Voyage of the Devilfish

CHAPTER 20

The main detonator of the Magnum’s warhead was set in motion by a spark cap, making the thumb-sized high explosive burn into a white-hot miniature fireball. In turn the main detonator caused six larger igniters to explode within ten microseconds of each other. Each of the six igniters then caused its pie-shaped trinitrotoluene charge to detonate. The points of the pie-shaped charges faced the center of the forward section of the Magnum torpedo, and the charges went up in one coordinated explosion. More accurately it would be called an implosion, since the shaped charges were designed to cause a pressure pulse to move inward, toward the center of the torpedo.

As the explosives at the skin of the warhead blew inward they forced a doughnut-shaped piece of plutonium to collapse into a dense sphere, the mass blown into the hole of the doughnut. As the plutonium collapsed into a dense ball from the force of the explosion it achieved critical mass. There had long been a background of nuclear fissions, the splitting apart of the heavy plutonium atom’s nuclei, ever since the plutonium had been assembled into the Magnum torpedo a year before, but each fission had sent its neutrons flying off into space. The leaking neutrons were lost forever, and continued to leak out of the doughnut, useless in causing any further fissions. And although each fission gave off a tremendous amount of energy, the fissions were sporadic, infrequent. But as the plutonium was blown into a dense ball, the critical mass, the neutrons stopped leaking. The sporadic fissions still happened but each neutron flew not out into space but directly into another plutonium atom’s nucleus, splitting that nucleus into two smaller isotopes and sending out another three neutrons. And as those three flew away from the fissioning atom they didn’t leak but collided with other plutonium nuclei in the densely packed mass. And each of the three neutrons of that fission generation created three more fissions, with three more neutrons. Those three caused nine new fissions, creating 27 neutrons that led to 81 fissions, then 243, then 729, then 2187, until after 47 generations of fissions nearly every molecule of plutonium present had experienced an energy-releasing fission. The whole process took less than fifty microseconds. The result was a nuclear explosion, a fission bomb. Even so, it was only the beginning. The original plutonium doughnut had been surrounded with a canister of deuterium, heavy water. The fission explosion was a trigger for the fusion reaction, giving the deuterium atoms’ nuclei enough energy to come together and form a heavier element, helium, releasing even greater quantities of energy per reaction. The deuterium atoms experienced fusion on an incredible scale, forming the helium and bringing the area in the vicinity of what was once the Russian Magnum torpedo to the temperature of the sun’s surface, several million degrees. The icecap itself, 600 meters above, over 30 meters thick, jumped into the air. A series of cracks in the ice formed, some as far as 70 kilometers from the blast. The ice immediately above the blast zone was blown hundreds of meters skyward in a tower of steam. The sphere of million-degree gas expanded rapidly, growing hundreds of meters in diameter. But even the hydrogen bomb had met its match in the coldness and near-infinite stretches of frigid ocean water. As the gas cloud expanded at high pressure, the cold arctic water cooled it, calmed it and eventually collapsed it. The gas bubble, defeated by the cold arctic sea, gave up and decomposed into several hundred trillion bubbles, all rising upward in the radioactive water that had rushed back in to fill in the hole left by the explosion.

Although the gas bubble was doomed, fracturing into tiny bubbles, the shock wave from the blast lived on. It traveled at sonic speed in the ocean depths, reinforced by the ice above and the ocean bottom below into a solid wall of a pressure pulse that propagated quickly from the blast zone, reaching out to the sea around it. As the shock wave moved out it crushed hundreds of icepressure ridges, some stalactites of ice vaporizing from the energy of the shock. One slender ice stalactite, roughly the size and even the shape of the Empire State Building, except that it was upside down and submerged, disintegrated instantaneously into several thousand pieces, none larger than a few feet in diameter. The shock wave travelled on in all directions, killing the few fish and animals that inhabited the area of the arctic north. It took three seconds to reach the USS Devilfish, then drifting in the current from the north some three kilometers from the polynya’s west edge. The shock wave took slightly longer to reach the Kaliningrad, almost five seconds. The shock wave was attenuated, eroded, weakened as it travelled further from its origin. With each meter it travelled it grew weaker, its destructive forces spread over more and more area as the wave front expanded, growing weaker with the square of the radius from the detonation. The Devilfish was 5000 meters from the blast, the Kaliningrad almost 7000. It would seem both would sustain equal damage, but the extra 2000 meters meant that the shock wave force was twice as cruel to the Devilfish as it was to the Kaliningrad — though to both vessels it was more than cruel enough. Hundreds of meters beneath the icecap, and several kilometers from the original polynya and the new one formed by the detonation, both submarines were in mortal danger.

