Voyage of the Devilfish

CHAPTER 17

The SSN-X-27 canister was buoyant, nose-light, tail-heavy. On leaving tube four of the Vladivostok, the canister was already going forty clicks and angling upward. Two fins had popped out from the stem of the canister as it left the torpedo tube, both fins horizontal, both slightly angled upward at their trailing edges. The nose-light canister, aided by the tail fins, rose to the surface of the Atlantic, leaving the Vladivostok, by then imploding and sinking to the bottom, far behind. Launch depth had been fifty meters. It would take almost thirty seconds for the SSN-X-27 to broach the surface. Every second of those thirty was vital to the missile’s success as it ran through internal checks and arming sequences.

A failure on any of the dozens of logic circuits and interlocks would cause the weapon to inert itself and shut down. But each interlock checked out.

Behind and astern of the missile, the twin detonations of Billfish’s Mark 49 torpedoes hit the Vladivostok amidships and forward, first blowing holes in the hulls, inner and outer, and filling a sphere thirty meters in diameter with hot expanding gases. The gas expansion was much too slow to affect the missile. The disintegrating hull of the firing ship was also of no concern to the SSN-X-27. Long since separated from the Vladivostok’s fire-control system, the missile was completely independent. Autonomous. It swam to the surface, encapsulated, waterproof. When the broach sensors indicated that the nose had broken through the waves and was touching air, the nosecone of the capsule would blow off from the action of thirty-two explosive bolts. The rest of the capsule, suspended momentarily half-submerged, half-broached, would serve as a launch pad, and the rocket motor first stage would ignite, lifting the missile out of the cylindrical capsule, which would then sink.

The SSN-X-27 would have proceeded in this fashion, oblivious to the death throes of its mother ship, if not for the shock wave that travelled at sonic velocity through the water, hitting the missile’s capsule when it was just ten meters short of the surface. But the only effect of the pressure pulse was to force the capsule to the surface a few seconds sooner. The capsule broached. Thirty-two explosive bolts fired the cruise missile’s nosecone into the dark sky of the dawn, the fiberglass tumbling end over end, the faint moonlight, now peeking between the clouds, glinting off its orange surface with each revolution. The computer software, knowing the next command in the sequence, lit a small grain can at the far aft-end of the solid rocket stage. The grain can exploded into incandescence. In a chain reaction, the solid-fuel rocket-motor ignited. Under the influence of almost 100,000 newtons of thrust, the missile lifted itself out of the elongated capsule. The capsule sank from the hot gas reaction forces. The missile flew skyward with an acceleration of four g’s that caused it to reach 600 kilometers per hour within five seconds. Three seconds later the rocket motor cut out. The missile arced over in a ballistic trajectory, feeling zero-g at the peak. On the way back down, the first-stage solid rocket-motor blew off from eight explosive bolts at an altitude of 500 meters; it was no longer needed. The intake diffuser popped out of the underside of the missile’s fuselage, ramming in the predawn Atlantic air into the suction box of the axial compressor. The highspeed air windmilled the compressor, spinning up the unit on its near frictionless journal bearings. As the compressor speed came up to several thousand RPM, the computer processing unit amidships sensed that it was time for fuel injection. An air-driven fuel pump, also windmilled by the 400 click airspeed, pressurized the kerosene jet fuel in the fuel lines. The missile measured the pressure buildup in its fuel lines. When the compressor RPM was high enough a solenoid valve in the fuel line popped open, sending the pressurized fuel into the six-canned combustion chambers. The air in the combustion chamber was very hot as a result of being raised to so high a pressure by the compressor vanes. With the injection of fuel, all that was needed was the light-off of the chamber spark plugs, and black smoke came out the tail of the missile as the fuel partially burned in the cans.

The missile now activated the six-can spark plugs, the cans instantly coming up several hundred degrees in temperature, and the air fuel mixture burned at a rate just shy of explosion. The hot gases were passed into the turbine connected by a shaft to the compressor — the turbine designed to keep the compressor running during the journey. The hot high-energy gases flew by the turbine and out the missile’s aft nozzle, which sped the gases up to supersonic velocity, creating the reaction thrust. As the exhaust flowed out the nozzle, the missile felt the push of 50,000 newtons of thrust, and the jet engine was self-sustaining. While the missile was injecting fuel into the combustion chamber cans it extended its amidships fins, horizontal square miniwings, then rotated the wings to pull out into level flight. Just in time. Altitude was a mere ten meters above the water.

