The Command (56 page)

“You saw it go?” Bendt asked her. “Sure?”

“The flexible coupling, the one that goes from the fire pump to the manifold? It sprayed me when I was trying to get past. It's fucked, all right.”

“That might be where all this fucking water's coming from, too,” Bendt said.

Helm mused, “If the flex coupling's busted, you'll have flooding from two directions at once. Up from the sea chest, down from the firemain system.”

“Sure, we're pumping it in at the top, it's running out at the bottom. That's why it's not holding pressure,” Bendt said. He took the sound-powered phones from one of the talkers, spoke to Central. Then gave it back, looking grim. “The remote valve doesn't work on the sea chest. None of the remote valves are working. The hydraulics are fucked.”

Helm looked around, past her, pointed to Sanders. “Richochet. Remember where the fire pump discharge valve is? Yellow wheel? Lower level? Under the main engine enclosure?”

“Uh—sort of.”

“Sort of. And the suction valve?”

He shook his head. Helm looked frustrated. Finally he looked to her. “Okay. Cober.
You
remember where the fire pump discharge valve is?”

She nodded. “And the sea suction valve's the red one, with the wheel. Under the deck plates, by the fire pump.”

He studied her. “We got to close both those valves. First the yellow one. Then the red one. You up for going back in?”

“But it's flooded down there.”

“I know. But we're all gonna be playing tag with the sharks if we don't get those valves closed.”

She was scared. She didn't want to go back in there. But Mick was right. They had to do it. She put her head down and shrugged.

HOTCHKISS called down that Radio had rigged a whip antenna and raised a merchant out of Cyprus. She was asking him to relay the information about their sinking condition to any warship that answered up. Dan said that was fine, would he alter course to stand by them? Hotchkiss told him the master said he had to request permission from his owners to alter course more than ten miles. Dan thought this was bullshit, but couldn't think of anything he could do about it. He told her to keep trying to pass traffic to
Moosbrugger
and
Kocatepe.
“How's the flooding?”

“It's not going too great down here, Claudia. We'd better start a life raft inventory.”

“I sent Yerega out to check, but I don't want anybody exposed outside the skin of the ship long. He says most of the rafts got blown over the side. Some of the containers are cracked but they might still inflate.”

“Faith? Fear?”

“Gone. Wait one.” She went off the line, then came back. “Bad news from the radiological team. There's heavy alpha contamination all the way up the starboard side. Very heavy—some patches count at three hundred rads an hour.”

“Three hundred?”

“Uh-huh. So it was a nuclear burst, all right—and a really, really filthy one. We'll stay at Circle William and try to get the washdown system going. Are we going to have firemain pressure anytime soon?”

“That's kind of up in the air right now.”

“Okay, but we got to get this stuff washed off. The longer it stays, the higher dose we're accumulating. I'm stripping everybody who was topside and sending them through decon. I've got to rotate my radiological team, they're over safe stay time already. Everybody else needs to go to deep shelter stations, right now.”

Dan held the phone, overcome by a sense of disorientation. The U.S. Navy had drilled and trained for nuclear war for nearly fifty years. Now, just as the enemy they'd feared most had gone away, he was facing it for real.

Suddenly all the material about isotopes and half-lives and biological damage that had seemed so esoteric had become a deadly reality. Three hundred rads an hour was serious contamination. On
Horn,
the maximum permissible exposure was a hundred and fifty rads, and the dose to be rated as a casualty was two hundred and fifty. The book said half the men who got six hundred rads would die.

Radiation from a nuclear burst came in two forms. Initial radiation, emitted during the first seconds of the fireball's existence, came from the actual fission of the warhead. It was powerful but transient, gamma rays and neutrons. No way to estimate how much the personnel topside had gotten from that source. The second wave was residual, from the base surge and the fallout cloud… mainly alpha and beta particles, slower acting but longer-lived.

Whatever had just gone off had obviously been intensely dirty, grossly radioactive, and
Horn
had been caught square under the area of maximum fallout. But if they couldn't stop the flooding, they'd all be
in the water with it. He looked at his watch. Only twenty minutes had passed since the detonation.

