Piranha Firing Point
Page 35
The Vortex launches went on for a half hour, the solid-rocket motors igniting and flying off into space, looking for the Red sub. There was no way to tell if the missiles ever hit their target. Over the next hour, explosions started to be heard. That could just be their termination detonations, since the missiles were programmed to explode as they ran out of fuel, just in case by dumb luck they were close to a target.
Pacino felt a heavy weight of exhaustion fall on his shoulders. He had lost five Pegasus patrol planes, twelve
688s, and perhaps even the Piranha, all in a few hours’ time.
He looked up to see Patton walking into the room from the forward centerline passageway.
“Colleen says she’ll be up in about two minutes,” he said.
Pacino donned his virtual-reality helmet and climbed into the darkened station four, waiting to see what had happened since they had gone blind and deaf.
SS-403 arctic storm The missiles kept on coming.
Chu knew enough to turn tail and run, but before he did, he made sure he put out his last three highspeed Nagasakis to the bearing of the ship that had launched these miserable plasma missiles at him. Once the three weapons were away, Chu turned and ran west at maximum speed at maximum depth to try to evade the saturation attack.
It would turn out to be too little and too late. Plasma missile number six detonated a kilometer astern of his position, a termination detonation as it ran out of fuel.
The explosion shock wave blasted through the water at sonic speed and hammered the Arctic Storm. If Chu hadn’t been strapped into his console, he would have died, but as it was, the five-point harness held tightly, his body bruised by the G-forces, but not broken. But although Chu survived, the ship was not as lucky.
The reactor shut down.
The ship began to flood through a seawater cooling system.
The periscope no longer worked, nor would any of the masts or antennae.
All that was an easy day compared to the worst casualty.
When the ship took the shock wave, the Second Captain died on impact The upper functions of the processing suites, the DNA parallel processors, ceased functioning as their cabinets broke open and the soup of DNA spilled to the decks.
When the upper functions died, the lower functions of the neural network became confused and actually began working at cross purposes, a sort of machine equivalent to the convulsions of a headless chicken.
Although the ship was whole, the loss of the Second Captain meant they had to abandon ship.
And Chu couldn’t abandon ship by surfacing it, because whoever had launched more than a dozen plasma missiles at him would not stop shooting because he was on the surface.
No, he’d get the crew out the escape hatch, then scuttle the ship. With luck they’d be picked up by one of his trawlers.
“Gentlemen, your attention, please,” he said. “Leave your posts and assemble at the forward escape trunk.
We are abandoning ship without surfacing. Any questions?
Now!”
At the escape trunk, Chu found a dozen air hoods and surface survival kits, and he sent Xhiu for their own emergency radio transmitters and beacons. Once Chu opened the lower hatch, they climbed up into the chamber.
The deck of the ship was starting to list slightly to port, taking on a more pronounced down angle. With his crew in the escape trunk, Chu shut the lower hatch, ordered the men into their hoods, and flooded the trunk.
A hydraulic lever opened the upper hatch, leaving the men in a protected section separated from the upper hatch by an air pocket on the other side of a wall. Chu found the hose manifold, filled each man’s hood with pressurized air, then shoved him out the open upper-escape trunk hatch. Last to go, he filled his own hood, ducked under the air barrier into the cold water, and climbed up out of the hatch.
For a passing second he regretted leaving the ship to die. He tapped twice on the hull in a gesture of farewell, and pulled himself out of the hatch. The buoyancy of the hood pulled him up to the surface, and Chu was careful to blow out all the way up. The air pressurized to one hundred twenty meters’ depth would blow up his lungs if he didn’t exhale hard.
In twenty seconds he broke the surface. The initial members of his crew had already inflated two rafts and were clicking the radios, trying to find help.
“Any luck, Lo?” he asked.
“I got through to Tianjin. They should be sending a seaplane for us. They’ll be here in about two hours.”
“Good.”
“Admiral? Do you think we won?”
Chu considered the question. It had seemed so obvious to him that they had lost that the question almost seemed academic.
