by Tom Clancy
Greer rose and walked around the couch a few times to get his circulation going. “Interesting. The timing would be almost impossible, though.”
“I didn’t say it would be easy, sir, just that we could do it.”
“Call home, Tyler. Tell your wife you won’t be making it home. If I don’t get any sleep tonight, neither do you. There’s coffee behind my desk. First I have to call the judge, then we’ll talk to Sam Dodge.”
The USS Pogy
“Pogy, this is Black Gull 4. We’re getting low on fuel. Have to return to the barn,” the Orion’s tactical coordinator reported, stretching after ten hours at his control console. “Anything you want us to get you? Over.”
“Yeah, have a couple cases of beer sent out,” Commander Wood replied. It was the current joke between P-3C and submarine crews. “Thanks for the data. We’ll take it from here. Out.”
Overhead, the Lockheed Orion increased power and turned southwest. The crewmen aboard would each hoist an extra beer or two at dinner, saying it was for their friends on the submarine.
“Mr. Dyson, take her two hundred feet. One-third speed.”
The officer of the deck gave the proper orders as Commander Wood moved over to the plot.
The USS Pogy was three hundred miles northeast of Norfolk, awaiting the arrival of two Soviet Alfa-class submarines which several relays of antisubmarine patrol aircraft had tracked all the way from Iceland. The Pogy was named for a distinguished World War II fleet submarine, named in turn for an undistinguished game fish. She had been at sea for eighteen hours, and was fresh from an extended overhaul at the Newport News shipyard. Nearly everything aboard was either straight from manufacturers’ crates or had been completely worked over by the skilled shipfitters on the James River. This was not to say that everything worked properly. Many items had failed in one way or another on the post-overhaul shakedown the previous week, a fact less unusual than lamentable, Commander Wood thought. The Pogy’s crew was new, too. Wood was on his first deployment as a commanding officer after a year of desk duty in Washington, and too many of the enlisted men were green, just out of sub school at New London, still getting accustomed to their first cruise on a submarine. It takes time for men used to blue skies and fresh air to learn the regime inside a thirty-two-foot-diameter steel pipe. Even the experienced men were making adjustments to their new boat and officers.
The Pogy had met her top speed of thirty-three knots on post-overhaul trials. This was fast for a ship but slower than the speed of the Alfas she was listening to. Like all American submarines, her long suit was stealth. The Alfas had no way of knowing she was there and that they would be easy targets for her weapons, the more so since the patrolling Orion had fed the Pogy exact range information, something that ordinarily takes time to deduce from a passive sonar plot.
Lieutenant Commander Tom Reynolds, the executive officer and fire control coordinator, stood casually over the tactical plot. “Thirty-six miles to the near one, and forty on the far one.” On the display they were labeled Pogy-Bait 1 and 2. Everyone found the use of this service epithet amusing.
“Speed forty-two?” Wood asked.
“Yes, Captain.” Reynolds had handled the radio exchange until Black Gull 4 had announced its intention to return to base. “They’re driving those boats for all they’re worth. Right for us. We have hard solutions on both…zap! What do you suppose they’re up to?”
“The word from CINCLANT is that their ambassador says they’re on a SAR mission for a lost boat.” His voice indicated what he thought of that.
“Search and rescue, eh?” Reynolds shrugged. “Well, maybe they think they lost a boat off Point Comfort, ’cause if they don’t slow down real fast, that’s where they’ll end up. I’ve never heard of Alfas operating this close to our coast. Have you, sir?”
“Nope.” Wood frowned. The thing about the Alfas was that they were fast and noisy. Soviet tactical doctrine seemed to call for them mainly in defensive roles: as “interceptor submarines” they could protect their own missile subs, and with their high speed they could engage American attack submarines, then evade counterattack. Wood didn’t think the doctrine was sound, but that was all right with him.
“Maybe they want to blockade Norfolk,” Reynolds suggested.