At 790 kilometers per hour, the 1.1 megaton hydrogen bomb flew toward its target.

The engine room was the furthest aft compartment of the ship, going from the escape-trunk hatch all the way to the shaft seals near the screw and rudder. The compartment was conical and large, the biggest aboard. It was humid, miserably hot even in the arctic water, from the massive steam pipes threading their way through the space.

Maneuvering, the nuclear control room, was close to the forward bulkhead of engine room upper level on the starboard side. It was a closet-sized space filled to bursting with three control panels facing forward, a large panel on the aft wall and four watchstanders. Nearest the door of maneuvering on the ship’s centerline the throttleman stood at the steel wheel of the throttle. His panel was the steam plant control panel, his gages read steam pressures and temperatures — the heartbeat of the steam plant. Touching the throttleman’s right shoulder was the reactor operator, who sat in front of the reactor-plant control panel. Its slanting lower surface had a mock-up piping diagram of the main coolant system that showed the portcoolant loop on the left and its mirror image on the right. In the center of the coolant system was a reactor core with a pistol-grip lever protruding from it that moved the control rods. With the plant critical, the rods only affected coolant temperature, but when the plant was shut down the rods were withdrawn to start the nuclear fission reactions that heated the main coolant water, boiling the water in the steam generators and thereby providing steam to the turbines. The vertical section of the panel was mostly stuffed with electrical gages showing reactor-plant temperatures and pressures and the reactor-power meter, which went from zero to 150 %. Above 100 % the meter face was painted blood red. No naval reactor had ever been above 103 % power. Much over 100 %, the core would experience some fuel melting. At some level above that, say 130 %, the fuel melting would get substantially worse, irradiating the crew.

Against the starboard bulkhead was the electric-plant control panel where the remote circuit breakers that channelled the electricity to ship’s distribution were operated. Behind the electrical operator was the Engineering Officer of the Watch, the EOOW, a nuclear-qualified officer who supervised the watchstanders and was responsible for the engineering spaces. The battle stations EOOW was Lieutenant Commander Matthew Delaney, a rotund red-faced man with a seemingly perpetual frown. Delaney, a deadly serious man, could be at odds with Captain Pacino over what he perceived as the sometimes not sufficient concern showed by Pacino toward the potentially dangerous reactor. After all, unlike civilian reactors with their low-power density-cores, a Navy reactor could blow sky high. Navy engineers called such a potential catastrophe a “rapid prompt critical disassembly.” Delaney called it a nuclear explosion. In the moments after the “torpedo in the water” announcement, the order to scram the plant took Delaney by surprise. An exchange of weapons with the Russian he could understand. Under the ice, it had been rumored to happen. But with an exchange of torpedoes came standard evasive tactics — all-ahead flank, cavitate the screw, run like hell at max speed until the ship was hit or the weapon exhausted its fuel.

Delaney, though assigned as the ship’s engineer, was also qualified for command of a nuclear submarine. The U.S. Navy insisted on all officers being tactically qualified. So the goings-on in the control room were no mystery to Matt Delaney. However, the order to scram the reactor was. Instead of continuing the run at flank, as the plant was just seconds before, the Conn had ordered all stop. That was wrong, Delaney thought. He realized that fear of an ice-raft collision and subsequent hull rupture was justified. But an underice collision was a roll of the dice. Maybe it would happen, maybe not. A Russian torpedo was not a game of chance. If the target failed to run it had less chance of surviving than a wide-eyed doe staring down a hungry wolf. Pacino must be playing dead, Delaney realized. But under the ice there was no surface to go to when the battery died. Delaney would need power to restart the reactor, especially for the power-hungry reactor main coolant pumps. And without juice from the battery, the ship would die. Worse, the loss of the hovering system after the collision meant the ship would need to keep bare steerage way over the fairwater and sternplanes to keep from sinking — which required propulsion — another reason to stay critical. But with a dead reactor they’d have to use the Emergency Propulsion Motor, another damned electricity hog. The battery would be exhausted in fifteen minutes, and when it died so would the Devilfish.