The two officers in the F-14 looked toward the base as the cruise missile flew on, oblivious to the tail chase of the two Mongoose missiles. The first Mongoose went wild and dived for the ground, exploding as it impacted on nearby Interstate 64. The hole in the interstate was three-lanes wide. The second Mongoose flew toward the hot exhaust of the SSN-X-27 cruise missile, as it was designed to do, but 200 yards from the target the heat sensor in the Mongoose’s nosecone failed and it lost its direction. It sailed off to the north, effectively blind and with no target, until its rocket motor ran out of fuel. It glided to earth and landed on the roof of one of Norfolk Naval Base’s several administration buildings. Its fuselage was crushed and misshapen as it lay smoldering and inert. The SSN-X-27 had escaped Nikels’ and Tollson’s attack and was now approaching the northwestern edge of the base — the surface ships and submarine piers.

There was no warning when the shock wave of the nuclear explosion hit the Kaliningrad. With the sonar systems out, and the torpedo seven kilometers away, it was inaudible and unexpected. Kaliningrad had slowed to approach the polynya and had turned to the north. In doing so she had exposed her fifth compartment’s portside wound, the dp from the American torpedo that had ripped open the diesel oil shield tank. The rip came halfway up her port flank and had cut through four structural frames. The shock wave smashed into the port side of the ship, a violent, instantaneous pressure-pulse, peaking at 8500 Newtons per square meter. Had the inner and outer hulls been undamaged, the ship would have rolled as the shock wave blasted over her, perhaps damaging only more of the delicate computers. But with the rip in the fifth compartment, there was no metal on the port side to hold the ship together.

The ship snapped in half. The control compartment experienced an immediate seven g’s in the starboard direction, then three to port. Anything not bolted down, including the men, was thrown into one side of the room, then the other. The room was not designed for such impact forces, no padding, no softened edges, practically all metal — metal cabinets, metal seats, metal deck, metal titanium ellipsoid hull, metal pipes and valves and periscopes and conduits. What was not metal was glass — the screens of the computer consoles, the navigation graphic chart table, display faces. The combination of high-g forces, the small metal-filled room, glass screens and vulnerably human flesh turned the room into a meat grinder. It took only seconds, and when those seconds were over not a single man was whole, not a single man was conscious. The stern part of the vessel, the remains of the fifth compartment and the huge turbine compartment, sank backward into the sea, the port high-pressure turbine coming loose from its foundation as the hull fractured. It took only two minutes for the aft-hull to pass through its 2000-meter crush-depth, shallower than the ship’s since the compartment bulkheads were weaker than the hull.

The only man conscious in the aft-hull as it sank at a precipitous tail-down angle was the engineer, Mikhail Geroshkov, who had been strapped into a control seat in nuclear control at the aft section of the sixth compartment, the turbine room. The lights had gone out and the battery had already been destroyed by the American torpedo. Complete darkness made the prospect of death that much more frightening.

Mikhail Geroshkov began a prayer, something his mother had taught him decades before. At one time it was a practice he had disapproved. Now he said it aloud, over and over. The deck had become almost vertical, leaving him lying in his seat on his back, strapped in like a cosmonaut in a rocket. “Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name—”

The forward bulkhead of the sixth compartment collapsed and ruptured at a depth of 1970 meters. With a thunderclap of pressure it compressed the contents of the sixth compartment like the air in an engine’s cylinder, and like the air in a diesel engine, the compression shot up the air temperature thousands of degrees. For just an instant the nuclear control room was lit by the bright flash of the approaching flame front, the leading edge of the compression wave. Geroshkov was allowed milliseconds to see the wall of flames coming toward him at sonic velocity, 5500 clicks, but he had no time to open his mouth to scream. By the time the pressure wave reached the aft bulkhead of nuclear control, the scattered tissues that a moment before comprised Mikhail Geroshkov had vaporized in the soaring pressures and temperatures of the fiery air. The aft half of the Kaliningrad hit the Arctic Ocean bottom, a crushed lump of steel and titanium. The debris field it created was a kilometer wide, four kilometers long. The once mighty submarine, the pride of the Northern Fleet, was now little more than a titanium coffin.

