‘If it was up to me, I would have had you both shot. Now.’
‘Is Weps alive, XO?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ said the XO. He gave me a tight smile. ‘He’s unconscious, but alive.’
‘Will he come around?’
‘We don’t know. But if he does we will launch those missiles, I can assure you.’
We waited.
The submarine was still operating under ‘operational security condition alpha’, which was the quietest operational mode. Non-essential machines such as washing machines, fans and the trash compactor were turned off, and the crew were particularly vigilant to avoid accidental bumps and clangs known as ‘transients’ which might alert Soviet attack submarines in the area.
A wrench dropped on the floor definitely counted as a transient.
So the submarine was quiet. In the XO’s stateroom we should still be able to hear announcements over the 1-MC shipwide broadcasts, but not the more specific orders. Changes in depth might give us a clue as to what was going on – the submarine would tilt either up or down.
Lars’s pacing was irritating me. It was difficult enough sitting still when you had a specific role as part of the crew, you knew what was going on and you had been trained for it.
But sitting on a bunk in a tiny stateroom with no clue what was happening in the outside world? That was difficult.
The speaker in the stateroom kicked into life. ‘Secure from battle stations missile.’ It was the captain’s voice.
A few seconds later the floor tilted downwards from the right of the stateroom, the direction of the bow. The crew was standing down from battle stations missile and we were descending.
‘What do you think that means?’ said Lars.
‘I guess it must mean that Craig hasn’t come around,’ I said. ‘They were probably waiting for him to wake up and tell them the combination. But he hasn’t, so they have given up on launching the missiles and descended again.’
‘Thank God for that!’ Lars said. ‘I mean that we haven’t started a war. Not about Craig.’
‘Maybe he’s dead?’ The relief I felt was only partial, and Lars’s face, his whole being, was still tight with tension. ‘Maybe a war had already started.’
‘I wish they’d tell us what’s going on!’
Lars banged on the door, which was opened by a petty officer armed with a rifle. Another stood back, watching.
‘Can you tell us what’s happening?’
‘No, sir,’ said the petty officer. His name was Calhoun, and when he was on watch, he was a throttleman in manoeuvring.
‘I want to speak to the XO. We need to know what’s happening!’
The petty officer hesitated. ‘Please step back into the stateroom, sir, and I will pass on your message.’
Five minutes later, the door opened. It was Calhoun again. ‘The XO says he is too busy to speak with you, sir.’
‘Screw him!’ said Lars as the guard closed the door. ‘We’ve got to know what’s going on out there!’
I agreed, but I wasn’t at all surprised that the XO hadn’t come down to enlighten us.
‘We don’t even know if war has broken out,’ Lars said.
I shook my head.
‘Do you think the captain knows?’
‘How could he? We would have heard the Alert One alarm if there had been another EAM.’
‘I’m sure that message was an error,’ said Lars.
‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘It might have been. I know we were right to do what we did. But it’s just as likely that there are missiles flying around out there.’
We were both quiet.
‘They would have struck by now, wouldn’t they?’ said Lars.
‘Some,’ I said. It would depend when they were launched and where they were launched from, but if Russia and NATO were flinging thousands of warheads at each other, some would have landed. A lot would have landed.
I tried to imagine it. It was clear what would happen to the direct targets like New York and indeed the New London Submarine Base. Flattened. Massive explosions and temperatures at thousands of degrees. Anyone close to a thermonuclear explosion would die instantly. Millions would be dead in the world’s great cities. Washington. Moscow. London. Paris.
New York.
Donna.
It wouldn’t have hurt. There would have been a brief warning, enough to provoke panic in the powerless civilians who heard it, but actually many New Yorkers would take a while to figure out what the Civil Defense sirens meant.
Then almost instant death.
And what about my parents, on the banks of the Susquehanna? They might still be alive. How long before the fallout would kill them? A day, maybe two at most, given the amounts of radiation in the atmosphere around the eastern United States. I remembered the symptoms from my radiation sickness training: vomiting, diarrhoea, headaches, fever and then death.
‘So if there is a war, what happens to us?’ said Lars.
‘I guess they will let us out of this stateroom. And then we all stay submerged for as long as we can.’ A Lafayette-class submarine could stay under water for at least fifteen years. But humans couldn’t.
‘How long do you figure we’ve got before we run out of food?’
‘We’re a month into the patrol. Three months maybe, with aggressive rationing, perhaps four?’
‘And then what?’
‘We surface somewhere. New Zealand? And hope there are still people alive.’ This was something we had never discussed, or only in jest. I remembered a conversation over a few beers with Craig about giant mutant bunnies. I also remembered laughing at the time.
‘Did you ever see On The Beach?’ Lars asked.
‘I read the book.’ It was a novel by Nevile Shute set in Australia a year after a nuclear war had wiped out life in the northern hemisphere. The population waited as the radiation cloud drifted slowly southwards. In the end, everyone died.
Everyone.
‘But that was in the fifties,’ I said. ‘There’s going to be much more radiation now. There will be nowhere to go.’
Lars propelled himself at the door and banged. ‘Tell us what the fuck is going on out there!’ he yelled.
The door remained shut.
I tapped Lars on the sleeve. ‘Hey, man. Calm down. There’s nothing we can do here except wait. All will become clear in time.’
Lars pushed himself away from the door and resumed pacing.
I sat back down on the XO’s bunk, my mind a jumble of my parents and Donna. And trees and streams and meadows. Birdsong.
I had thought long and hard about a nuclear war since I had joined the Navy at eighteen; I was sure we all had. But it had always been in the abstract. Now, because it was so real, it was difficult to process.
The 1-MC burst into life. ‘Man battle stations torpedo!’ Usually this would have been followed by the loud bong-bong-bong of the general alarm, but the captain must have ordered silence to avoid alerting any nearby Soviet attack subs.
‘What’s that about?’ said Lars. ‘Are we under attack?’
The floor of the stateroom tilted up and to the right. The Hamilton was ascending steadily. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. If we had been, the submarine’s movement would have been much more extreme as it evaded a possible torpedo, the ‘angles and dangles’ we had practised ad nauseam.
We had no idea how deep the submarine was, but the ascent took a while. When the boat eventually levelled out, I could feel a slight movement from side to side signifying we were near the surface. ‘I think we are at periscope depth.’
‘That means he’s going to transmit!’ said Lars.
‘It also means we’re sitting ducks,’ I said. ‘If a war has started, the Soviets will hear us right away. They’ll be after us.’
That was why the captain had ordered battle stations torpedo – in case the Hamilton got into a shooting battle with a Soviet fast-attack submarine. In addition to nuclear missiles, the Hamilton carried anti-submarine torpedoes. The Soviet submarines were faster and more agile; they would know exactly where we were, and we wouldn’t locate them until they were upon us. The Hamilton’s significant advantage was its ability to hide silently, but by rising to surface depth and broadcasting to the world, we had thrown that advantage away.