“You there? Concur with deep shelter?”

“Yeah.” He told her to get that word to the battle dressing stations, make sure they knew any wounded from topside were probably contaminated, too.

As he was talking, a decon team had come in. They stood waiting behind him. He told Danenhower to start double-checking Circle William settings, make absolutely sure some neglected fan or topside access wasn't sucking contamination into the ship. Then he pushed back the chair and stepped into a trash bag one of the masked and suited team spread on deck.

Working from both sides with heavy shears, they cut his uniform off down to the skin, dropping the scraps into the bag. He stepped out of his shoes and stood naked except for the neck brace. Porter was talking into the phone, not looking at him. Letting the decon guys help him, he went clumsily through the portside hatch and up to the main deck level and aft, still inside the skin of the ship, until he got to after decon. He caught his breath as the spray of cold water hit him, and they started scrubbing.

THIS time the air in the engine room was much hotter. Cobie figured heat rose, it might not be so bad at the lower levels. At least she hoped not. They weren't pulling a hose now, so it was easier to shuffle along. Fear gave her energy, but she felt fatigue growing under it. She kept pulling the mask straps tighter, till it felt like it was crushing the back of her head. Her skin itched where she'd buttoned the collar and wristcuffs of her coveralls. She wondered if that was the toxic gas, or what.

Main One was no longer the place she'd worked and stood watch in. Except for the dying glow of the remaining emergency lights it was completely dark. They had power back in the passageway but couldn't put power back into the space. Not with wires dangling loose in saltwater. At least the fire was out now. She and Helm had to feel their way, point their lanterns where they were going to step. They got to the boiler flat and inched along to the ladder down to the PLCC flat. Then looked down to see the water surging there, black, oily-looking, absorbing light. She couldn't tell how deep it was or what was underneath.

Mick put his face close and yelled through the speaking diaphragm, “Me first.”

She nodded. He slid down the ladder, letting boots, then legs, then lower body in little by little, like inching into a chilly pool. Only this one was covered with oil and smoking in the heat. If it reflashed they'd die screaming, clawing at their faces as the pure oxygen they were breathing ignited.

When he let go of the ladder, he was waist-deep. He glanced back, and she saw the fear in his eyes. Somehow it gave her the courage to go down after him. Only her boots slipped on the slick treads, her hands let go and she splashed down and floundered around, almost falling. It was up to her chest. Hell, almost to her neck, when the ship rolled and a black wave came out of the dark and surged up toward her face.

She pointed her lantern the length of the flat. Gauge faces flashed at the far end. The water sloped slowly back and forth above the counter level. She remembered how the Porn King used to sleep under it with his jacket over his head. Where was he? They should have seen his body by now, at least. Unless he was
under
this stuff.

Helm started wading toward the panel. She forced her fingers to un-clamp from the handrail and waded after him. Hoping she had a good seal on the OBA mask. They'd told her never to let the canister touch oil or fuel. But it was all over the water, a thick brown viscous coat of it. With hydraulic oil and that synthetic shit she wasn't supposed to touch and everything else mixed in, too.

Finally she got to the console. To her left was the main engine enclosure. To her right a short ladder leading down to the generator flat. But now it was invisible under the black undulating blanket. One more level below this. Where the firemain valves were. But they were back under the main engine, and deep under water by now. How the fuck were they going to get to them?

In the darkness she felt Helm pull her head in close to his. Like for a kiss. Only he was yelling, through the creak of the ship and the hammer of her heart, through the buzzing diaphragm: “I'm going for the firemain suction. That's the first one we got to close.”

She nodded, already figuring that. Once it was closed, Main Control could pressurize the loop without pumping more water into the engine room. But each time she'd looked, the water level was higher. It was already almost to where Helm had once shown her the outside water-line was.

She shouted back, “What you want me to do?”

“Wait here.”

