The trouble was, he didn't know how long that deployment was going to be. No one did, and no promises could be made. Virginia might be stalking mystery subs and poking around Chinese bases in the South China Sea for the next week… or for the next three months.
And in the meantime, Jorgensen was compiling a charming list of Virginia's shortcomings and problems, and that meant trouble of a less personal and far more direct nature. Virginia was a brand new boat two times over — newly built, and the very first of her kind. Though she'd been on a pretty thorough shakedown under Commander Fitch, everyone had expected that more problems would surface.
They had. During the run south from the Bering Strait, no fewer than ninety-three separate electrical faults had been noted and logged, and some of them were in some pretty damned inaccessible spaces, way back in the depths of Virginia's belly. The big galley freezer had quit working while they were under the ice; the galley crew had had to bring a small mountain of frozen stores on board at Yokosuka to replace the ones ruined by an unexpected thaw. A set of fluorescent light tubes in the passageway aft of the torpedo room had stopped working, and replacing the tubes had not fixed the problem. There was an electrical short in there somewhere, and the ETs hadn't been able to find it yet. More worrying than that, the port side broadband sonar was out. If the sonar boys couldn't fix it, Virginia would be half deaf.
"Captain?" Jorgensen was at his side.
"Yes, XO."
"Thought you should see this, sir." He handed Garrett a clipboard with a sheaf of engineering reports and an extract from the troubleshooting log. Garrett scanned the entries quickly, flipping through the pages.
It was not pretty. The ET and engineering crew had traced more than half of those electrical faults to a single component — a thumb-sized computer chip identified by a long string of alphanumerics, and referred to as the "3C" for short. The chip was, in effect, a kind of electronic valve that determined when power flow through one set of circuits was approaching the system's tolerance levels, and shunted the flow to a parallel system. The idea was to prevent power overloads that could burn out circuits, and the system was used in literally hundreds of places throughout the Virginia, from sonar systems to cruise missile power-up circuits to communications relays to crew-space lighting and air circulation throughout the boat.
In these reports, Lieutenant Mizell, Virginia's chief engineering officer, was pointing out that those chips were failing under voltage fluctuations well within their supposed tolerance limits.
"Shit, XO," Garrett said. "What are we dealing with here… lowest bidder?"
"Looks that way, sir. Eng is fit to be tied. He recommends yanking all of the 3Cs and replacing them with… well, he told me chewing gum and duct tape. And he says he would recommend using a Tomahawk on the production plant in California that made these things, but that the chips in the launch circuits would probably fail and the missile wouldn't fire."
Garrett gave Jorgensen a hard glance. "He thinks our weapons circuits are compromised?"
The exec shook his head. "Not completely. The buggers fail randomly and intermittently. He's saying…" Jorgensen reached over Garrett's arm and flipped through several pages, to a sheet giving the engineering officer's recommendation. "There. When we went in at Yokosuka, he pulled and tested a bunch of 3Cs, and says they're running about a 12 percent failure rate, but only when the voltage fluctuates above a certain tolerance. They work fine… "
"…until they're used. Shit, XO, that's flat out UA. Unacceptable. You're telling me we have a one-in-eight chance of pushing a button and nothing happening. Or worse, a fire."
Of all possible casualties, the single greatest dread on board a submarine was fire, the demon dreaded more than crush depth, asphyxiation, or enemy action. An overloaded chip could cause a circuit to overheat. Overheat it enough, and a circuit breaker would cut in — theoretically. If the circuit breaker failed for any reason, fire was the inevitable result.
"That's about it, Captain. Eng recommends testing all of the 3Cs in stores to identify the bad ones, then pulling all the ones already installed and replacing them. Just to make sure."
"How long?"
"Two weeks at least."
"Two weeks?"
Jorgensen shrugged. "They have to run regular engineering duties, too. This is essentially extra-duty grunt work."
"Just how expensive is this little gem?" Garrett asked.
Jorgensen chuckled. "Eighteen dollars."
"Jesus. A billion-dollar sub crippled by an eighteen-dollar gadget you can probably buy off the shelf at Radio Shack."
"Well, that is the COTS philosophy. Screw up more for less money."
"Right. Okay, pass on to Eng that he can get to work pulling those chips. Just keep me informed if he wants to shut down a critical system."
"Aye aye, sir."
This promised to be a long patrol indeed.
EM1 Kirkpatrick was furious. He backed Wallace up against the bulkhead, his livid face inches from Wallace's, and screamed, "Wallace, you are an A-1 fuckup, you know that?"
"Yes, sir."
"Don't goddamn call me sir! I work for a living!"
"Yes, s—" He stopped and tried again. "Yes, Petty Officer Kirkpatrick."
"You pull another stunt like you did this morning, Wall-eye, and I will have your balls for breakfast, you understand me?"
"Yes, uh, yes, I do."
"If we had a big school chalkboard installed on this boat, I would make you write one thousand times, 'I will not be a screw-up.' But we don't have a chalkboard, so you will scrub out the shitters instead. You will use your freakin' toothbrush if necessary, but you will get them to shine and you will scrub the urinals and the sinks and the shower head and then you will swab the deck until you can eat your goddamn cornflakes off of it! Now get to work!"
The aft head on board the Virginia was about the size of a typical restroom in a McDonald's, with less privacy and more stainless steel — two open stalls, two urinals on the bulkhead, and two sinks. Kirkpatrick spun on his heel and left, leaving Wallace to face his task.
"Jesus, Wall-eye," a voice called from one of the stalls. "What did you do to piss him off?"
"Uh… I forgot to log out on my fire and security watch last night."
"Oops. Bad move, son." The hiss of the toilet being flushed sounded from the stall, accompanied by the distinctive and unmistakable stink of raw sewage. A moment later, Chief Kurzweil emerged, tucking his shirt into his trousers. "At least the head is brand new. You won't have to scrub hard."
That was true enough. Most of the stainless steel in the small compartment already gleamed bright in the overhead lights, and normal shipboard routine kept the place fairly spotless.
The insides of the commodes, though, were not gleaming. The smell made him hesitate at the door to the first stall.
"Pretty bad, isn't it?" Kurzweil said. "If they're ever able to build a submarine that doesn't let the stench in from the holding tanks, I will sign on for life, and personally kiss the designer."
"Isn't there a way to seal the septic off from the commode?" Wallace asked. "You know, a double door or something?"
"Negative. You know how the thing works?"
Wallace shook his head no.
"Pretty simple, really. You got your two ball valves — a big eight-incher at the bottom that lets the water and shit out of the bowl, and a small one that closes off a one-inch pipe bringing in sea water. You do your business, then yank that big lever to open the first valve, so a positive-displacement pump can move the shit into the sanitary tank. Then you close that, and use the other level to refill the bowl. Sealing it off would be a lot more complicated, a lot noisier, and a lot harder to keep clean. I can tell you, though, it's a lot better than it was on the old boats."