U.S.S. Seawolf Read Online Free Page B

of the boat, the senior enlisted man aboard the submarine, now in the control room, Master Chief Petty Officer Brad Stockton from Georgia.
    “Is he crazy? This submarine is sinking. We’ve got an unbelievable leak in the torpedo room. Jesus Christ! We gotta get to the surface.”
    “Easy, sir,” replied the veteran master chief. “The boss knows what he’s doing.”
    Linus Clarke stared at Brad in disbelief. “That water’s gonna sink us. He hasn’t seen it. I have.” And he turned as if to argue further with his captain. But the master chief grabbed his arm in a steel grip and hissed, “STEADY, SIR.”
    Judd Crocker turned to his XO and quietly asked, “Did you shut the bulkhead door behind you?”
    Linus Clarke hesitated, and then admitted, “Er…nossir.”
    “Good,” said the CO. “Check it’s still open.”
    Linus began to wonder if he could get anything right today, and moved off to check the door.
    Judd Crocker turned to the combat systems officer now standing beside him, Lt. Commander Cy Rothstein, the smooth, composed intellect of the ship, known locally as “Einstein.”
    “This may be quite minor, Cy,” he said. “I just want tocool it. I know a leak at depth is unnerving. But I can’t feel the pressure increasing in my ears. And look at the barometer. No change. Even if we are taking on water, the flow rate is small, the leak is small. Right now I have to conclude it’s not sinking us.
    “I don’t know how bad it is down there, Cy. But the trim’s not altering significantly. I’m damn sure it’s not going to sink us in the next twenty minutes. Go deal with the problem. Aside from a lot of noise and flooding, which we seem to be coping with, there’s nothing disastrous happening…yet. So let’s not act as if there is. Because that way we might make it worse.”
    “Aye, sir.”
    Both men knew that only the most thorough mental preparation by the CO for all imaginable eventualities will ultimately ensure the survival of the crew. Fear is the enemy when things go wrong, because panic follows fear, and inappropriate reaction follows panic. Confusion follows that, with disaster close behind them all. Judd Crocker knew the rules. Especially the unwritten ones.
    At this point Master Chief Stockton and Linus Clarke reentered the control room.
    “Hi, Brad. How do we look?”
    “It’s only a tube vent valve, sir. We don’t have a hole punched in the hull or anything. It’s just a matter of shutting the damn thing and then getting the water pumped out.”
    “Someone make the wrong switch?”
    “Guess so.”
    “Schulz got it in hand?”
    “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 barof 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