To Kill the Potemkin (5 page)

Cakes
thought Stanley's fuss over the sauce was ludicrous.

"It
looks like gravy to me, Stanley."

The
cook
waved a slotted spoon in Cakes's face. "Once, they say to me, cook for
the
President Marcos. On the
Andrew Jackson
in Subic Bay
the President
Marcos eat his dinner on the ship. Big missile sub, yes, the
Andrew Jackson.
The President Marcos he come and he run his hand all up and down the
missile, like
he love it, then he eat. He like what he eat. He call me from the
galley to the
officers' mess and he say come cook for me in the palace of the
president. No
no, I say, I am loyal to the U.S. Navy. I am qualified as a submarine,
first class, I say. I am
citizen of the U.S.A."

Cakes
was making
his last cruise. The only
member of the crew to have served in World War Two, he had seen a lot
of cooks
in twenty-five years, but never one like Stanley Real.

"Good
God,
Stanley. Where do they find
guys like you?" Cakes muttered as he locked away the officers' flatwear
in
a cabinet. "Whatever happened to white beans and ham hocks?"

In
the forward
crew quarters, in a bunk on
the third tier, Fogarty lay sleepless, all in a sweat. In two days his
world
had changed so completely that he seemed to have forgotten who he was.
The
discipline of the sub often required him to react without thinking, as
if he
were a robot, and he lay now in his bunk pretending that his brain had
been
replaced by a reactor. Someone pulled the control rod a little ways out
of his
head, and he speeded up. Pull it all the way out and he speeds up so
much, he
melts. Push it all the way in and he stops, he scrams.

Fogarty
understood that on a submarine there
was no margin for error. A moment's hesitation could mean disaster.
Fogarty
knew that in time the discipline would become automatic, but the
learning was
painful. Two hours out of Norfolk, as the crew raced through their
first
damage-control drill, he had banged his knee on a bulkhead while
scrambling through a hatch, and it
still hurt. Yet the bruises to his body were nothing compared to what
was being
done to his brain. He was being bombarded by information. A whole new
world was
being revealed to him in the sonar room—the sea and all its
multifarious
sounds—and he was close to overload. Sitting watches with Sorensen was
an
exacting experience. In his casual way, Sorensen was a perfectionist
who never
tolerated mistakes. Off watch, Fogarty frequently found himself running
from
one end of the ship to the other during endlessly repeated drills. Not
a single
watch had passed without a drill, and he felt as if he had a terminal
case of
jet lag. Night and day had been replaced by the rotation of the
watches; his
circadian rhythm was off. He knew it was five o'clock in the
morning—four
hundred feet up there was weather, a sunrise, a sky—but on
Barracuda
there was only machinery, a handful of radioactive metal and one
hundred men.

The
compartment
was dark. His bunk was a tidy
cocoon. To his right he could feel the acoustic rubber insulation that
lined
the pressure hull. To his left a flimsy gray curtain gave him a sense
of
seclusion. He heard the whir of air conditioners, and the sounds of
sleeping
men packed together as carefully as the uranium pellets in the reactor.

His
mind refused
to shut down. Electrical
circuits popped like flashcards into his imagination, demanding
recognition.
When those were exhausted he started going through the signatures of
Soviet
submarines, retrieving the sounds from memory. The Russian ships were
noisy,
but he had had no real idea how loud they were until Sorensen played a
tape of
a Hotel-class fleet ballistic missile submarine. Fogarty thought it was
the
most frightening thing he had ever heard.

Fogarty could hardly believe
that he
was lying in a bunk with the sound of Soviet machinery running through
his
head. All his life he had waited to get on a nuclear-powered sub. When
he was
eight years old he had been electrified by the news that
Nautilus
, the
world's first nuclear-propelled submarine, had put to sea. When
Nautilus
went under the polar icecap and surfaced at the North Pole, Fogarty
made up his
mind that he was going to become a submariner. He read
20,000
Leagues Under the sea
and
Run Silent, Run Deep
so many times his
paperback copies fell apart. His father, who had served on a submarine
in World
War Two, encouraged both his sons to join the navy, but it was young
Mike who
fell in love with subs. In high school Fogarty had puzzled over the
mysteries
of nuclear reactors and spent hours in the library buried in
Jane's Fighting
Ships.
He built model submarines, marvelous, handcrafted
working miniatures
with radio control that struck terror into the hearts of toy
sail-boaters on Lake Minnetonka.