“You might have a point there,” Wood said. “Well, in any case, we’ll just sit tight and let them burn right past us. They’ll have to slow as they cross the continental shelf line, and we’ll tag along behind them, nice and quiet.”
“Aye,” Reynolds said.
If they had to shoot, both men reflected, they’d find out just how tough the Alfa really was. There had been much talk about the strength of the titanium used for her hull, whether it really would withstand the force of several hundred pounds of high explosive in direct contact. A new shaped-charge warhead for the Mark 48 torpedo had been developed for just this purpose and for handling the equally tough Typhoon hull. Both officers set this thought aside. Their assigned mission was to track and shadow.
The E. S. Politovskiy
Pogy-Bait 2 was known to the Soviet Navy as the E. S. Politovskiy. This Alfa-class attack sub was named for the chief engineering officer of the Russian fleet who had sailed all the way around the world to meet his appointment with destiny in the Tsushima Straits. Evgeni Sigismondavich Politovskiy had served the czar’s navy with skill and a devotion to duty equal to that of any officer in history, but in his diary, which was discovered years later in Leningrad, the brilliant officer had decried in the most violent terms the corruption and excesses of the czarist regime, giving a grim counterpoint to the selfless patriotism he had shown as he sailed knowingly to his death. This made him a genuine hero for Soviet seamen to emulate, and the State had named its greatest engineering achievement in his memory. Unfortunately the Politovskiy had enjoyed no better luck than he had enjoyed in the face of Togo’s guns.
The Politovskiy’s acoustical signature was labeled Alfa 3 by the Americans. This was incorrect; she had been the first of the Alfas. The small, spindle-shaped attack submarine had reached forty-three knots three hours into her initial builder’s trials. Those trials had been cut short only a minute later by an incredible mishap: a fifty-ton right whale had somehow blundered in her path, and the Politovskiy had rammed the unfortunate creature broadside. The impact had smashed ten square meters of bow plating, annihilated the sonar dome, knocked a torpedo tube askew, and nearly flooded the torpedo room. This did not count shock damage to nearly every interior system from electronic equipment to the galley stove, and it was said that if anyone but the famous Vilnius headmaster had been in command, the submarine would surely have been lost. A two-meter segment of the whale’s rib was now a permanent fixture at the officer’s club in Severomorsk, dramatic testament to the strength of Soviet submarines; in fact the damage had taken over a year to repair, and by the time the Politovskiy sailed again there were already two other Alfas in service. Two days after sailing on her next shakedown, she suffered another major casualty, the total failure of her high-pressure turbine. This had taken six months to replace. There had been three more minor incidents since, and the submarine was forever marked as a bad luck ship.
Chief Engineer Vladimir Petchukocov was a loyal Party member and a committed atheist, but he was also a sailor and therefore profoundly superstitious. In the old days, his ship would have been blessed on launching and thereafter every time she sailed. It would have been an impressive ceremony, with a bearded priest, clouds of incense, and evocative hymns. He had sailed without any of that and found himself wishing otherwise. He needed some luck. Petchukocov was having trouble with his reactor.
The Alfa reactor plant was small. It had to fit into a relatively small hull. It was also powerful for its size, and this one had been running at one hundred percent rated power for just over four days. They were racing for the American coast at 42.3 knots, as fast as the eight-year-old plant would permit. The Politovskiy was due for a comprehensive overhaul: new sonar, new c
omputers, and a redesigned reactor control suite were all planned for the coming months. Petchukocov thought it irresponsible — reckless — to push his submarine so hard, even if everything were functioning properly. No Alfa plant on a submarine had ever been pushed this hard, not even a new one. And on this one, things were beginning to come apart.
The primary high-pressure reactor coolant pump was beginning to vibrate ominously. This was particularly worrying to the engineer. There was a backup, but the secondary pump had a lower rated power, and using it meant losing eight knots of speed. The Alfa plant achieved its high power not with a sodium-cooled system — as the Americans thought — but by running at a far higher pressure than any reactor system afloat and using a revolutionary heat exchange system that boosted the plant’s overall thermal efficiency to forty-one percent, well in excess of that for any other submarine. But the price of this was a reactor that at full power was red-lined on every monitor gauge — and in this case the red lines were not mere symbolism. They signified genuine danger.
