Mac’s chest tightened. He strained his ears, squishing the black ear cups of the headset tighter around his head. The band pressed into his temples, amplifying the pounding ache in his head and increasing his nausea considerably.
The acoustic set in front of him plotted out the sound waves of the ocean surrounding him. Aboard the Los Angeles-class fast attack submarine, Mac had one job: to be the ears of the ship and to hear the enemy before they heard him.
A series of cathode ray tubes flickered and hummed brightly, taxing Mac’s eyes. He avoided looking as much as he could, shutting his eyelids tight so he could concentrate on listening. The dot-matrix printer behind him churned and chattered, shattering his concentration as it spat out a meaningless report.
“Dammit!” he shouted, tearing off the headset.
“Whoa, Mac, you okay?” Charlie asked, swiveling in his seat and lifting one ear cup off.
Mac inhaled deeply and wiped his forehead. He let out the air, holding it for as long as he could to ensure his lungs were empty.
“Sorry Charlie, yeah I’m alright. Just a little tired is all.”
“You want me to take over here for a bit, you wanna go for a walk or something?” he asked, looking up and down at the beads of sweat accumulating on Mac’s face and shirt.
“No, no I’m good. Thanks.”
“Alright, well I’m gonna go grab a coffee, you want anything?”
Mac sat staring ahead at the phosphorous screen plotting sound waves. After a few seconds he snapped to and replied, “Yeah, sure, just a black coffee. Thanks Charlie.”
As Charlie got up and left, Mac rested his face in his palms. Something about this trip didn’t feel right. He had been crewing sonar in the northern Atlantic for over a decade, but this voyage felt different. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he had been sick to his stomach with worry since the ship left port.
He replaced his headset over his ears, adjusted a few dials, and continued listening.
A game of cat and mouse on a boat without a single porthole out to the swells, the calm, the sun, or the moon. A dimension not of sight but of sound and mind. Here on this ship, there is only what man can hear with his own two ears. The ping of a blip on a screen which portrays an empty void, and carries the promise of either victory or certain destruction. The rest is left to darkness.
You’re now looking at Samuel “Mac” McClellen. Age: 35, occupation: Sonar Technician, 1st Class. A talented sonarman whose expertise has invited him aboard a journey to the darkest pit mother earth has to offer. Samuel McClellen, for whom this voyage is not just a job, but an adventure into the depths of his own imagination. In just a few moments, Mr. Samuel McClellen will be subject to an exploration of his own fears, and the plunging trench of man’s coldest struggle yet. Samuel McClellan, who has a gut sense not of what he will find, but that he will find it, has just dived into the trench of…The Deadlight Zone.
The full cup of coffee sat idle, no longer giving off a wisp of steam. The mug, emblazoned with the USS Norfolk badge, was scratched and stained from years of late nights and early mornings.
Mac leaned forward, ear cups pressed in, scanning the empty void of sound piped into his mind. He was sure he heard the telltale murmuration of a Soviet sub’s prop not twenty minutes ago, but it had slipped away without a trace.
Another fifteen minutes passed with Mac returning to his cold sweat, his headache dizzying his senses. And suddenly, he heard it: the faint, rhythmic oscillations.
“Skipper, boomer spotted bearing one-two-five,” he announced into the intercom.
Beside him, Charlie flipped a switch and the printer started churning another readout from its spool.
Mac watched the sonar pings on the flickering display as the Norfolk changed course. As it did, he took a deep breath. His lungs would not completely fill with air, and he struggled to get a full breath, as if he was being constricted and dragged down to the abyss.
His eyes widened. A larger blip entered the field, almost right over top of the boomer. It was unthinkably huge and engulfed the enemy sub completely.
“Skipper, second sub spotted! Will identify,” he called and then, turning to Charlie, continued, “get a signature going on that, will you?”
Charlie nodded and Mac went back to squishing his headset over his ears, listening for the new sub to try and get a read on its make, nationality, anything. What he did hear was incomprehensible.
A swishing, almost fluid sound, like a soft jet of water. Whoosh, whoosh. It accompanied the enemy sub’s rising power output, its rhythmic thrumming increasing tenfold.
“They’re not even trying to hide anymore.”
“Could be they’re under attack?” Charlie suggested.
The two blips joined together on the screen, and the computer finally rumbled and spat out diagnostics on the new sound signature. Mac tore it off the reel and studied it. Natural phenomenon.
“This is junk, run it again,” he said, crumpling up the report.
“McClellen, what do you have for me?” the intercom crackled.
“Skipper, double subs are still on screen. Cannot identify blip two, bearing–”
Both blips blinked out of existence. The murmuring of the sub ceased, and the swishing jetting sounds went along with it.
“Skipper, it’s gone, they’re both gone! I have nothing!”
Mac slumped back in his chair to the stifling lack of noise in his headset.
“I just don’t get it, how do you get two subs in the span of a minute and both up and disappear like that?”
It was well past his watch and Mac was exhausted, searching in vain for their enemy sub all night turned up nothing.
“Maybe it wasn’t two subs, maybe it was a sub and…something else,” Charlie added, looking down at the screen.
Mac sipped on his refreshed yet still cold cup of coffee. “You wanna run that by me again?”