Anyone in the control room of the USS Devilfish at 0945 Greenwich Mean Time would object to being called lucky. Of course, none could know what had just happened to the men in the after-hull of the OMEGA submarine. Pacino had not bothered to grab onto a handhold in the overhead when the Magnum had returned. Convinced that the Magnum detonation would mean his death, he had stood there, rooted to his spot on the Conn, his arms crossed across his chest. The shock wave from the Magnum’s nuclear explosion first hit the screw and passed through the ship longitudinally, its force accelerating the ship forward in an enormous four-g jerk. The ship control team sitting strapped into seats at the forward panel had no headrests, the backs of the seats coming only up to shoulder level. All three were jerked backward so abruptly and forcefully that their necks were broken. One, the Diving Officer, died not from a broken neck but from asphyxiation when vertebrae punctured his throat. The four men sitting at the fire-control console were hurled forward, resulting in broken bones, concussions, deep gashes, finger-amputations. The battlestations watchstanders who had been standing were tossed, sands in a gale-force wind. After the shock wave passed the only sounds in the room were the groans and labored breathing of the wounded.

The acceleration first knocked Michael Pacino off his feet and onto the deck, then threw him aft. He fell all the way back down the operations-compartment upper-level passageway, back almost sixty feet to the hatch to the reactor-compartment tunnel, his headlong plunge broken only by the body of a yeoman seaman just out of bootcamp, the upper-level phone talker, who had hit the aft bulkhead first, fracturing his skull, breaking his back. Pacino’s head had rammed into Miller’s abdomen, soft enough to break the mad tumble but not soft enough to avoid a severe shoulder sprain and a hard knock on the head. Dazed, he wiped his hand on his head, now drenched with blood and mucus, wondering briefly whether it was his or the dead seaman’s. He stared for a moment at the boy’s body, his blood now running over the deck. Dimly Pacino heard the sounds of men screaming and moaning in operations upper level, most of the sounds seeming to come from the direction of the control room. He dragged himself to his feet and skidded down the blood-covered deck forward to the control room. As he moved forward, the sounds of agony were joined by a second, even more frightening sound — the flow-noise of water flooding the ship in the lower level.

Aft of the fourth compartment’s after bulkhead, the steel and titanium skin and framework were mangled and shredded where the vessel had split in two. The reactor-compartment forward-bulkhead at first remained intact in spite of the ship smashing in two. Then the liquid reactor coolant sprayed and flooded the compartment as the number-two reactor vessel flew off its foundation and careened to the aft bulkhead, where it punctured the titanium wall. The hole in the bulkhead invited in the cold arctic water, where the gushing wave mixed with the sodium reactor coolant. The highly reactive sodium and the water exploded with twice the power of the explosives in a 53-centimeter torpedo. The after bulkhead ripped fully open, dropping the number-two reactor vessel down the fifteen kilometers to the ocean floor. The sodium-water reaction continued and melted the titanium walls of the compartment and began to melt through the forward bulkhead, at last breaching it and flooding the third compartment with seawater.

The loss of the aft part of the ship had left the forward portion unstable, no longer self-righting in roll or pitch. And the flooding in the first compartment, adding the additional weight of the water, made matters worse. The forward spaces took on a down angle with a list to port that increased as the loose weapons in the first compartment skidded into the port bulkhead, and the water in the lower deck washed over from the tilt. On the first compartment’s middle-level deck the grain can at the aft end of one of the 53-centimeter torpedoes sparked as the wrecked weapon crashed into the port bulkhead, and the spark lit the explosive self-oxidizing fuel. The resulting explosion first set off fuel fires in the other weapons in the compartment, and moments later the warheads of the weapons went off in a tremendous detonation, blowing holes in the side walls of the compartment and breaching the decks above and below. The Magnums in the lower level were crushed, setting off fuel fires and rupturing the warhead casings. The forward bulkhead of the deserted second compartment dimpled from the explosions up forward but held, making it one of two compartments of the Kaliningrad to retain its structural integrity. The other to survive was the control compartment, the oval-shaped bubble of titanium anchored to the top of the second compartment and faired into the superstructure. But with the power loss the control compartment, the nerve center, in effect died — no hydraulics, no electricity, no lights, no fans, no displays or computers or live consoles.