At
first
Fogarty had been impressed by
the
enormous power and fabulous mystique of the nuclear sub.
Nautilus
and
the ships that followed her had conquered the great ocean and opened a
new
frontier. He very much wanted to be part of it.

At
an
early age he had learned to distinguish the different types of
submarines.
First, there were the SSNs, fast attack subs, hunter-killers like
Nautilus
and
Barracuda.
Then there were the FBMs, the Fleet
Ballistic Missile
subs, the city-killers that had captured the public's imagination after
the
first one, the USS
George Washington
, was launched
in 1960.

The
missile subs had frightened him. The idea of a
ship that by itself could destroy a civilization drove a wedge of doubt
into
his adolescent mind. It seemed crazy to him that such a wonderful
device could
be turned to such a terrible purpose. Though he never wavered from his
ambition
to join the Submarine Service, he grew increasingly haunted by dark
visions of
nuclear war with the Russians. In the end World War Three would be
resolved by
submarines. If and when the war occurred, the primary function of
attack
submarines like
Barracuda
would be to find and sink
enemy missile subs.
If they succeeded and sank the enemy "boomers" before they could fire
their missiles, at least something might be preserved. In effect the
SSN was a
defensive weapon, an anti-ballistic missile system. Fogarty wanted very
much to
believe that serving on such a ship was a decent if not noble endeavor,
but a
little corner of his mind remained unconvinced. When he was old enough
to enlist,
he argued with himself. In the years he had spent studying submarines
and naval warfare he had developed an
understanding of the consequences of nuclear war, in particular nuclear
war at
sea. He realized that if the American and Soviet navies started sinking
each
other's ships with nuclear torpedoes, rockets, depth charges and mines,
they
also could very likely kill all marine life and thereby doom life on
earth.

Such
questions bothered Fogarty, but in the end he realized there was only
one place
to find the answers. Besides, no matter what, nothing was going to keep
him off
a sub.

Boot
camp,
sub school, sonar school, and here he was, breathing air-conditioned
air,
listening to Muzak and sitting watches with the great Sorensen himself.
In
sonar school the scuttlebutt had been that Sorensen was the only
American
enlisted man whose name was known to the Russians. He doubted that, but
who
could be sure? In any case he didn't have to deal with Sorensen the
legend but
Sorensen the taskmaster, who had no intention of making Fogarty's life
easy.

Leave
your mind behind.

In
the maneuvering room Master Chief Alexander
Wong, the head nuc, and the three men on watch were discussing the
high-paying
civilian jobs waiting for them when they got out of the navy.
Surrounded by the
maze of instrumentation that accompanied controlled nuclear fission,
the nucs—nuclear
engineers who had
completed a course at one of the navy's nuclear
power schools—figured they had it made.

When
the captain
walked in, though, they
stopped talking and stared at their displays. Springfield stood for
several
minutes in silence, hands on hips, watching the engineers. Without
warning he
reached over Wong's shoulder to the main control panel and flipped a
bright red
switch. The control rods dropped into the reactor vessel and the
reactor
scrammed. The neutron chain reaction came to a complete stop.

With
no chain
reaction, no more heat was
created in the reactor. If the engineers continued to use the residual
heat to
make steam the reactor would cool too quickly and crack, spewing
radioactive
material all over the compartment.

The
reactor
control team responded instantly.

"Close
main steam
feed," ordered
Wong.

The
technician
sitting at the steam panel
spun a wheel and the steam supply to the engine room was cut off. With
no
steam, no power was delivered to the turbines. The ship was now without
main
propulsion power. As the prop stopped turning, the ship lost way and
began to
sink. The trim was off and the ship slowly sank at an angle, stern down.

