Tales from a Stricken Submarine

Tales from a Stricken Submarine

by Christopher Flynn

Copyright Christopher Flynn 2012

Smashwords Edition

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Table of Contents

The Chaplain’s Tale

The First Seaman’s Tale

The Second Seaman’s Tale

The First Officer’s Tale

The Junior Seaman’s Tale

The Midshipman’s Tale

The Third Seaman’s Tale

The Cook’s Tale

The Captain’s Tale

The Veteran Seaman’s Tale

The Doctor’s Tale

The Fourth Seaman’s Tale

The Old Seaman’s Tale

The Fifth Seaman’s Tale

The Sixth Seaman’s Tale: Part One

The Sixth Seaman’s Tale: Part Two

The First Junior Officer’s Tale

The Radio Operator’s Tale

The Second Officer’s Tale

The Chief Petty Officer’s Tale

The Seventh Seaman’s Tale

The Second Junior Officer’s Letter

Foreword

I discovered the following court-martial transcript while working in the archives during my military service, and felt it was a story that should not be lost in the paper jungle of naval bureaucracy. I present it to you as I found it, except for any reference to place or person by name, or any other scrap that would allow an avid investigator to track it to its source. Do not imagine, either, that the language it appears in gives any extra clue as to the text’s origin – I neither deny nor confirm the rumour that it is a translation. I do all this first because I have to protect myself, since what I did in smuggling it out constitutes a crime against the state. Secondly, I wanted to protect the memories of the people involved, and their families and friends from any additional pain; this is not an ancient incident.

Navigator Nicholas B:

On a submarine every strange noise fills you with fear. Or, if not fear exactly – because like everything else you get used to fear – then dread. A foreboding. It’s not something you ever control fully; it’s a physical thing that resides in your cells, and you can no more rid yourself of it than you can train the herding instinct out of a sheepdog.

Before a big earthquake strikes there is a noise like no other, a subtle scream as high as rung crystal; it must be the noise of all the concrete, steel and glass that make up a city bending, stretching, warping with the approaching shock wave. Then – WHAM – and all that you have taken for granted, as solid, is shuddering, jelly-like, all around you. In the days and weeks and months that follow, though you think you feel completely calm, any noise of a similar pitch sends your heart racing in preparation for the event your body is sure will follow.

On a submarine the body is similarly high-charged, super-aware, your hair standing on end before any conscious recognition of anything changed, gone wrong. It is something that follows naturally enough from the knowledge that a serious fault could leave you stranded at the bottom of the ocean, stranded because the weight of water outside is enough to crush your body flat, soft as a crab’s is inside its shell.

So it was no surprise that we had all noticed the sound that came before the explosion. It, too, was high-pitched; high like steel ballooning under an atomic pressure, like atoms in pain at their impending separation. Like all the sailors that ever died at sea keening their faraway loneliness, their bitter loss. Then a great judder, and we all knew we were sunk.

I don’t know what happened in the rest of the boat, or to the rest of the sailors. Whether they were drowned by the inrush of water into a breached hold, or whether, like us, in other chambers, they got the place secure and sat around in the dark telling stories. We heard some banging of something metal on the steel hull; it went on for some time somewhere stern of us, and then stopped. But that could have meant any number of things.

There may be safer places to be, places more spacious and so containing more of that precious gas, oxygen; there may be – and is – procedure in such cases regarding where one should go and what one should do; regardless of this, if you possibly can, you head for the control room. I know I did, and I think you will agree that the disparate nature of the group of sailors that ended up there further attests to the fact. It is a natural urge to want to be where things are decided, to head for a perceived centre of activity; just as the traveller in a strange town moves instinctively towards the streets of denser crowd, traffic, noise, till they find themself in the main square.

So we got to the control room, but everything went; radio equipment, lights, ventilators, everything. We got the place secured, felt the ship fall, fall, fall like a piece of feather-down in the air; fall in that endless dreamlike drop that goes on for hours between one fretful waking and the next a moment later; fall down, down into the depths, where colourless fish and molluscs swim that have never even conceived of the sun, let alone seen it. The air became chill, I swear, before we even reached the bottom – steel holds little heat, and men’s hearts give little out when faced by the darkness of the unknown. I can’t remember anyone speaking for the whole time down; how can you, when you haven’t come to the end of a thing, and for all you know (and you hope a little, too) you might carry on falling forever?

Then the boat hit the bottom, settled, sat.

Submarines stay underwater for weeks and months at a time, and the air is recycled and recycled, but it is only when it stops circulating that you realise how foul it is, how laden with men’s sweat, the smell of urine and excrement. And how old it is, and how thin of oxygen.

