Warran Jacobs was concerned. He pulled Hunter over to the navigation chart and pointed, “Captain, this strait narrows down to a few hundred yards at this depth. It’s deep, but real narrow and shoals up fast on either side. This will be like threading a needle in the dark. Recommend we come shallow to give us more room.”
“Sounding one-five fathoms below the keel,” the BQR-17 Fathometer operator reported, confirming the Nav's fears.
“Noted, Nav” Hunter acknowledged. “We can’t afford to come shallow. The cavitation will broadcast our approach. Run continuous soundings on the secure fathometer. Set red soundings at five fathoms and yellow soundings at ten fathoms below the keel. Log your concerns.”
Cavitation, the formation and collapse of millions of tiny bubbles caused by the screw moving quickly through shallow water, sounded like hail on a tin roof magnified a thousand times. It could be heard for many miles. Down deep, the bubbles couldn’t form, so no cavitation. It was a trade-off that Hunter had evaluated and decided that the risk of hitting the bottom was better than the risk of getting shot at. It was the captain’s decision, alone. Warren Jacobs had done his job in voicing his concerns to the captain, but now the decision was made. They would charge ahead, deep and fast.
The submarine rushed onward through the inky black depths. The strait narrowed to a vertical wall of hard lava rock on either side. The slightest miscalculation and they would crash into the rock. Even her two-inch thick HY-80 high-strength steel hull would not withstand the crushing force of seven thousand tons of rushing mass colliding with the solid rock wall. The first indication would be the bone-jarring jolting impact followed almost instantaneously by the inrush of ice cold water compressed to steel hardness by the great depth. In a millisecond, a human being unfortunate enough to be inline with the onrush would be smashed into unrecognizable pulp. The flash fire of compression would incinerate the rest in another millisecond. Incredibly, no one would drown. Everyone would be dead long before that could happen.
Eyes flicked nervously from the fathometer to the dead reckoning bug on the chart. Driven by the ship’s electro-stabilized inertial navigation system, or ESGN, its small dot continuously displayed the best available estimate of their position on the chart. Both the ship’s chronometer and the bug inched forward imperceptibly.
The beads of sweat stood on Seaman Osterburg's deeply furrowed brow as he concentrated to hold the rudder precisely on course. The fathometer watch delivered his reports crisply, but in a noticeably higher pitch. The Chief of the Watch's hands crept over the emergency blow chicken switches in vain hope that he could react fast enough to save the ship if anything went astray.
Hunter did his best to look calm as he leaned alongside the number two periscope. From this vantage-point he could survey the entire control room while sipping his umpteenth cup of coffee. As he had come to expect, his crew was doing their jobs like real professionals.
There was little for him to do but to watch, wait, and worry. The planning was done; the tactical decisions lay in the future. All that remained was to ponder and second-guess. He knew it was counter-productive, but the temptation was irresistible. Was this the best way? Had he chosen correctly? Was he up to the task? All these questions flashed, unanswered, through his mind. He would know the answers soon enough.
After an interminable forty minutes, Jacobs called out that the ship was beyond the narrowest neck of the strait and they were entering more open water.
As if in confirmation, the fathometer watch reported, "Depth under the keel one-zero-zero fathoms and increasing."
With a nod, Hunter said, “Okay, now to blow past that KILO skipper before he knows what’s happening. Helm, left two degrees rudder, steer two-three-five.”
“Left two degrees rudder, steer two-three-five, aye,” Osterburg responded crisply as he turned the wheel slightly to the left. The ship heeled over during the turn and then snapped back upright as Osterburg smoothly swung the rudder to stop SAN FRANCISCO smartly on the new course.
“Sonar, conn, coming left to two-three-five. Heads up for that KILO. I expect him to be to the Southwest and to be shallow.” Hunter replaced the microphone.
“Conn, sonar, aye.” It was the voice of Master Chief Sonarman Holmstad, the best sonarman in the world as far as Hunter was concerned. If there were a KILO out there to detect, Master Chief Holmstad would find him.
A long chain of events that had started at an electronics manufacturer in Des Moines, Iowa, three years previously was about to come to a culmination. A switch designed to cause a standby lubricating oil pump to automatically start if low oil pressure was sensed had been improperly assembled by a line worker suffering from a bad hangover. The switch had somehow passed the quality assurance checks at the factory and later testing onboard the ship, when it was installed last year during a shipyard maintenance period.
It had reached and gone beyond the last cycle that it would operate. Normally this would not be a problem, as the lube oil system was designed to prevent just about any possible loss of the vital lubrication the massive bearings needed to allow the powerful steam turbines, reduction gears and shaft to keep rotating.
The down angle preceding the race through the straits caused a small nut, left by an inattentive shipyard worker, to shake free from the remote recesses of the lube oil sump. The nut was now making its way slowly toward the operating lube oil pump. The close tolerances of the screw type, positive displacement pumps would not allow a