“We sank their first task force, then twelve of their submarines, five of their maritime-patrol planes, and they killed five of our subs and paralyzed our ship, forcing us to abandon her.”
A booming roar sounded from beneath them, the sound muffled by the depth.
“That was either the ship imploding from the deep or someone finishing her off with a torpedo,” Chu said.
“Anyway, our success is to be measured by how well and how long we held off the American landing force.
If the Americans decide this sea is still too risky to cross, then we will have won a huge victory. If they decide they have vanquished us and proceed to White China to fight our forces, then we will have suffered a tremendous defeat. My opinion? We did our best, and I owe each one of you a debt of thanks for your work, for risking your lives.”
“Hear, hear,” Lo Sun said.
USS piranha, SSN-23
“Things are pretty quiet out here now,” Master Chief Henry said.
“No missiles, no torpedoes, no Rising Suns.”
“Correct.”
“Let’s restart the reactor, submerge, and get out of here,” Bruce Phillips said.
USS devilfish, SSNX-1
“Cyclops will be starting up in three, two, one—”
It would be a relief, Pacino thought, to be able to see the world around them. He was wrong.
The screens flickered to life again. Pacino strapped on his helmet.
“Goddamn it,” one voice.
“Shit,” a second.
“Torpedo in the water!” a third.
“Emergency flank!” Patton said. “Course one six zero!”
Pacino’s display showed the Piranha on the surface, no one nearby, no Rising Suns, but one lonely incoming Nagasaki torpedo, less than one thousand feet from their position and targeted at the Devilfish.
The deck began to shake as the ship sped up to emergency flank. Pacino sincerely hoped that they could outrun it. He was thinking that thought when Patton made some odd orders.
“OOD, get on the circuit one and order all hands into emergency breathing masks.”
“Aye, sir.”
The circuit one announcing system blared out, “Torpedo in the water! All hands don EABS.”
“OOD, arm the fire-suppression system.”
“Aye, sir, urn. Captain, won’t that kill the Cyclops and all the other electronics aboard if we use that?”
“Better than dying in a fire,” Patton said.
Pacino looked at him but decided not to interfere.
Maybe it was just a quirk he had come upon after the Annapolis sinking.
Pacino strapped on his gas mask and plugged it into a receptacle. The air he found was dry and canned and hot.
The deck continued to vibrate beneath their feet as they ran. Pacino wondered if this torpedo was programmed to execute a termination-run detonation. His next thought was of Colleen, whether she was wearing her gas mask, and what she was doing. He stood up and reached for his hose connection at the manifold, planning to unplug it and walk forward to check on Colleen.
He never made it.
The termination detonation of the Nagasaki torpedo knocked him to the deck. Then there was only darkness.
The first few seconds after the torpedo impact seemed almost calm, due to
the temporary deafness experienced by the crew.
Pacino found himself on the deck, lying on top of someone groaning in pain. He untangled his emergency-air-mask hose and pushed himself up. Seeing a handrail of the periscope stand above his head, he grabbed it and hauled himself to his feet. The lights overhead were flickering, but electrical bus fluctuations were normal after loss of the reactor. As the electrical turbines dropped off the grid, the battery’s motor-generators picked up, dumping the nonvital buses and carrying the vital loads.
He looked over at the ship-control panel. The ship was maintaining depth. That meant the helmsman was still able to control the ship’s angle and the planes.
There didn’t seem to be any immediate danger. They’d have to restart the reactor—that was strange, he thought, that the officer in maneuvering hadn’t reported the reactor scram. The engine-order telegraph was set at all stop. Pacino craned his neck to find Patton, who was pulling himself up from the other side of the commander’s panel. He seemed okay, as did the officer of the deck. Each of them set about adjusting the rubber masks on their faces, then the hoses and regulators clipped to their belts.
Battle control was down again, but after a shock like they’d just experienced, Pacino expected it to be in trouble.
All told, they’d been able to outrun the Nagasaki torpedo, and they had come out whole. Pacino found Patton’s eyes, and pointed at his gas mask. The masks were now unnecessary with the ship relatively safe. He was reaching for the straps when a booming voice stopped him dead.