Admiral Novskoyy lay unconscious at the lip of the periscope well, with a bloody head wound and concussion from one of the periscopes. He had sustained countless minor injuries, scrapes and bruises and sprains but was the one in the compartment who had been spared the wrath of the shock wave, having landed near the ship-control console.

Ivanov, Deck Officer and Acting Captain, had been at the ship-control console supervising Lieutenant Katmonov. He had been thrown into the ladder going to the escape pod, been spun around and collided with the bulkhead on the port side, a relatively smooth surface with nothing hanging from it, so built to allow entry up to the escape-pod ladder without snagging the climber’s clothes or body. He collided with Warrant Officer Danalov, with only a moment to register the sound of bones crunching but did not yet feel any pain. On the trip to the starboard side Ivanov’s leg was caught on the back of the ship-control seat while his body continued toward the starboard side. Finally he broke the hold of the seat, and when he landed he hit the starboard forward corner of the room, opening a gash in his arm. With a compound fracture of his leg and a gash in his arm, he regained consciousness in time to see arterial blood spurting from his arm and two bones protruding from his left thigh, one pointing forward and one sideways. He promptly fainted. When he came to, the pain hit him like an electric shock.

Lieutenant Katmonov, the Control Officer, had been strapped into his seat and survived with cartilage damage to his spine and pulled muscles in his back. In shock, he stared straight ahead at his dead panel, illuminated only by the compartment’s four weak battle lanterns, and waited, and waited…

Captain-Lieutenant Viktor Chekechev, Weapons Officer, had been at the fire-control console at the time of the Magnum detonation. He was thrown into the periscope well, smashing his back into the periscope. From there he was hurled back into his console, where broken glass in the computer display broke his fall, and cut his ear half off. Three ribs had been snapped jaggedly on the fall to the periscope well, one entering his left lung and piercing a pulmonary artery. Immediately his heart began pumping blood into his chest cavity, his abdomen swelling with the blood, his skin turning white as he silently bled to death.

The only other crewmember in the compartment was Warrant Officer Dmitri Danalov, head of the security crew. On hand only to guard Vlasenko in the escape pod, he had been standing at the base of the short tunnel to the escape pod lower hatch between the control console and the communications station. The shock of the Magnum blast had sent him into the smooth ladder bulkhead, only smashing his nose. But the acceleration to port brought a missile to bear — Ivanov’s body travelling at some forty meters per second. Danalov’s head was smashed against the bulkhead, fracturing his skull. The acceleration to starboard threw him into the opening mechanism to the escapepod lower hatch. If he had hit the mechanism a few inches to the right he would have escaped with only the top of his skull fractured.

No such luck. The opening mechanism of the escapepod lower hatch was a steel wheel set horizontally onto a shaft that controlled the steel dogs of the hatch as above. At the outside of the wheel was a long handle that protruded horizontally and was used to crank the wheel by hand. Danalov’s head hit the crank handle with sufficient force to send it through his forehead deep into his brain. The crank handle rotated the wheel until the handle released him. Danalov was still breathing when the weight of his body pulled him off the handle and then sent him to the deck, leaving a residue of brain tissue on the crank handle. As the deck developed a down angle, Danalov’s breathing had slowed to a wheeze. By the time the self-oxidizing fuel of a Magnum had ignited below in the first compartment his body functions had shut down. And when the rest of the ship passed through a depth of 1000 meters, the deck at a 40-degree down-angle, Dmitri Danalov was dead.