Delaney did not like the commands from the Conn, but he also believed in Navy Regulations, the Reactor Plant Manual and the Ten Commandments. In about that order. So, reluctantly, he gave the next orders: “Reactor operator, shift reactor main coolant pumps one, two, three and four to slow speed. Manual group scram the reactor and secure pumps one, two and three.” The reactor operator, an aggressive first-class petty officer named Manderson, acknowledged and flipped each reactor main coolant pump T-switch on the lower reactor control panel to the slow speed position, then pulled each switch upward. The indicating lights at the pumps changed from FAST to SLOW. Manderson stood and lifted a square Plexiglas cover over a rotary switch at the top of the reactor control panel: the switch was marked MANUAL SCRAM. Manderson looked over his shoulder at Delaney. Delaney nodded. Manderson rotated the switch. As the switch handle came to rest at the position marked GROUP SCRAM, a dozen things happened in the nuclear plant within fifty milliseconds. And as far as Delaney was concerned, all those things were bad. The reactor siren sounded, a wailing police-car siren in the maneuvering room. The control rod bottom lights lit for group one, the controlling rod group. The rod position digital counter began dialing group one’s indicated position down to zero.

The reactor power meter dropped from 15 percent, normal for all stop with slow pumps, to zero. Within seconds, main coolant average temperature dropped from 496 degrees Fahrenheit to 465 and continued to fall. The STARTUP RATE meter on the RPCP went from zero to minus 0.3 decades per minute as the power level crashed into the immediate range, enroute within minutes to the startup range. These were only the indications at the reactor plant control panel. Two compartments forward, inside the reactor compartment, the six control-rod drive mechanisms of group-one rods lost their magnetic latch voltage. As the electrical power was interrupted from the scram breakers tripping, the magnetic flux holding the rods engaged to the drive motors collapsed, and as the magnetic attraction disappeared, springs opened alligator assemblies, disconnecting the rods from the holding mechanisms. Massive vertical springs pushed the six control rods made of an obscure element named hafnium to the bottom of the reactor vessel. The hafnium had the odd property of acting as a black hole for the subatomic neutron particles that made the Devilfish’s screw turn. When the six rods hit the bottom of the core, most of the neutrons flying around in the center of the reactor were absorbed by the hafnium instead of by uranium atoms. As the uranium atoms stopped absorbing neutrons, the fission reactions came to a halt like popcorn removed from an oven, going from full frantic popping to sporadic pops at odd intervals. The fissions stopped. The uranium atoms, stuffed deeply into the fuel elements, stopped splitting, and so no longer added 200 megaelectron volts each of energy to the fuel element material. The end of the energy input was sensed immediately by the water coolant flowing in the fuel elements that no longer were superhot. The coolant stopped being heated by the fuel and arrived at the steam generators relatively cool at 465 degrees. Such coolant in the steam generators was useless in boiling the water from the condensers to turn it into steam. Low steam pressure in the steam generators starved the propulsion turbines and turbine generators in the engine room. For a moment, the blare of the alarms was accompanied by the sickening, shrieking howl of the two huge steam turbines aft as they wound down from 3600 RPM to a complete stop. To Delaney it was the sound of the Devilfish starting to die. The electrical operator opened the breakers to the turbine generators as the steam pressure went away. Now the ship was on battery power alone. The fans in the ventilation ducts spun down and stopped. The air stopped flowing. The room grew hot and stuffy as the air conditioning disappeared. For a few moments the residual heat of the plant was overcoming the arctic cold. Soon, however, the boat would be as cold as the arctic sea surrounding it.

“Cut out the reactor siren. Shut main steam one and two,” Delaney ordered. The alarm siren stopped, leaving maneuvering in an unreal quiet. Manderson rotated two more switches, and two eight-inch gate-valves shut in the main steam headers, eliminating hope of a fast restart of the reactor.

“Rig emergency cooling for natural convection and shift propulsion to the EPM, then secure the last reactor main coolant pump,” Delaney ordered. The electrical operator spoke slowly, almost a hiss: “Eng, twenty minutes on the battery at this rate.” Delaney nodded, reaching for a phone. “Conn, maneuvering, reactor scram, steam plant shutdown, twenty minutes left on the battery.” Twenty minutes. The torpedo would be there any second, he thought. The high-pitched sound of the Russian nuclear torpedo’s sonar pinging was now audible through the hull of the Devilfish, echoing off the ice rafts around them.

The eerie, detached feeling left Commander Toth abruptly. The adrenaline jolt of fear accelerated his sense of time, blowing up seconds into minutes. He had heard stories about time dilation but thought they were exaggerations. He looked over at Lieutenant Culverson, the Officer of the Deck, who stood frozen in his blue Hush Puppies. The Billfish had blown the AKULA out of the water, but not before it had launched a cruise missile at the coast of the United States of America. Right at Norfolk, Virginia. Home.

