emerged into the aft compartment through the tight opening of the hatch, amazed to hear the roaring of steam down the headers, the loud shrieking of the turbines, the curtain of hot humid air stunning and welcome.

He went on to maneuvering, looked in and saw blood on the panels, corpses of his operators lying in a heap on the deck, one of them Ensign Michell, the engineering officer of the watch, the younger brother of an acquaintance from his college days. Michell’s throat had been opened by an exposed switch or metal panel corner, a substantial puddle of the youngster’s blood on the deck. The panel operators, though not as sickening to see as Michell, were just as dead, limbs sticking up into the air in grotesque rigor mortis. Schramford saw that the reactor power-meter needle read eighteen percent, that average coolant temperature was low out of the green band at 499 degrees. He reached for the rod lever and pulled the control rods out an inch, the temperature slowly rising back up into the green band at 502. A lone blinking light shone from the annunciator section on the panel, the alarm face marked hi rad — rx compt. The fuel assemblies must have experienced some melting from the torpedo evasion, he figured, and now the reactor compartment had a high radiation level. He looked over at a panel on the starboard side and flipped a rotary switch several times, saw that radiation levels in the reactor compartment were ten times normal levels. The upper level of the aft compartment, the maneuvering room included, was now a high radiation area. But it was not at a lethal level. At least not yet.

Schramford left maneuvering and found Mcdonne aft in the upper level between the main engines, reading a gaugeboard. The XO saw him, nodded, “Hi, Eng, you look like hell,” and then disappeared behind the turbines to check bearing temperatures.

Schramford returned to the maneuvering room, dragged the corpses out of the room and placed them in the motor-control cabinet space, then went back to maneuvering, found a rag and a bottle of cleaner and began slowly cleaning the blood off the panels.

Forward, in the crew’s mess, Houser and the chief corpsman, a chief named Ives with red hair and fair skin covered with freckles, had assembled the casualties, some of the living on the six dinette tables, some on the benches, several on the deck, covered with blankets. Ives counted twenty-two injured too badly to return to duty, half of them from broken limbs, nine still unconscious from head injuries.

In the control room Kane had assembled a skeleton crew of watchstanders at the ballast-control and ship-control panels.

A phone on the conn periscope platform buzzed. It was Mcdonne.

“Skipper, I’ve checked out the hovering system and the auxiliary seawater systems. I’ve got Schramford aft. He’s got the drain pump ready to clear out the aft compartment.

There’s some high bilge levels in the reactor compartment we’ll have to pump. Do we have a chief of the watch?”

“I’ve got Henderson stationed. He’s got a bad arm and a sprained ankle but he’ll be okay.”

“Good. Go ahead and have him pump out the compartments on the drain pump. I want to test the trim pump on depth-control one when he’s done.”

Houser returned to the control room, his Hawaiian shirt covered with blood smears. He stood near the conn while the drain pump came up to speed and dewatered the aft compartment, then the reactor compartment and finally the forward compartment torpedo room bilges.