Choke Point

difficulty, which meant air circulation wasn’t up to par. The world being divided into those who are always too hot and those who are too cold, the “hot” mechanics were complaining so much it was suggested that the two enormous steel doors dividing the hanger into three distinct areas be opened. The officer of the deck refused. The idea of having the two huge doors closed in these hectic hours of getting underway was that if a fire or explosion occurred in one or more of the planes or from the ordnance — of which there was three thousand tons, in addition to the ship’s 2.68 million gallons of aviation fuel — the doors would seal off the hangar into three distinct zones, each as survivable as the other two thousand watertight compartments throughout the twenty-three transverse and longitudinal bulkheads.

Admiral Bressard looked ahead into the darkness of the Juan de Fuca Strait and at the two protective Aegis cruisers. The one off to his right was all but invisible against the rugged mass that was the southern coast of Vancouver Island. The silhouette of the other Aegis, on the Turner’s left flank, was lost against the coast of Washington’s Olympic peninsula. Then came the 4,315-ton Arleigh Burke — class destroyer squadron, two abaft and two astern of the carrier, and up ahead one of the two escorting flank attack submarines, the smallest vessels in Turner’s battle group. But having twelve vertical launch tubes for nuclear warhead Tomahawk cruise missiles, each of the converted Lafayette-class subs packed a powerful punch. The other sub, maintaining station farther west, moving slowly at sixty feet below to join the battle group, was Rorke’s 7,800-ton Utah, none of its crew happy at having been so near yet so far from home.

Alicia Mayne was the unhappiest of all, keen to get off the boat onto terra firma and back to her lab. She liked Rorke and the super politeness of the Utah’s crew, a naval tradition whether on sub or carrier, where long, narrow passageways, needed to make room for more equipment and close living quarters, demanded exceptional courtesy. But Alicia yearned for the lavish comforts of a full-size bedroom, the sheer pleasure of a walk outside, the sensuous feel of rain on one’s face. No matter how much modern commentators emphasized the roominess of the 377-foot-long, thirty-four-foot-diameter Virginia sub compared to other subs, it was still a submarine, a cooped-up world in which the normal rhythms of life ashore are lost. Only the “redded out” lighting, making the submariners’ eyes more able to adjust from red to the darkness, should they have to surface, told them it was night in the world above.

Alicia could smell steaks cooking in the galley, and she heard the whir of the big mixer mashing potatoes and the thud from what she guessed was something bumping against the hull, forward and below the sail. Then all hell broke loose.

The explosion shook the Utah like a toy, things crashing everywhere, burned wires smoking, and suddenly the pastel blue of the wardroom walls bulged out in huge blisters from the intense heat. She could hear men yelling and screaming, the sub still shaking so violently that what she took to be dust falling was in fact fine particles of pipe-wrap insulation squeezing through multiple fissures in the pipes’ sheathing. From a broken elbow joint, superheated jets of steam sliced across the passageway in which she could already hear doors and hatches slamming shut, turning the long, cigar-shaped sub into a series of watertight compartments, so that whatever section had been hit might be effectively sealed off from all others.

Alarms continued to sound, the OOD calling for damage reports as Rorke ran from his stateroom to Control and other men rushed to their stations. Rorke could feel the sub desperately trying to assume her emergency up angle in order to surface, but the forward ballast tanks were obviously damaged. In fact, there was a gash approximately three and a half by one foot wide on the starboard bow tank between the chin’s sonar array and the sail. The pumps seemed unable to evict the torrent of water required to give the Utah the positive buoyancy she needed to rise, which she had to do quickly before becoming so heavy she’d be driven to the bottom. Rorke immediately ordered all engines stopped, diving planes at surfacing elevation, and the crew ready to abandon ship.

The starboard-side bulkhead of the battered forward tank was showing spider fissures visible only on the control monitor’s zoom, and in the few seconds it took for the operator to tell the OOD about it, the spidery fissures had gone to a “visible web,” the tiny cracks emitting powerful pencil-lead-thin jets of water. Rorke quickly realized that with the air pressure coils in the ballast tank ruptured, there was no hope of the Utah surviving, unless he could somehow achieve an emergency blow. In its present fragile state, the boat hovered dangerously close to negative buoyancy. If that happened, it would plunge, reaching breakneck speeds, plummeting past its crush depth and smashing into the seabed, its air-filled chambers popping like tin cans under the sledgehammer weight of the ocean.