Wong
grabbed the
intercom. "This is a
drill, this is a drill. Reactor scram, reactor scram. All hands to
damage-control stations. All hands to damage-control stations. This is
a drill.
This is a drill."

Sorensen
felt a
shudder run through the ship
and was out the door and past Barnes before alarms began sounding in
every
compartment.

In
the torpedo
room the alarm burst in on
Lopez and his ritual. Leaving the fly untouched, the scorpion retreated
to a
corner of its cage. "Son of a bitch," Lopez said, "what is it
this time?"

In
the mess
Strother Martin had Paul Newman
trapped inside a church. "What we have here is a failure to—" and the
film stopped dead.

In
the forward
crew quarters Pisaro stood in
the hatch. "This is a drill. Off your asses and hit the deck."

Sleepy
sailors
stumbled out of their bunks
and into their shoes. Like firemen, many slept in their clothes, ready
for such
a moment. Fogarty delayed long enough to zip up his jumpsuit. Pisaro
swatted
him on the butt as he rushed out.

The
passageway
was jammed. The new seamen
collided with one another in the hatches and banged into hard steel at
the
turns. Grunts and howls of pain rattled around in the dim light.

Fogarty
was
dizzy. More than anything on the
ship, the reactor terrified him. Every minute aboard he knew he was
being
irradiated. Yet now he was rushing through the ship because the reactor
was
shut down.

Throughout
the
ship, damage-control teams put
on asbestos suits and checked fire extinguishers. Everything loose was
fastened
down. Everything already fastened down was double-checked.

In
the galley
Stanley was indignant. The cook
could not have explained the physics of a reactor scram, but he knew
that with
no power to his stove his sauce was ruined. He slopped the brown fluid
into a
plastic bag and swore in Tagalog.

Sorensen
moved
rapidly through the ship on
bare feet, one step ahead of the confusion. In the control room Lt.
Hoek still
had the conn. As Sorensen passed through he noticed the blissful look
on the
young officer's face as he gave the commands to recover from the scram.

"Engineering,
rig
for battery
power."

"Batteries
on line and ready to go."

"Very
well, switch to batteries."

"Batteries
engaged."

"Very
well. Blow forward trim tanks."

A
sailor
spun a valve and compressed air was forced into the tanks, expelling
the water
into the sea. The rate of descent slackened.

"Blow
after tanks. Slowly, very slowly. Let's not spill the coffee."

Willie
Joe
was on duty in the sonar room when Sorensen burst in. The screens were
clear.
There was nothing around them but ocean, nine thousand feet of it under
the
keel.

"Okay,
go," Sorensen said. Willie Joe quickly changed into a white asbestos
suit
and hurried to his damage-control station.

Fogarty
came in, eyes red and swollen. Sorensen frowned.

"You
have to get in here quicker than that, Fogarty. Much quicker."

"The
passageway was blocked."

"No
excuses. If people are in your way, jump over them, run through them. I
don't
care, just get in here."

"Aye
aye."

The
ship
was still going down. Fogarty stared at the digital fathometer: six
hundred
fifty, seven hundred, seven hundred fifty feet. His face remained
impassive.
The sea didn't frighten him.

Sorensen
liked his nerve.

At
eight
hundred feet the ship leveled off and stopped. The sea was quiet.

"Tell
me what you hear," Sorensen said.

"The
Atlantic Ocean," Fogarty replied. "The turbogenerator," he added
quickly.

"That's
all?"

Sorensen
punched
a button and the overhead
loudspeakers came on. An intermittent scratching sound came from the
sea.

"What's
that?"
Sorensen asked.

Fogarty
listened.
"I don't know."

"Turtles,"
Sorensen said
cheerfully. "Fishing at one hundred fifty feet. Unusual for them to be
so
far north, but it sounds like they've struck it rich."

Still
in shorts
and wearing sunglasses in the
darkened room, Sorensen scrunched up his face and contorted his voice,
trying
to reproduce turtle noises. He glanced up to make sure a tape was
rolling.