U.S.S. Seawolf

“I wouldn’t say that, sir. But he’s on the case.”

Meanwhile the water continued to blast through the valve and into the torpedo room, the water eventually collecting in the bilges. The engineers worked to close the valve. But the entire electric system in the torpedo room was blown, so it had to be done by hand. Which was incredibly difficult because it was so close to the steel bar of water, which was prone to knock men clean across the compartment.

However great, however small, a leak at depth in a submarine plants fear in the minds of the men who operate her. There was already, inevitably, only one word in the minds of some of them: Thresher, SSN 593, the Navy’s most advanced and complex attack submarine, which sank with all hands 200 miles off Cape Cod on April 10, 1963.

Every submariner knew the story, and in several minds there were already alarming similarities. Thresher had gone to the bottom with her entire crew within 10 minutes of incurring a major unstoppable leak in her engine room. The men of Seawolf had now been working for seven minutes, and that span of time gave them room to think about one of the Navy’s worst-ever disasters, the loss, 42 years earlier, of the top American nuclear submarine because of a leak during her sea trials in the deep submergence phase. Jesus, was this creepy, or what?

The U.S. Navy’s final report on the loss was required reading among officers and irresistible to the men. It laid the likely and primary blame on a catastrophic failure of the casting of a big hull valve that effectively left tons of water bursting every second through a 12-inch-diameter hole in the pressure hull. There was no way to shut the valve off. There was no valve left.

On that fatal spring morning in 1963, the submarine hit the bottom and broke up minutes after it first reported a problem to its accompanying warship USS Skylark. Sixteen officers, 96 enlisted men, and 17 civilian engineers perished with her. And like Seawolf, she was, without doubt, the best submarine in the U.S. Navy.

The captain too had allowed the apparition of the sinking Thresher to flicker across his mind. But being Judd Crocker, he was able to discard it almost instantly. Not so Lt. Commander Linus Clarke. “My God, sir,” he blurted. “I implore you to take this ship to the surface.”

The CO stared at his number two. “XO, take the conn. Slow down to ten knots. Clear your baffles and come to periscope depth…then prepare to surface if I so order. I’m going for’ard to inspect the damage. You have the ship.”

“Aye, sir, I have the ship.”

Judd Crocker could see that the XO’s mouth was dry, and there was a strange cast to Linus’s voice as he ordered, “Helmsman — XO. Make your speed ten…right standard rudder, come to course one-two-zero. Sonar-conn…clearing baffles prior to coming to periscope depth.”

Judd never even bothered to change into seaboots, just made his way for’ard, pondering, as all COs might do at times such as these, why Thresher had imploded and crashed to the bottom with such alarming speed: first indication of a problem 0913, slammed into the seabed 8,000 feet below at 0918.

Seawolf’s CO had always had his own private theories as to why the disaster occurred with such terrifying swiftness. First, he believed that the old method of linking alarm systems was a truly lousy idea, because one instantly triggered the next, which triggered the next, which ended up with an automatic reactor scram when the power cut out.

But the key to Thresher, according to the studies of Judd Crocker, was that she was going too slowly, creeping along 1,000 feet below the surface at only around four knots. When the valve casing burst and the reactor shut down, she had power for just a very few minutes, but she had no momentum, and she used her power revving her turbines, building speed to drive her upward virtually from a standing start. That power, Judd believed, failed when she was only 150 feet below the surface. There just was not sufficient thrust to carry her upward all the way, and she simply slid back down, gathering speed before crashing into the bottom at some 80 knots.

When he arrived at the scene of the flood he was taken aback by the noise, the apparent amount of seawater entering the ship, and the stupefying roar of the leak. Lt. Commander Schulz appeared to have the situation in hand, and he had two burly engineers, wielding wrenches, shutting the valve, soaked through, working in the dark mist in a maze of pipes and valves, fighting their way to get at the bronze fitting.

And even as he stood there, already soaked by the freezing spray, unable to speak because of the noise, he felt Mike Schulz tap him on the shoulder and, grinning, offer a silent thumbs-up.

As the valve was finally shut and the noise stopped, Judd squelched his way back to the control room and announced that the torpedo tube trials would be delayed only as long as it took to pump out the water, repair the electronics and clean the place up. He didn’t want to get too far behind the eight ball. This section of the tests was supposed to be completed by noon the following day.

And once more he ordered a speed change, back to 20 knots, running silent, steady, without further hysterics. The way he liked it.

“Carry on, XO,” he said. “Go back down to eight hundred feet at twenty knots. I’m just going back to change my shoes. I’ll be back in five. Get someone to bring me a cup of coffee, willya? I’ll drink it while you’re changing your underpants.”

Linus Clarke had the sense to laugh.

Thursday evening. June 15, 2006.

The Pineapple Bar. Pearl City, Hawaii.

“Well, guys, we got our celebrity XO back, right?”

Chief Brad Stockton was referring to the one fact that had occurred on this day that everyone knew. Lt. Commander Linus Clarke, fresh from another six-month stint at CIA headquarters, had arrived by air from San Diego to resume his duties on Seawolf. The CO had been palpably noncommittal in his assessment of the merit of that appointment. In Chief Stockton’s view, Judd had always known that Linus would be his number two on this particular mission.

They were leaving in a few days, Seawolf having finally completed her trials. But their destination remained wrapped in secrecy. In Brad’s opinion they were heading southwest for a long way, bound for the Indian Ocean and then the Arabian Sea, where there was the usual unrest along the oil tanker routes, Iran still making veiled threats about her historical ownership of the Persian Gulf.

Among the rest of this cheerful gathering, on this warm tropical night just north of Pearl Harbor, opinion was divided. Petty Officer Chase Utley, the communications operator, thought they might be headed northwest, way up the Pacific toward the Kamchatka Peninsula, where the Russians were reportedly planning to conduct missile tests off their base at Petropavluvsk.

“Jesus, I hope the hell not,” said veteran Seaman engineer Tony Fontana. “That place is the goddamned end of the world, coast of Siberia for Christ’s sake. We’d be about ten thousand miles from the nearest bar.”

“Well, how the hell could that matter?” said Chase. “We never get out of the ship on these patrols anyway.”

“That’s not the point,” retorted Fontana. “It’s just a feeling of being at least somewhere close to civilization.”

“For civilization read Budweiser,” said Stockton, grinning.

“I’m serious,” added Fontana. “You guys don’t understand. There’s a terrible feeling…kinda desolate when you’re operating at the absolute ass-end of the world off Siberia. You just know there’s nothing there, nothing in the sea, or even on the land, ’cept for rocks and trees and shit. Something happens, you’re a dead sonofabitch, thousands of miles from anywhere.”

“You ever been up to the Kamchatka?”

“Well, no. But I used to know a guy whose cousin had been there!”

They all fell over laughing. Fontana was a funny guy who really should have gone for a career in standup comedy, or at least on television. He’d never quite advanced as he should have in the Navy, owing to a determination to be the last man to leave any party. He’d twice missed his ship, which had been regarded as a character flaw by the powers that be. But the tall, tough, Ohio-born engineer was outstanding at his job, and various COs had found a way to get him forgiven. Just as well, in the opinion of Brad Stockton. Tony Fontana had been the man who had shut the valve in the torpedo room the previous October.

At this point newly promoted Petty Officer Third Class Andy Cannizaro from Mandeville, Louisiana, arrived