In a matter of milliseconds the explosion of the seabed-planted mine had not only ruptured Utah’s ballast tank, but generated a pulsating white-domed bubble of carbon dioxide and methane gas that struck the aft bulkhead above the prop. The speed of the explosion’s shock waves, excited by the prop’s normal cavitation or bubble-producing motion, created a partial vacuum. The sudden whack of the explosion’s pressure wave, traveling at Mach 4, deformed then oscillated the entire structure of the sub, in effect whipping the boat, ripping bulkheads away from their longitudinal stiffeners, and causing massive flooding.

Now that the integrity of a half-dozen previously watertight compartments was breached, the flooding could not be contained, and thirty-two officers and men in departments aft of the sail drowned within minutes of the roaring deluge invading their home. The encased pipelike housing for the SOSUS “python” was torn asunder from the sub’s flank like some long worm tube, breaking up, its contents of black, oil-encased “hockey puck” microphones spilling into a frenzy of white water. It marked the catastrophic end of one of America’s preeminent warships, a weapons platform that had contained more than twice the firepower of all the ordnance dropped by all combatants in World War II.

Rorke had ordered Beaufort life raft drums released, and Alicia Mayne to be the first out of the sail’s hatch. She’d been through the drill often enough, but actually doing it, hitting the cold, ear-dinning horror of a battering in total darkness, was terrifying. Her body was caught in the vicious vortexes of contrary forces from the sinking boat and the boiling sea, and further battered by debris, her arms flailing, breath failing, her nostrils clogged. Her chest seemed about to explode, and her lips felt as if they were afire in the fierce upstream of acidic effervescence that was now highly poisonous due to the chemical reaction between seawater and the dying sub’s gutted battery compartment.

The resulting greenish-yellow clouds of dirty chlorine that had already suffocated a dozen or more of Rorke’s crew were now visible as a smudge on Darkstar’s routine overflight, the explosion itself heard by the handful of isolated settlements on both the American and Canadian sides of the fifteen-mile-wide strait. Some of the submariners who, in fate’s strange grasp, had popped through the chaos of swirling sea and debris to the surface of the strait, were relatively unharmed. The screaming of others was a terrible testimony to the burns and injuries inflicted by the firespill spreading across the previously black surface of the sea, its flames illuminating hundreds of pieces of debris, the unidentifiable shapes, some afire, floating around and around Alicia and everyone else who’d made it out.

Alicia involuntarily opened her mouth to scream as a corpse, its head all but severed, floating beside the body, bumped into her on the downward slide of a cresting wave. Her mouth, however, made no sound, and instead sucked in the scum of oil and a slippery, cold, choking substance that made her gag. It could have been a melange of canned or frozen food that had exploded from containers as the Utah imploded from the mine’s pressure wave, but convinced that she’d swallowed human flesh, albeit inadvertently, the thought gripped her with an overwhelming revulsion. “Captain!” she screamed. But all she could hear was the agony of survivors and of the dying, and then a wave crashed into her, pushing her into the burning oil slick.

Through his binoculars high in the Turner’s island, Admiral Keach, the overall commander of the carrier’s battle group, could see the oil slick moving up and down like a fiery island, illuminating the final seconds of the Utah before she disappeared piecemeal below the heaving crimson-slashed surface of the strait. Keach had already ordered the carrier’s rescue Sea Knight helicopters aloft. Standing firm against the instinctive desire of all his battle group’s sailors to rush to help their stricken comrades from the Utah, Keach ordered all other elements of the battle group to stay where they were until further notice. On Turner’s bridge, Ensign Myers, though trying to hide his disgust with Keach’s decision, murmured his disapproval.

The admiral took it as a chance to educate the officer as well as to chastise him for not keeping his feelings to himself. “Mr. Myers,” he said. “What would you do as captain of one of the Aegis or destroyers? Go full steam