The word came into the control room on the circuit four emergency voice line, which amplified a voice in any of the ship’s phone circuits and broadcasted it over the shipwide PA system. The man on the phone shouted: “Fire in the torpedo room! Fire in the torpedo room, weapon-fuel fire!”
Pacino felt a surge of adrenaline slam him in the gut.
A weapon-fuel fire was the death certificate of any nuclear submarine, because peroxide torpedo fuel, in the booster stages of the Vortex missiles and the main fuel for the two room-stowed Mark 52 torpedoes, burned without a source of oxygen, the oxidizer chemically contained in the fuel itself. While this made for ideal torpedo propellant, it meant disaster if a weapon broke open and began to burn, because there was no way to put the fire out. The peroxide would bum until it burned all the fuel, and the fumes from it were so toxic that a single breath would drop a two hundred fifty-pound man in his tracks. Pacino had been faced with this issue during the design phase of the SSNX, and had met the challenge two ways. He had installed a liquid nitrogen fire-suppression system in the room, a liquid nitrogen hose forward and one aft, and had stiffened the bulkheads of the torpedo room. With the hatches to the room shut, the room could be flooded by opening it up to sea and pumping seawater through the compartment. The water wouldn’t stop the fuel fire, because it would simply keep burning underwater, but the water flowing through the flooded space could possibly cool the burning fuel enough to keep the hull from rupturing until the fire was burned out.
He had run simulations of a weapon-fuel fire, and every one had showed the ship sinking, the fuel fire too catastrophic to recover from. He had made a modification, ejecting the torpedoes that weren’t on fire, and by doing that the nitrogen and flooding systems could handle the casualty, with skillful ship and depth control.
His thoughts flashed to Colleen. Her computer room was located just above the weapons. An image came to mind, of her struggling in a toxic-fuel fire, dropping to her knees and collapsing. Before he realized what he was doing, he took a deep breath and disconnected his hose and dashed through the aft door. Since he was not a member of ship’s company, he had no assignment at battle stations or during a casualty, although U.S. Navy regulations were conflicted about his role at a time like this.
He didn’t give a damn right now. He had to put out that fire. He dashed to the ladder outside the executive officer’s stateroom. He slid down the slick stainless steel handrails, his feet dangling, until his shoes hit the lower-level deckplates. He raced through the berthing room to the forward door, the door to the torpedo room.
The door was a heavy steel hatch with a small window set at eye level. All he could see in the window was black smoke and the haphazard orange flash of flames.
For a fraction of a second Pacino froze in place. If he opened the door, he would admit air and oxygen into the existing conflagration, making it worse. But then, he reasoned, what was burning inside didn’t need the oxygen out here; it had plenty in liquid form.
He opened a locker marked o2a and pulled out a large contraption resembling a scuba buoyancy compensator, a sort of artificial lung with a gas mask—OBA stood for oxygen-breathing apparatus. He pulled it on, leaving the mask hanging by its hose, and grabbed a cartridge, a chemical oxygen generator, from the rack inside the cabinet. He inserted the canister, pulled the pin on it, and lit it off. The cartridge took thirty seconds to come up to temperature and generate the oxygen Pacino would need inside the space.
“Fire in the torpedo room,” the circuit one PA system boomed from a speaker in the overhead. “Fire in the torpedo room. Casualty assistance team, lay forward.
Admiral Pacino is in charge at the scene. Ship is emergency-blowing to the surface. Prepare to flood the torpedo room.”
Pacino was joined by a burly man, his shirt soaked in sweat.
“Who are you?” Pacino asked through his gas mask.
Taking one last breath, he ditched the mask and put his face into the new mask of the O2A. The air in it was rubbery and hot, but he took a breath. It would keep him alive, if barely.
“Chief Hanson, torpedoman, sir,” the burly man said.
“I’m getting an O2A on myself.”
“I’m going in and forward,” Pacino said to the chief.
“I’ll hit the liquid-nitrogen suppression system. If I can, I’ll get the LIN hose on the fire from forward, you get it on from aft. Then let’s get the room empty. You know how to handle weapons from the aft panel?” “Yessir,” Hanson said.
