Four minutes, now.
"Tubes one and two flooded!" Rodriguez shouted.
Wallace squeezed back out of the way. His heart was pounding, his hands slick with sweat. This was his first qual rotation in the torpedo room, and it was promising to be an exciting watch. Shit… ten minutes ago they'd had him swabbing the deck with a mop and bucket, and now…
He was watching a gauge on the fire-control panel. "Outer doors open!" he called, when two lights flashed red.
"Snapshot," Chief Giangreco yelled, bringing his palm down on the big red firing button. "Fire number two!"
Nothing happened.
"Shit!" Giangreco growled. "Hang-fire!"
Wallace stepped back, putting himself as much out of the way as possible, as Giangreco and Rodriguez bent over the fire-control panel, trying to find out what had gone wrong. Giangreco hit the intercom switch. "Conn, Torpedo Room! Hang-fire on number two!"
They were in trouble. That much he knew. A snapshot order meant that an enemy had fired torpedoes at them, and that the captain was sending a torp or two back in the direction from which the attack had come, an unaimed shot-from-the-hip that might get lucky.
But the first torpedo fired had failed to leave the tube. It would not be armed as yet — it had to travel a certain distance before its warhead went active — but the situation was still incredibly dangerous. If one thing had gone wrong, chances were a whole cluster of things had gone wrong as well….
He looked aft, at the stolid, watching faces of the Navy SEALs. The torpedo room was the one compartment on board with room enough to house Virginia's eight guests. Bunks had been unfolded along the bulkheads, above and below the stored, quiescent, black-and-red giants, the torpedoes waiting on their hydraulic racks, making the normally neat and hyper-efficient space of the compartment seem a lot more crowded and claustrophobic than usual. The SEALs, too, were standing back out of the way, close by the watertight door leading into the aft end of the torpedo compartment.
"Shit and double shit," Giangreco said. "The whole firing net's gone!"
"One of the fucking three-Cs?" Rodriguez asked.
"Maybe…."
Wallace leaped into the central passageway and raced aft, toward the midsection of the torpedo room. Rodriguez's words had triggered something.
Two days ago, Wallace had been down here as part of an ET work detail, swapping out 3C chips from a routing station buried in the port-side bulkhead. Chief Kurzweil had told him at the time that some of the computer chips could fail when current went through them, starting a fire….
The panel was hidden behind one of the SEALs' racks. He grabbed the mattress and yanked it out into the passageway. "Hey!" one of the SEALs shouted.
"What the fuck?…"
But Wallace had exposed the sealed access panel where he and Chief Kurzweil had been swapping out one of the 3Cs. He pressed the palm of his hand against the access panel. Usually, the bulkheads were cool… but the panel was warm to the touch. "Fire!" he shouted. "Fire in the bulkhead, right here!"
Rodriguez, Giangreco, and two other torpedomen were with him in an instant. The access panel was locked and there was no key, but Giangreco had a pry tool in one hand. "Out of my way!"
The flat end of the tool went into the grip recess, and Giangreco strained against it.
"You sure, kid?" Rodriguez asked Wallace. "I don't smell no smoke." He sounded worried, though. Of all the possible dangers on board a submarine, none — not even a casualty in the reactor room — was as dreaded as fire.
"I helped replace one of those computer chips here the other day," Wallace said. "It's right there, behind that panel. And it feels warm…."
"If you're wrong, Wall-eye," Giangreco growled, "the cost of the repairs comes outta your hide!"
Then the panel snapped open. Sparks danced and crackled, and, an instant later, smoke billowed from the opening in a thick and acrid cloud.
Rodriguez was already leaning against the 1MC. "Fire! Fire in the boat!"
"Secure that door!" Giangreco bellowed, and one of the SEALs aft slammed the watertight door shut and dogged it. Their first duty was to contain the fire — and the potentially deadly smoke — and keep it from spreading through the rest of the boat.
Only then could they begin to fight the fire.
17
"Fire! Fire in the boat!"
The warning windows appearing on his touchscreen told Garrett that the alert was coming from the torpedo room. The compartment had just been sealed, containing the fire and smoke.
"Rig the boat for fire, now, rig the boat for fire" sounded over the 1MC. Both of the control room's watertight doors clanged shut hard, the dogging wheels pushed hard to the right to seal them—"righty-tighty, lefty-loosey" as the old mnemonic phrase had it.
"Ventilation systems secure, Captain," Jorgensen announced. "All compartment hatches shut and dogged. Fire party laying forward to the torpedo room."
"Very well."
"Captain," Lieutenant Carpenter, the weapons officer, reported. "I have negative signal on tube two. The fire may have melted the fiber optics."
"Very well."
The tension on the control room deck was electric. The men were scared, but they continued to carry out their duties with the calm professionalism Garrett expected of them.
Three problems now complicated Virginia's survival, and Garrett needed to deal with all three. The submarine was racing away from four oncoming torpedoes now strung out astern, with four minutes more to go before the first one caught up with the racing Virginia. One of Virginia's snapshot ADCAPs was hung in torpedo tube two, and there was no way as yet to tell if the fish was damaged — or if the fire casualty had armed the ADCAP's warhead. The torpedo was wire-guided, but Carpenter was reporting negative signal… meaning information wasn't getting through in either direction. If the torpedo had armed itself, it could explode at any moment.
And finally, there was the fire. Electrical fires were rare on board American submarines, but they did happen from time to time. They were almost commonplace on board Russian boats, which had older technology, wiring that was nowhere near up to U.S. Navy spec, and crews not nearly so well trained as American sailors. Torpedo-room fires were especially dreaded. Those silently ranked ton-and-a-half monsters down there possessed both peroxide — a fuel that contained its own oxygen supply — and 650 pounds of PBXN-103 in the warhead. A torpedo-room fire had been responsible for the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk, K-141, in August 2000, killing all 118 men aboard.
And a fire inside Virginia's torpedo-room bulkhead could also have another disastrous effect — touching off the fuel in the Tomahawk missiles in their vertical launch tubes, nestled in between the outer hull and the bulkhead on either side of the torpedo room. If a Tomahawk engine lit off while the missile was still in the tube, the blowtorch blast from its engine would melt right through hull and bulkhead both, resulting in a swift and one-way trip to the bottom.
Yeah, as they said… a torpedo-room fire could ruin your whole day.
At the moment, though, there was little else Garrett could control. The hang-fire would explode or not, and there was little that could be done now save closing the outer doors and emptying the tube, tasks that would be carried out once the fire was under control. Fire-control parties were dealing with the fire.