Pacino pulled himself off the deck of the operations compartment and ran to the control room, his body a symphony of aches but intact. The sounds around him formed the cacophony of a nightmare… the rushing sound of flooding, the screams and moans from the control room not as loud but audible, a knife in Pacino’s heart. The smell of the ship had changed. What before was oil residue, ozone, perspiration, sewage and cooking grease was now salty seawater, hydraulic fluid, burning insulation and the smell of burning hair.

The lights were still on in the narrow fore-and-aft passageway. As Pacino went toward the control room he nearly tripped over a body, half lying in the passageway at the door to Sonar, half in the sonar room. Chief Sonarman Jethro Helms was dead, eyes staring at the overhead, blood running out of his mouth.

As Pacino forced himself forward past the door to Sonar, the overhead lights went out. The battery he thought. The battery has flooded with seawater and it’s shorted out and the ship is dying with no power and the hull is filling with chlorine gas from the reaction of seawater with the huge wet cells. He ran forward until he was in the control room, feeling his way by instinct from years of living with the geometry common to all Piranha-class submarines. He felt the deck under his feet give, he was sliding in the darkness, something wet on the deck. He reached into the overhead for the switch to a manual lantern, not sure if he was slipping on oil, water or blood. The lights came back on as he struggled for the switch to the battle lantern, but he switched on the light anyway in case the overhead lights went out again. He realized the ship was running solely on battery, and when it went he would be in an uncontrollable hulk, suspended in seawater with no depth control.

It took several seconds for him to take in the scene in the control room. Filled with smoke. No one moved. Watchstanders collapsed on the deck surrounded by the broken glass of the video fire-control and sonar screens and instrument faces. The plot table of the geographic plot had smashed itself into the narrow aisle behind the fire-control cabinets and the curving starboard bulkhead. The ship-control team was still strapped into their seats, their heads lolling on their shoulders. The Chief of the Watch was nowhere in sight. The OOD, Nathanial Stokes, was collapsed on the periscope stand, a phone handset resting on his face, the smashed panel that was once the sonar-repeater screen half-lying on his chest. Jon Rapier sat on a fire-control bench, his head on the console, his arms dangling. Behind him the Pos Two console was in flames. Lieutenant Scon Brayton had fallen between the bench and the lower portion of the Pos Three console. Ensign Brett Fasteen, the Pos One operator, was lying on the deck with his arms and legs in unnatural positions, his chest toward the deck, his head twisted clear around so that his face was upward. No sign of Steve Bahnhoff or lan Christman, but there were still unexplored shadows and piles of rubble.

Pacino heard a brief sound of an electrical arc. The sound of flooding had stopped, leaving the room deathly quiet. Pacino grabbed the P.A. Circuit Seven microphone, clicked on its speak button: “Engineer, Captain.” Pacino was talking to himself… the microphone was hanging from the severed cord. He threw it to the deck, grabbed the phone handset off of Brayton’s chest: “Maneuvering, Captain. Engineer, pick up the Circuit JA phone!” Lieutenant Commander Matt Delaney’s voice came over the JA phone circuit. Pacino got out his question before Delaney could finish saying, “Engineer.”

“Eng, what’s your status?” Delaney was shouting, as if the line reception was poor. Or maybe he was just scared, Pacino thought. He had a right to be.

“Flooding in port main seawater isolated by the chicken switch. We took on maybe two feet of water in the bilges and I need the drain pump but it takes too much current for the battery. Battery’s got maybe five minutes left. We had a fast leak. in the primary coolant system. Not sure where it was from but I isolated both loops with the main coolant cutout valves and the leak stopped. We were watching loop pressures when you called — okay, it’s starboard.” There was the sound of Delaney’s voice getting distant as he shouted instructions to the maneuvering crew, probably the reactor operator.

“Skipper, you still there?” Delaney’s hoarse voice.

“I’m here, Eng.”

“I’m opening up the port loop cutout valves. Okay, pressurizer level’s holding.” For a moment Delaney’s voice was muffled. “Charge to the port loop.” Delaney’s voice came back as he screamed into the phone. “Skipper, we gotta restart the reactor with an emergency heatup rate. If we wait any longer we won’t have enough juice to run a main coolant pump to start up. We need an emergency fastrecovery reactor startup.”

“Engineer, conduct a fastrecovery reactor startup. Put the switch in battleshort and use an emergency heatup rate on the reactor. Do an emergency warmup of the turbines, SSTG’s first. I want propulsion in four minutes.”