Four more men showed up. Hanson had already donned his O2A, his canister lit off.
“Get them in OBAS and into the room. Chief. Let’s get these missiles out of here! If we get a solid-rocket-fuel fire, we’re all dead men!”
The solid-rocket fuel of a Vortex missile would put a four-foot hole in the hull, pressurize everything inside to a thousand pounds per square inch, and fill the ship with hydrogen cyanide, a gas capable of killing a man from a teaspoonful in a gymnasium.
“Sir, you’ve got to get into the steam suit or you’ll be burned alive!”
“No time!” Pacino shouted.
“Take the gloves, then!”
Pacino strapped on the gloves the chief handed him.
The chief hit the hatch lever and opened the hatch. Pacino stepped in, not believing what he saw or felt. It was as if someone had unlatched the gate of hell itself.
Flames blasted at him through the hatchway as he ducked in. Rolling black smoke engulfed him. By feel Pacino ran around to the side, where the liquid-nitrogen suppression emergency button was. Like so many cures on the sub, this one was potentially as dangerous as the threat. The liquid nitrogen, or UN, at minus 190 degrees was cold enough to kill human tissue on contact. A splash on a hand doomed it to amputation; a drop on the skin caused a cryogenic burn. In addition, as liquid nitrogen vaporized, it filled the space with nitrogen gas.
A single breath of pure nitrogen could instantly shut down the functioning of the human respiration center of the brain. A breath of high-concentration nitrogen would kill a man, switching off his breathing like a switch. For that reason the liquid-nitrogen fire-suppression system was not entrusted to a computer or electrical system, but set off physically by a button. Pacino felt the cover over the button, yanked it off against a massive spring, and hit the mushroom cap, The room hissed like a giant cat as liquid nitrogen hit the flames and weapons. The UN system sprayed the room for a full two minutes, filling the space with the in
ert gas. Immediately, Pacino ducked under a hood beneath the button to avoid the fluid hitting his poorly protected skin. He could hear the hissing easing as the system ran out of LIN, and he stood.
Hanson’s voice erupted behind him. “Forward, Admiral.
I’ve got the aft hose. Jenson! Get the valve!”
Pacino advanced into the flames. Intense heat invaded every pore of his skin. His flame-resistant coveralls started to smolder, his sleeves smoking as the material caught. By the time Pacino reached the middle of the room, he realized he was on fire.
And there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. The first faint breeze of fear touched him, chilling him, slowing his steps. The alarm picked up until panic filled him, a gale force forcing away all logic and reason.
The effect of the paralyzing panic was more frightening than the fact that his clothes were on fire.
He’d just about stopped moving when he felt a body beneath his right foot. The form lay facedown on the deck, dead. The scorched skin of the body crunched under Pacino’s foot. Suddenly he wondered if the body was Colleen.
Colleen! his mind screamed. She would be directly over his head, and she might be dying right now. He had to get to her, he had to save her. With that thought the panic that had grabbed him by the throat was thrown off. Pacino ran to the forward bulkhead, his heart pounding, not with fear but with anger. He had finally found the one for him, and he wasn’t going to be robbed of her before they even had a chance to get started.
At the panel, he grabbed the LIN hose, opened the valve. The liquid nitrogen blasted out at the hottest spot of the fire—he couldn’t even see it, he could only feel it. The room seemed to cool for just a second, enough for him to scream at the chief: “Jettison the weapons! Chief!”
“Mark 52s going now. Admiral,” the chief called back.
The next sound was the crash of a torpedo tube launching a weapon. Pacino shut the LIN hose nozzle, waiting. Vaguely he was aware that the nitrogen around him was putting out the flames on his clothes. He couldn’t feel any damage to his skin, but then, perhaps that was because he was numb. He pushed the thought away as a second crash sounded. The second torpedo tube had launched. A third and fourth tube-launch crash slammed his eardrums. The room grew hot again, and Pacino sprayed the LIN hose in spurts. The LIN in the aft section began to hiss as the supply ran low.