Phoenix Sub Zero

David Kane’s mind was operating on parallel tracks, and if he were not seconds from disaster he might have found the effect fascinating, the sudden expanded mental capacity the result of the rush of adrenaline and his own sense that he probably had less than thirty seconds to live.

Phoenix’s deck had plunged to a steep down-angle as a result of the diving-angle on the stern planes. One part of Kane’s mind acted as a recorder and impartial observer, seeing that the inclinometer mounted above the ballast-control panel was off the scale, which would be over a fifty-degree down-angle. A grease pencil on a string suspended from the O.O.D’s status board hung very nearly horizontal relative to the deck — the ship was headed damn near straight down, a fact Kane could swear to if for no other reason than he and the other battle stations watchstanders had fallen to the forward bulkhead, the cluster of almost two dozen bodies at rest against the door to the forward passageway, the door to sonar and the ship-control station. The stern planesman was out cold after being slammed into his control yoke by the hit he took from XO Mcdonne, the safety harness either failing or unused. The diving officer was the man next in line to save the ship, his duties to supervise ship’s course and depth and angle, this incident fitting right into his job description, but who was not up to the task. Usually the DO sat behind the flight-deck-style controls, behind the console that separated helmsman/stern planesman from the fairwater planes man.

He had been knocked from his seat by the impact of several plotters and a phone talker. the pile at rest against the ship-control panel, blocking view of the plane indicators and depth gauge. Houser, the O.O.D, was apparently missing, but could have been under the pile of bodies. Which left Kane himself, who was initially on the conn and had slid down the deck and hit someone else, too pumped up to experience the shock or surprise he would have expected.

It was obvious to Kane that the ship was dying and had only seconds to go before changing from a submarine to a submerged debris field. The ship had been going full-out at the time of the Nagasaki detonation, the initial blast giving them a slight up-angle, then suddenly pushing them into a dive. The reactor had tripped, that much was obvious from the loss of the ventilation system. The ship would now plunge until it exceeded crush depth, at 1,300 feet below the surface, a trip that would probably take only a few seconds.

Once below 1,300, the sea pressure outside the hull would become greater than the ship was designed for, the enormous force built up from the weight of the water above. The submarine force had lost three nuclear subs to the crushing pressure; the first, the Thresher in 1963, went down on sea trials and made a crater when it hit the bottom. There was not much left of her intact, just a square mile of ocean bottom scattered with wreckage.

If the water was not deep enough to crush the hull, the ship would hit bottom and rupture like an egg hurled to the kitchen floor. A fleeting mental vision flashed through Kane’s mind, that when the Russian submarine Komsomolets sank a decade before, it had hit the rocky bottom of the Norwegian Sea so hard that it broke into several pieces, two of her own torpedoes detonating from the violent impact.

Kane next saw the chart as if it were suspended in front of his face, blocking his nightmare view of his submarine.

The mouth of the strait had a very rocky bottom with scattered patches of sand. And the depth was only 225 fathoms, a little over 1,300 feet. The good news was that at least the ship wouldn’t implode from sea pressure, but the bad news was it would end up worse off than the Komsomolets. These thoughts all ran through Kane’s mind in less than a few seconds, and during that time the ship dived over 210 feet deeper.

The second track of Kane’s mind was devoted entirely to action, most of it reflex. Years before at submarine school an instructor could walk by in the hallway and casually say “jam dive,” and Kane would have shouted back “all back full, emergency blow forward, full rise on the bowplanes.”

Immediate actions. All automatic. All useless here … because ordering up “back full” meant the ship needed propulsion to back down with the screw and pull the ship out of the dive, and there was no power; because ordering an emergency blow meant reaching the ballast-control panel, a mere twelve feet away, twelve feet of obstacles, piled bodies, control seats, consoles, with no walkway now that the ship was vertical; and to get full rise on the planes, the fairwater planes man might as well have been as remote as the ballast panel.