“You know, like a freak squid or something. You ever read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?”
Mac rubbed his eyes until he saw stars. Now really wasn’t a great time for another one of Charlie’s speculative discussions. “Can’t say I did, not exactly my genre.”
“No? Oh, it’s great, you gotta read it. There’s this sea monster, see, only it’s not really a sea monster, it’s a highly advanced submarine. And this professor doesn’t know that but he goes out looking for it and he and his friends wind up aboard this sub. Captain Nemo’s the captain’s name. He travels the whole world in this sort of exile, studying the sea and enacting vengeance against enemy ships. In the end he just sort of up and disappears while the professor escapes with his friends.
“Well anyway, there’s this one part where the Nautilus—that’s Nemo’s sub—is attacked by giant squid. Like a whole school of them, see? And Captain Nemo has to fight them off with his crew. It sounds ridiculous, but every year it seems people find something down there that’s even bigger than we thought possible.”
Mac felt his headache residing. Barely. And his fatigue continued to rise listening to Charlie’s bedtime story.
“Charlie, I think you need to spend a little more time with the comm. manuals and a little less time with Captain Nemo there.”
Mac’s screen lit up again and the printer started to crank out another report. The two men threw their headsets back on and held their breath. The fluid jet of water was back, as was the enormous blip it foretold.
“Skipper, that unidentified sub is back, bearing one-eight-one and coming up on our tail, five hundred yards!”
“Mac, it’s gaining on us. Big mamba jamba popped up out of thin air too, dammit.” Charlie flipped a couple of switches and fussed with the recorder.
On screen, the massive blip propelled itself directly at the Norfolk, bringing up the rear and closing the distance drastically.
“Two hundred yards, captain, still gaining,” Mac shouted into the intercom.
“Is he flooding his torpedo tubes?” the Captain asked back.
“Negative, sir, no he shows no signs of armament. Less than one hundred yards now. Captain, he’s going to ram us!”
The whole sub lurched and groaned as the blip overlapped with the Norfolk. Mac’s ears ringed as he twisted his volume down. The whooshing sound ceased and was replaced with a horrid squelching as the ship continued to roll.
Mac felt the clenching, tightening sensation wrapping around his chest.
“We’ve lost speed. And we’re sinking!” Charlie called out.
Over the intercom the captain rapidly gave orders. “Emergency main ballast tank blow, on my signal…Now!”
The feeling of being closed in, smothered started to become unbearable. Mac opened his mouth but couldn’t draw breath.
The Norfolk shuddered as its ballast water evacuated at force. The nose began to pitch up, Mac’s cold cup of coffee sliding off the desk and shattering on the deck. The squelching noise over the sonar system gave way to a series of pops and knocks as the sub rose.
The sonarmen braced themselves as the hull of the ship broke through the surface, and then laid steady again.
Mac took the full breath he hadn’t been able to all week.
Over the next several days, the crew of USS Norfolk was business as usual as they rendezvoused with the rest of the Atlantic fleet. For his part, Mac couldn’t help but feel a sense of relief. He sipped his hot coffee and calmly listened into his acoustic set. There was nothing to report.
Charlie stepped up to the desk behind him, scanning another tractor-wheel printout. “Did you see this bulletin yet?”
Mac leaned back in his chair. “What’s that?”
“Soviet sub went missing. Ambassadors are all in a hubbub about it, said we ought to have seen something of her after all this time. She’s presumed lost.”
“Our mystery sub?”
“They threw away our report. Said there’s no way that a boomer would just drop to the bottom like that. Brass is disavowing the bit where anything ‘grabbed’ us. Chalking it up to faulty equipment or engine trouble.”
Mac smirked. “They didn’t like your giant squid idea? You shouldda told them about Nemo.”
“Oh okay, alright, very funny,” Charlie retorted, crumpling up the report and tossing it away.
It was easier for Mac to joke about it. When he thought too hard about what he heard, he started to get uneasy again. Besides, he was nearly dead of lack of sleep at the time. He couldn’t possibly be trusted with his interpretation of the sucking sounds on the hull.
Pretty soon the Norfolk would make port again and she’d get overhauled to find the source of the problem, then be put back in action.
The Norfolk sat in dry dock at Newport News. The chief engineers on site made a thorough report about damage to the propeller from some foreign object in the water. Norfolk’s entire sonar and acoustic instrumentation was replaced with new equipment to better prepare for upcoming secret missions. The engineers even added a small addendum about repainting her rear quarter, as there were a myriad of large, circular spots where the paint appeared to have been sucked off the hull.
A naval submarine involved in a confrontation with the enemy. One goes home, the other goes to the bottom. How she got there is a mystery, but one which will enter the footnotes of hearsay and coincidence. For Sonar Technician Samuel “Mac” McClellan and his fellow crew, the voyage was dipping their toes into the dark forces of undiscovered fathoms. A reach from the deep of the mind, as uncharted and unexplored as the watery abyss they traverse. What they heard, they may only hear again…In the Deadlight Zone.
This post was a part of Nat 1 Publishing’s Summer Court writing challenge! You can read the final, edited draft in their published anthology and participate in the challenge every year on Discord.