Attack of the Seawolf - Страница 3

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One deck below, in the middle level, the crews’ mess was half-filled with enlisted men eating traditional bacon-and-eggs breakfasts, their eyes heavy from six hours of watch standing through the middle of the night, the mid watch In the neighboring galley cooks were finishing the last servings of breakfast, cleaning up and preparing for a lunch of “sliders,” hamburgers so greasy they were known to slide down the throat. On the starboard side of the middle level, officers’ country was quiet. The staterooms were empty. The officers’ wardroom, which doubled as a conference room, office, movie screening room and dining room, was crowded with men, some officers, some senior enlisted chiefs and petty officers. Most were dressed in blue cotton coveralls, their silver or gold submariner’s dolphin pins above their left breast pockets, all of them wearing sneakers or crepe-soled shoes for ship silence.

The seat at the head of the table was empty. The man in the seat just to the right of the end seat counted heads, stood up and lifted a phone by the starboard bulkhead communication ship status console.

“Captain, Engineer here,” he said into the phone.

“We’re ready.”

One deck above, in the captain’s stateroom adjacent to the control room, Commander Sean Murphy smiled as he acknowledged and hung up the phone. Murphy was forty, of medium height with the muscular build he had had at the Naval Academy. Since then, of all his classmates, he had probably changed the least. He had yet to lose a single hair to baldness, although gray seemed to be appearing with regularity in his wavy blond hair. He had fought off the weight gain of middle age and was still able to fit into the dress-white uniform he had worn to his graduation eighteen years before. His only wrinkles were the laugh lines around his dark blue eyes, accentuated by hours of squinting out of a type-20 periscope. Murphy was almost always cheerful, his smile softening the planes of an otherwise harsh-looking face. His leadership style had always featured encouragement and reward, rarely threat or admonishment, and it had taken him up the Navy’s ladder quickly, giving him command of the second newest submarine in the entire fleet, the last Los Angeles-class nuclear submarine built before Electric Boat retooled for the new but already canceled Seawolf-class ships.

Here at sea. Murphy was in his element, in the role that he had trained for for nearly three decades-command at sea. Although he could not walk onto the bridge, smell the sea air and scan the horizon with binoculars and see dolphins and seagulls, like his surface-warfare classmates, the smells and sounds of the submarine deep under the Pacific were compensation enough for him. His only regret was that one year hence he would have to turn the boat over to her next skipper and give up the sea for an endless series of desk jobs. The thought filled him with a momentary sadness, and again he found a foreign thought entering his head, to resign his commission and leave the Navy, but then he would be trading a desk job at squadron for a desk job in civilian industry. What was the difference?

He made an effort to put the matter out of his mind, picking up the drill briefing sheets and scanning them before affixing his signature on the bottom. As he considered the schedule for the day — nuclear reactor emergency drills in the morning, tactical drills in the afternoon, perhaps some approach-and-attack runs against surface ships with some simulated torpedo shots — he found his mood improving. Another day of play deep beneath the Pacific with this brand new billion-dollar toy.

Murphy closed the spiral notebook he had been writing in before the call from the wardroom. The notebook was a long letter to his wife Katrina, whom he hadn’t seen in ten weeks since Tampa deployed to WESTPAC; in the next six weeks the book would be filled with his daily notes to her, the only way he knew to ease the ache of being away from her and nine year-old Sean Junior and two-year-old Emily. Murphy tucked the photo of Sean and Emily into the notebook and put it in a cubbyhole on the aft wall of his ten by-ten stateroom, grabbed a red baseball cap from a hook near the door and walked out to the passageway, down the ladder, and into officers’ country and the crowded wardroom.

As he entered the wardroom, a familiar feeling took over as he saw the collection of his officers and men, waiting for him at the table and on the bulkhead sofa seats, some standing, leaning against the bulkheads.

The feeling was an odd mix of affection, gratitude, and obligation. These men had given up their lives and families to go to sea with him, to submerge for months in a steel pipe hundreds of feet underwater, all to drive a nuclear submarine, to poke holes in the ocean in the name of service, the defense of America, in a time of peace, when few if any at home noticed or cared. It was more an honor to be their commander than to command the magnificent machinery of the Tampa itself. As wonderful as the hardware was, it was nothing next to these men. Centuries before John Paul Jones had said, “Men mean more than guns in the rating of a ship.” That was as true in the space age as it had been in the era of wooden sailing ships.