But every situation in a submarine has been anticipated, and such an extreme one all the more so. The problem is how to keep people alive until a rescue sub can be sent down; they have special attachments to fit onto the stricken submarine’s hatch, allowing rescuers to access the hull to check for survivors. This all takes time, however; equipping the sub and crew, getting out to the site of the sinking, locating the wreck. You’d imagine the oxygen would be the main worry, but the truth is that in such a situation the build-up of carbon dioxide is a greater danger. It doesn’t have to reach too high a level before it becomes poisonous for humans, and you’d be dead of that long before the oxygen became an issue.

So every submarine is equipped with a large number of what are called super-oxide cartridges. They’re chemical cartridges that eat up the carbon dioxide in a space and produce oxygen, solving both problems at once. I can’t get any more technical than that, because I don’t know any more than that, but given the standard number of those issued to a submarine, we should have been set to last for days.

Except when I went to the locker where they were meant to be, they weren’t there. And they weren’t in any of the places they weren’t meant to be, either.

Our proud navy. And our proud seamen. The submarine’s doctor once told me that the entire supply of morphine in the medicine cupboard had been ripped off before he got to the post, and the new batch he had requisitioned had disappeared too. What someone would want with super-oxide cartridges is beyond me, but there is a black market for nearly everything in our navy… our proud bloody navy.

None of the men could have imagined being saved after that, I don’t think, no matter what they might have said. With all the will in the world, it would take far too long to get to us.

I had the one torch, but once we started the stories everyone wanted it turned off. The stories were the chaplain’s idea. A submarine crew does not usually include a chaplain, but we were not on exercises, and it sometimes happens that one will be on board in such cases – usually to be transported from one base to another, or out to a ship. What was odd was that this one clearly did not have a military background – his salute was horrible – and it was something of a mystery to us what he was doing there at all. Anyway, someone asked for confession and he said that he didn’t feel… pure enough, I suppose… to hear it. Said that he’d done something he hadn’t confessed, and so wanted to get that out into the open. And he suggested that we each tell the story of the worst thing we ever did, as a kind of group confession, and God would be listening. And whether a believer or not, it was better than sitting with your own thoughts, waiting for the air to run out.

I was the one who turned off the torch and, in my first betrayal of my shipmates – though not the last, and not the worst thing I had ever done – turned on this device to record their final confessions. For fear of battery death, I recorded only the stories, and not the spaces and silences in between, and I will endeavor to fill in those gaps for you. This recording is what you will hear now, to make full sense of my own full confession. The chaplain told the first story.

The Chaplain’s Tale

I was orphaned at an early age and sent to live at a religious institution, where monks took care of our sustenance and education. I’m sure these places are the same all over – chilly, damp, with hard beds and prayers three times a day; meagre tasteless food and cold water to drink and wash in; early morning wake-ups and endless chores to do; long rigorous lessons and rote learning. A child does not mind these things too much, however, as long as everyone suffers them and he knows no different, and for an orphan a place of belonging is vital, no matter the place.

So this was not the problem, but the fact that this place was far up in the mountains, away out of sight and hearing, and the serpent of evil had found its way in and laid its vile eggs, and they had hatched safely in their remote mountain nest and flourished. I saw during my first days and weeks there boys who by day were pale as ghosts and red-eyed, and who could not stay awake or eat their food, and I remember wondering what dreadful nightmares haunted their sleep. And I soon found out.

One night I was woken from my sleep with rough hands, which thrust my head into a sack and bore me away from the dormitory where we all slept. We went down, down, into the depths of the monastery, far below anywhere I was ever to know from my daily routes, down where the air was colder than the deepest winter air, and tasted like the air in a tomb.

When they removed the sack I found myself in a large windowless room lit by torches, with three other boys and fifteen or twenty men. We were in our pyjamas; they wore long black robes and masks of various sorts, from a goat with wide curling horns to a satyr with a short pointed beard and a tight mocking smile. The air was thick with incense and another smell I only smelled elsewhere much later and recognized as male lust; an animal smell as sharp on the nostrils as vinegar.

I cannot and will not tell details of the horror of that night – no words exist to describe a child’s suffering adequately, and all attempts end in the teller wanting to tear at his own eyeballs and rake his petrified tongue from its roots. There was much religious chanting, but with the words twisted into strange shapes and shades of meaning. One monster stuck in my mind, one who wore a mask that was one half the mask of comedy, blankly laughing, the other that of tragedy, pretending to mourn our pain; pretending, for he in particular took the greatest joy