“Cap’n, we’ll be up in three.” The phone clicked. Pacino slowly put the phone handset back in its cradle and turned to look at the XO. Rapier was breathing. When Pacino touched his cheek, his skin was warm. Pacino slapped his cheek gently, trying to bring him to. Rapier moaned, slowly moving his head from side to side.

“C’mon, damn it, wake up…” Rapier’s eyelids opened, then shut, then opened again. His eyes were out of focus, pupils dilated wide.

Pacino bit his lip, turned and hurried out of the control room and down the stairs to middle level, then up twenty feet forward nearly to the hatch to the bow compartment and down the stairs to operations lower level, to the torpedo room. Once in the forward door Pacino froze. It was worse than he had imagined.

Novskoyy looked through a dark tunnel with an odd pattern at the end. As the fuzzy edges of the tunnel faded and more of the pattern became clear, Novskoyy realized he was staring, close range, at the vinyl covering of the deck of the control compartment, his face on the cold deck. There was an electric, tingling sensation in his tongue, and when the tingling stopped, the taste of copper. Blood. He moved his tongue in his mouth, feeling the cut in his inner cheek where he had bit nearly through the flesh. The tunnel was gone but his vision was still out of focus. He tried to pull his head off the deck, but the deck came spinning back up again. A wave of nausea and dizziness took over. When the feelings receded he again lifted his head off the deck, slowly, and realized his face was in the periscope well and his feet up on the main-deck level.

He felt his head, pulled back a hand covered in crusty warm ooze and realized he must have opened his scalp. He tried to drag himself upright but soon saw that he already was upright just by pushing his body slightly away from the deck of the periscope well. Which meant the ship, what was left of it, was nearly vertical going downward into a dive. His greatest disappointment was not at losing the ship or even dying, but that he would be unable to transmit the molniya, that his grand plan to neutralize the U.S. was dying with him aboard the Kaliningrad. He had lived to be a man of history… instead, it seemed, he would go down with the most advanced technological underseas craft on earth, a footnote, not an architect of events.

He turned to find the other officers in the compartment lying against what once was the forward bulkhead but with the dive was rapidly becoming the new deck. The eerily tipping room was illuminated only by the light of the battle lanterns, their beams uneven, leaving gaps of darkness. On the forward bulkhead below, still strapped into the seat in front of the control panel, Senior Lieutenant Vasily Katmonov stared unblinkingly into his lifeless control screen, his body hanging limply from the straps. If not for his moaning, Novskoyy would have thought him dead. To Katmonov’s left, at the corner of the room below the compartment’s escapepod ladder. Warrant Officer Danalov was collapsed in a heap, eyes shut, face white, a hole in his forehead. Under Katmonov’s seat, lying in the corner of what was once the deck and the forward bulkhead. Captain 3rd Rank Dmitri Ivanov watched his blood drip from his arm onto the deck. His face was a grimace of pain as he held his fractured leg with two hands. Ivanov’s pained breaths were the only sounds in the compartment other than the arcing of a stray electrical short circuit in the aft area now far overhead. To Katmonov’s right, on the forward bulkhead, now almost horizontal from the ship’s dive, Captain-Lieutenant Viktor Chekechev lay half in the shadows, his lower body obscured. What was visible gave little hope… face deathly white, breathing uneven, blood trickling from his mouth.

Novskoyy moved to go to Chekechev but dizziness enveloped him and he fell, landing on Katmonov’s control seat. He ducked his head between his knees and hoped the blood would return, and finally the dizziness did ease and his senses returned. The pod, he thought. Get to the pod. He limped across the tilted room and found the pod-control panel. He hit the toggle switch that would open the massive motor-driven hatch. Nothing happened. Fighting dizziness, he looked for a pry bar, any piece of long metal. Nothing. The room was not designed to require pry bars or primitive valve-extension handles. If the deck wasn’t so tilted he might have gotten the wrench that Vlasenko had dropped, the wrench the captain had brought to kill him with. He climbed back to the hatch and started to bang on the lower hatch with a flashlight, hoping Vlasenko would hear and open the pod from inside. No response.