Near the head of the table the Engineer, Lieutenant Commander Jackson “Lube Oil” Vaughn, stood and nodded to Murphy. Vaughn was Murphy’s age, his career delayed by leaving the Navy for several years after his first submarine sea tour. Finding something missing in civilian industry, Vaughn had volunteered to go back to sea. Vaughn’s nickname had survived from a decade before, from his first submarine, Detroit, when he had repaired a DC main lube oil pump himself after the Mechanic Division chief had given up on it. But in the process Vaughn had also flooded engine room lower level with lube oil, requiring a complete main engine shutdown and twenty-four hours with the entire ship’s company to clean up the oily mess. The incident’s survival in his name had always irked Vaughn, but Murphy knew that aboard Detroit he had been much more a hero than a goat from the incident, and the Detroit crew had affectionately called him Lube Oil ever since. Now that he was chief engineer on Tampa, he was rarely called anything other than “Eng,” unless one of his division officers was kidding him on liberty or at a ship’s party.

Vaughn was a solidly built and tall Texan with graying hair and a cowboy drawl. His at-sea beard was fully grown in, since he had quit shaving the day they had left San Diego ten weeks before. Vaughn was a serious officer, which was an advantage when entrusted with the sleeping giant of the ship’s powerful and potentially dangerous nuclear reactor system. Still, Vaughn was capable of sudden bursts of humor and a grin that took over his entire face. But when things went wrong Back Aft, Vaughn was as likely to raise his voice, a stern frown clouding his face, preaching to his officers and men, sometimes even lecturing broken equipment. Ship’s folklore held that more than one stubborn repair problem had been solved shortly after one of Vaughn’s episodes of “counseling” the offending machinery.

“Morning, Skipper,” Vaughn said as Murphy took his seat at the table and Vaughn sat down beside him on the right side.

“How’re you doing, Eng?” Murphy said in his gravelly voice, a signature hoarseness left over from his days as a two-pack-a-day smoker.

“Ready to break the plant?”

“No, sir, just test it a little,” Vaughn drawled, turning to address the men in the room.

“This drill session will start with a reactor scram initiated by the Captain.”

When he finished his briefing, the men grabbed their red caps and left the room for the engineering spaces aft.

Murphy took his place in the forward part of engine room upper level, where the electronic cabinets were jammed forward of maneuvering. Maneuvering was the nuclear-control room, a cubicle twenty feet square where three enlisted nuclear-qualified men operated the reactor under the supervision of a nuclear trained officer. Vaughn walked up to Murphy in the red cap, the red indicating that the wearer was part of the drill team and was to be ignored by the watch standers

“We’re ready, sir,” Vaughn reported.

Murphy nodded and reached into the cabinet next to them, pulled the Plexiglas cover off a switch marked MANUAL SCRAM, and turned the rotary switch lever to the position marked GROUP SCRAM.

All hell broke loose.

* * *

The switch Murphy had operated had done an emergency shutdown of the nuclear reactor, which until that moment had provided steam for the four huge turbines that powered the ship’s screw and electrical grid. The turbines aft of maneuvering, so loud before, like jet engines screaming mere feet away, spun down, their steam gone. As they came to a stop they howled mournfully, their cry deeper in pitch as the rotors slowed, until the room grew eerily quiet.

The lights overhead flickered as the battery picked up the ship’s loads. The fans wound down to a stop, the air-conditioning shut down, and the compartment’s temperature almost instantly climbed twenty degrees at a hundred percent humidity. Murphy broke into a sweat, his face and hands and body soaked — the room had become a sauna.

The Circuit One PA. system crackled through the unnaturally quiet space.

“REACTOR SCRAM. RIG SHIP FOR REDUCED ELECTRICAL.”

The deck tilted up, barely perceptible at first, then becoming as steep as a stairway. Like a scuba diver whose air is suddenly cut off, the ship was no longer able to survive deep and had to fight to get to the surface.

Murphy walked aft to look into the maneuvering room to see how the Engineering Officer of the Watch was handling the frantic actions required during a reactor scram. As Murphy leaned over the chain at the door of the cubicle the reply of the control room came over the overhead speaker above the EOOW’s head.