That didn't sound too demanding. She watched as he peered down, trying to figure which way he'd go. She'd guess down the ladder to the generator flat, duck under the deck beneath the PLCC—it looked like there was a couple inches of air space yet under it—and down three more steps to the lower level. Then across to the lube oil coalescers, around them to the right, then hang a left.

It'd take about six seconds to walk it. If it wasn't underwater, with who knew what crap fallen down from above blocking the way. You'd be right under the big main engine bracing. The mass of the reduction gear aft of that. Nothing but solid steel bulkhead forward. And no way out except back the route you'd just come.

Helm was pulling off his OBA. Her light flashed off the stainless steel of one of the emergency escape canisters. He was looking down into the smoothly rolling surface. Then he was gone, and she was alone in the echoing and clanging and the rush of water and the slamming of her heartbeat in her ears. She couldn't even see his lantern. She was shaking, and not just with the cold of the sea.

“Shit, shit, shit,” she mumbled around the mouthpiece. She tried to slow her breathing. Like Lamaze when she had Kaitlyn. In, two, three. Out, two, three, four. Her heart slowed a little and she sloshed over to the engine enclosure and knelt in the smoking fuel that covered the deck plates, trying to see past it to where he ought to be by now. But she couldn't see anything.

She realized she should be timing him. The little SEEDs, the emergency breathing devices didn't hold much air. Three, at the most four breaths. Just enough to get you out of a space. She brought her wrist above the water. Hard making out the sweep hand through the eyepieces. The plastic was going foggy, as if something was eating at it. But at last she acquired it and followed it around. Once. Then again.

She was beginning to feel frightened. More scared than she'd ever been before in her life. Except maybe when she'd gone into labor, surprised at the pain. The doctor had told her it wouldn't hurt. Like
he
would know … She started to back away from the black water that nibbled at her boots as the ship rolled and things clanked above her. Heavy things, sounding like they were getting ready to come down on her head.

A hammering rose from the darkness. It grew louder. Then faded. Till at last there was only silence again, or as close to silence as the creak and bang of a dying ship could approach.

She passed her beam over the black, and saw no sign of Helm. No bubbles. Nothing. There wasn't any other way out. The noise must have been his last despairing effort to escape.

She looked back up the way they'd come, seeing that already, in the time they'd been down here, the water had risen at least another foot. The emergency lamps were fading, cherry filaments slowly being eaten by the dark. Her own beam searched panels, hydraulic lines, the blank vertical tombstone of the console. The ship was dying. And she was deep in it, buried beneath the machinery and decks that towered above.

Her hands went to the mask. Her breath seemed to have a mind of its own, sucking in the rubber cheekpieces again and again. She couldn't get enough air. She had to get out.

She turned and began wading back toward the ladder. The viscid mixture tided toward her, reaching nearly to her knees.

Then she stopped. Stared upward into the dark. At a gleam of light far, far above.

Somebody still had to close that valve.

Mouth dry, mind a dreadful milling of fear, she looked back again toward the sullenly waiting water. She saw the way she had to go, like a jerky handheld camera shot from a horror movie in front of her rapidly blinking eyes. Down, and to the left, and straight, and left again. Down to the valve, under the deck plate by the bulk of the fire pump. Turn it. And then back.

She knew the way. But she didn't know what else was down there. What Helm had run into. That had trapped him. And killed him.

She took another step. Then stopped again. Grabbed the mask and wrenched at it with both hands, forcing her face down into it. Sucking desperately at the smoky dregs.

Then she turned around, and waded back to the ladder. The water came to her knees again. Then to her waist.

She heard a gurgle as she sucked, and knew the water had reached her breathing tubes. OBAs weren't made to be submerged. She panted rapidly. Getting all the air she could. Before there wouldn't be any more.

She groped in her coveralls, and her gloved fingers felt the rounded hardness of the SEED.

UNDER the deck it was blacker than a starless night in Louisiana. She still had the heavy waterproof battle lantern in her hand. She waved it
back and forth as she pushed her way under the steel deck, caught a gray smooth gleam ahead.