This fact, added to the vibrating pump, had Petchukocov seriously concerned; an hour earlier he had pleaded with the captain to reduce power for a few hours so that his skilled crew of engineers could make repairs. It was probably only a bad bearing, after all, and they had spares. The pump had been designed so that it would be easy to fix. The captain had wavered, wanting to grant the request, but the political officer had intervened, pointing out that their orders were both urgent and explicit: they had to be on station as quickly as possible; to do otherwise would be “politically unsound.” And that was that.
Petchukocov bitterly remembered the look in his captain’s eyes. What was the purpose of a commanding officer if his every order had to be approved by a political flunky? Petchukocov had been a faithful Communist since joining the Octobrists as a boy — but damn it! what was the point of having specialists and engineers? Did the Party really think that physical laws could be overturned by the whim of some apparatchik with a heavy desk and a dacha in the Moscow suburbs? The engineer swore to himself.
He stood alone at the master control board. This was located in the engine room, aft of the compartment that held the reactor and the heat exchanger/steam generator, the latter placed right at the submarine’s center of gravity. The reactor was pressurized to twenty kilograms per square centimeter, about twenty-eight hundred pounds per square inch. Only a fraction of this pressure came from the pump. The higher pressure caused a higher boiling point for the coolant. In this case, the water was heated to over 900 °Celsius, a temperature sufficient to generate steam, which gathered at the top of the reactor vessel; the steam bubble applied pressure to the water beneath, preventing the generation of more steam. The steam and water regulated one another in a delicate balance. The water was dangerously radioactive as a result of the fission reaction taking place within the uranium fuel rods. The function of the control rods was to regulate the reaction. Again, the control was delicate. At most the rods could absorb just less than one percent of the neutron flux, but this was enough either to permit the reaction or to prevent it.
Petchukocov could recite all this data in his sleep. He could draw a wholly accurate schematic diagram of the entire engine plant from memory and could instantly grasp the significance of the slightest change in his instrument readings. He stood perfectly straight over the control board, his eyes tracing the myriad dials and gauges in a regular pattern, one hand poised over the SCRAM switch, the other over the emergency cooling controls.
He could hear the vibration. It had to be a bad bearing getting worse as it wore more and more unevenly. If the crankshaft bearings went bad, the pump would seize, and they’d have to stop. This would be an emergency, though not really a dangerous one. It would mean that repairing the pump — if they could repair it at all — would take days instead of hours, eating up valuable time and spare parts. That was bad enough. What was worse, and what Petchukocov did not know, was that the vibration was generating pressure waves in the coolant.
To make use of the newly developed heat exchanger, the Alfa plant had to move water rapidly through its many loops and baffles. This required a high-pressure pump which accounted for one hundred fifty pounds of the total system pressure — almost ten times what was considered safe in Western reactors. With the pump so powerful, the whole engine room complex, normally very noisy at high speed, was like a boiler factory, and the pump’s vibration was disturbing the performance of the monitor instruments. It was making the needles on his gauges waver, Petchukocov noted. He was right, and wrong. The pressure gauges were really wavering because of the thirty-pound overpressure waves pulsing through the system. The chief engineer did not recognize this for what it was. He had been on duty too many hours.
Within the reactor vessel, these pressure waves were approaching the frequency at which a piece of equipment resonated. Roughly halfway down the interior surface of the vessel was a titanium fitting, part of the backup cooling system. In the event of a coolant loss, and after a successful SCRAM, valves inside and outside the vessel would open, cooling the reactor either with a mixture of water and barium or, as a last measure, with seawater which could be vented in and out of the vessel — at the cost of ruining the entire reactor. This had been done once, and though it had been costly, the action of a junior engineer had prevented the loss of a Victor-class attack sub by catastrophic meltdown.