“Helm, I have the Conn!” Toth shouted. “All ahead full! Maneuvering cavitate! Dive, make your depth six six feet, twenty degree up bubble! Let’s go, now!”

Despite the string of orders and the maneuver to periscope depth, the control room crew was moving through a sea of molasses. It was too late, anyway. There was nothing in Billfish’s torpedo room able to cope with a cruise missile on solid rocket fuel. Their only ally was time — the weapon was subsonic. Time to impact might be as long as fifteen minutes… With an early-warning message to CINCLANTFLEET and the White House, an interceptor aircraft might have a chance at shooting down the weapon. Assuming there was a unit ready for takeoff, an aircraft with a lookdown-shootdown radar, a pilot ready to fly and no screwups in relaying the message to people who could act on it… they would have maybe two minutes grace time in which to shoot the thing down. Which was all that stood between Toth and the annihilation of Norfolk, Virginia.

“Helm, mark speed eight knots.” At all-ahead full the ship would surge ahead at a knot a second. And nine knots would be enough speed to rip the periscope right the hell off.

The deck angled up steeply, forcing Tom to grab a handhold in the overhead. He felt the deck vibrate from the power of coming to fifty percent reactor power in mere seconds.

“Eight knots, Cap’n,” the helmsman called out.

“All stop. Lookaround number-two scope,” Toth replied while reaching for the P.A. Circuit One microphone. His own voice sounded fast and tight as it went throughout the ship.

“COMMUNICATIONS EMERGENCY. COMMUNICATIONS EMERGENCY. NAVIGATOR, COMMUNICATOR AND RADIO CHIEF REPORT TO RADIO IMMEDIATELY.”

“Six five feet, sir,” the Diving Officer called. The ship had levelled off. It took what seemed like an hour for the periscope to come out of the well. Toth focused on the bearing to the AKULA’s launch position, and his heart sank. The bright white rocket exhaust traced a graceful arc up to several thousand feet, a beautiful fourth of July rocket, except that as Toth watched, the fire trail suddenly stopped. There were no fireworks. No more fire from the tail of the rocket. Only a smoky parabola etched in the night sky. Which meant the first stage, the solid-rocket motor, had been exhausted and the jet-engine sustainer had kicked in, sending the rocket on its way. It was no longer visible, not just because of the jettisoning of the rocket motor but because it was cruising below the radar grass, maybe only forty feet above the water.

But the worst part was the direction of the liftoff. Toth had hoped the missile might have been knocked off course by the Mark 49 torpedo detonations’ shock-wave. No such luck. The rocket motor exhaust pointed due west, in a perfect trajectory toward Norfolk.

Toth handed the scope over to Culverson. “You have the Conn. Secure battle stations. I’ll be in radio.”

The emergency nuclear-warning message was called an OPREP 3 PINNACLE for some forgotten reason. Just a code word for a flash transmission to the White House consisting mostly of numerals in preformatted fields. The mere fact that it was being sent would be drama enough at COMSUBLANT and CINCLANTFLEET Headquarters.

At 0917 Greenwich Mean Time the BIGMOUTH antenna of the USS Billfish came out of the sail and transmitted the remarkable, harrowing message. The communication went out first on the NESTOR UHF satellite secure voice circuit, then on a teletype burst communication coded to the satellite, also by UHF. The messages sent, there was no sense lingering at periscope depth. Yet Toth wanted to stay at the surface to see if the transmissions on the HF frequency from COMSUBLANT HQ stopped suddenly, which would indicate their incineration. He especially wanted to see if the CINCLANTFLEET SIOP WARPLAN implementation message would come through at FLASH priority. The SIOP WARPLAN was the collection of detailed instructions on exactly how they were to proceed in the event of a battle. Toth walked slowly forward to the control room. All eyes of the watch standers were staring on him. He cleared his voice.

“Off sa’deck, lake her deep to 546 feet. Ten knots. Start searching for another Russian attack unit. Maintain the rig for ultraquiet. And stream the buoyant wire antenna. I want to be in synch on VLF in case anything is transmitted from ashore.” He stood at the red sonar monitor panel of the Conn, waiting to find another Russian submarine, waiting for radio instructions to reach him from his wire antenna skimming the surface 500 feet above — or much worse, for no instructions to come from an incinerated headquarters. It was time to give one more order.

“Off sa’deck, tell the Communications Officer to get into his top secret safe. Have him bring the CINCLANTFLEET SIOP WARPLAN to the Conn.”