Two hundred miles south of Ireland, a bulge suddenly appeared on the surface of the dark blue Celtic Sea. The next moment the bulge erupted in a phantasm of white, the “boomer,” in this case the USS Roosevelt, bursting through the surface, white smoke as well as spray pouring from her from a fire in her aft engine room, where the crew had been working on the MOSS. No one knew exactly where the electrical short had occurred as several of the monitoring circuits were themselves out of action following the severe concussion of the Yumashev’s depth charge attack.
It was the submariner’s worst nightmare, and Robert Brentwood knew that the acrid smoke pouring from the sub’s sail would alert the enemy for a hundred miles around. Yet he was the epitome of calm as he kept his men moving through Control up the sail, where he had posted his executive officer. If the fire was uncontainable, he had to get as many men as possible out and into the inflatables before setting the destructive charges that would be sure to destroy code-safe and disks along with the sub. In any event, with the carbon dioxide scrubber system out of action, the men had to get fresh air. Several off-watch crewmen, asleep when the fire had broken out, were unable to get their masks on in time and were asphyxiated by the highly toxic fumes. In the face of their loss, the thing Brentwood was most proud of, as he stood in Control, overseeing the evacuation through the dense smoke, was that there was no panic — he might have been a coach welcoming his team back to the dugout after a losing but hard-played game.
Up in the sail, Executive Officer Peter Zeldman saw men were also coming out of two of the six-foot-diameter hatches, one forward above Command and Control, the other leading up from the reactor room. But no one as yet was exiting the stern hatch above the turbine/drive space, and he reported this to Brentwood.
Brentwood knew there was a fifty-fifty chance that the fire-fighting party, having sealed themselves off in one of the forty-one cylinders that, welded together, formed the sub, might extinguish the flames if they could get in quickly enough behind the panels. But as captain, he couldn’t have taken the chance of staying submerged with the lives of over 100 men in his hands. He called up to Zeldman, “Officer of the deck, I want every available man on deck acting as a lookout. Don’t load the inflatables till you get my word.”
“Every man a lookout. Don’t load inflatables. Aye, sir.”
Next Brentwood called through to the chief of the boat in charge of battling the fire. “What are we looking at back there, Chief?”
A young voice came on, rising above the hollow roar of the fire. “Sir, this is electrician’s mate Richards. The chief’s—” Brentwood waited — either the circuit had gone or the seaman had also been overcome by the toxic fumes — a defective mask seal, the mask knocked askew by falling lagging — anything could happen.
Brentwood pulled a man out of the line of sailors waiting to go up to the sail and guided him toward the ladder. “Give me your mask, sailor.”
Brentwood informed Zeldman he was going aft so that should anything happen to him, Zeldman would take over. “Give me five minutes, Pete,” Brentwood instructed.
“Five minutes. Aye, sir. Mind how you go.”
Brentwood strapped on the mask, his throat already raw from the smoke, his voice nasal inside the mask as he entered the smoke-choked passageway. “On your left, make way. On your left…” As he walked through “Sherwood Forest,” the smoke was swirling thickly about the huge missiles like the set of some fantastic opera.