Today the inside valve was closed, along with the corresponding through-hull fitting. The valves were made of titanium because they had to function reliably after prolonged exposure to high temperature, and also because titanium was very corrosion-resistant — high-temperature water was murderously corrosive. What had not been fully considered was that the metal was also exposed to intense nuclear radiation, and this particular titanium alloy was not completely stable under extended neutron bombardment. The metal had become brittle over the years. The minute waves of hydraulic pressure were beating against the clapper in the valve. As the pump’s frequency of vibration changed it began to approach the frequency at which the clapper vibrated. This caused the clapper to snap harder and harder against its retaining ring. The metal at its edges began to crack.
A michman at the forward end of the compartment heard it first, a low buzz coming through the bulkhead. At first he thought it was feedback noise from the PA speaker, and he waited too long to check it. The clapper broke free and dropped out of the valve nozzle. It was not very large, only ten centimeters in diameter and five millimeters thick. This type of fitting is called a butterfly valve, and the clapper looked just like a butterfly, suspended and twirling in the water flow. If it had been made of stainless steel it would have been heavy enough to fall to the bottom of the vessel. But it was made of titanium, which was both stronger than steel and very much lighter. The coolant flow moved it up, towards the exhaust pipe.
The outward-moving water carried the clapper into the pipe, which had a fifteen-centimeter inside diameter. The pipe was made of stainless steel, two-meter sections welded together for easy replacement in the cramped quarters. The clapper was borne along rapidly towards the heat exchanger. Here the pipe took a forty-five-degree downward turn and the clapper jammed momentarily. This blocked half of the pipe’s channel, and before the surge of pressure could dislodge the clapper too many things happened. The moving water had its own momentum. On being blocked, it generated a back-pressure wave within the pipe. Total pressure jumped momentarily to thirty-four hundred pounds. This caused the pipe to flex a few millimeters. The increased pressure, lateral displacement of a weld joint, and cumulative effect of years of high-temperature erosion of the steel damaged the joint. A hole the size of a pencil point opened. The escaping water flashed instantly into steam, setting off alarms in the reactor compartment and neighboring spaces. It ate at the remainder of the weld, rapidly expanding the failure until reactor coolant was erupting as though from a horizontal fountain. One jet of steam demolished the adjacent reactor-control wiring conduits.
&nb
sp; What had just begun was a catastrophic loss-of-coolant accident.
The reactor was fully depressurized within three seconds. Its many gallons of coolant exploded into steam, seeking release into the surrounding compartment. A dozen alarms sounded at once on the master control board, and in the blink of an eye Vladimir Petchukocov faced his ultimate nightmare. The engineer’s automatic trained reaction was to jam his finger on the SCRAM switch, but the steam in the reactor vessel had disabled the rod control system, and there wasn’t time to solve the problem. In an instant, Petchukocov knew that his ship was doomed. Next he opened the emergency coolant controls, admitting seawater into the reactor vessel. This automatically set off alarms throughout the hull.
In the control room forward, the captain grasped the nature of the emergency at once. The Politovskiy was running at one hundred fifty meters. He had to get her to the surface immediately, and he shouted orders to blow all ballast and make full rise on the diving planes.
The reactor emergency was regulated by physical laws. With no reactor coolant to absorb the heat of the uranium rods, the nuclear reaction actually stopped — there was no water to attenuate the neutron flux. This was no solution, however, since the residual decay heat was sufficient to melt everything in the compartment. The cold water admitted into the vessel drew off the heat but also slowed down too many neutrons, keeping them in the reactor core. This caused a runaway reaction that generated even more heat, more than any amount of coolant could control. What had started as a loss-of-coolant accident became something worse: a cold-water accident. It was now only a matter of minutes before the entire core melted, and the Politovskiy had that long to get to the surface.
Petchukocov stayed at his post in the engine room, doing what he could. His own life, he knew, was almost certainly lost. He had to give his captain time to surface the boat. There was a drill for this sort of emergency, and he barked orders to implement it. It only made things worse.
