Phoenix Sub Zero

by Michael Dimercurio

  “Eng, open your throttles wide, I don’t care if the mains fly out of the fucking casings, and do it now!”

  The hull vibrations increased suddenly to a violent shaking as the screw’s thrust bearing 200 feet aft lost its oil film and made metal-to-metal contact, threatening to shear off the shaft. In maneuvering, several beads of sweat ran down Tom Schramford’s forehead as he glared at the reactor power-meter needle as it climbed to 150 percent and hit the top peg, deep into the red zone, the reactor compartment’s high radiation alarm flashing on the reactor control panel. The reactor core was coming apart, he thought, the bomb-grade uranium no longer separated from the cooling water by a sheath of zirconium cladding, the clad now rupturing as the fuel elements overheated. The main engines shook hard aft, the bearings hot, the boilers now putting out steam and water, unable to deal with the huge steam demand and still supply dry steam, the water droplets impinging on

  the main engine turbine blades, threatening to break off a blade. And a thrown blade would blow open the casing, blast the compartment with steam and roast the men aft.

  Schramford didn’t like his orders but would have done the same himself if he’d been in command. It was too loud aft with the complaining drive train to hear the sonar from the incoming torpedo, but forward in the control room David Kane’s earsr were filled with the wailing knell of the weapon.

  Kane had tried everything, putting the reactor in the red, running as hard as he could. He wondered if he should emergency blow to the surface, then rejected the idea. From the sonar tapes of Augusta’s sinking, he suspected that an emergency blow had been Rocket Ron’s last action, and it had not saved him. The bubbles from the ballast tanks had probably made them an even bigger target, or the blow had slowed them down.

  Kane was out of alternatives. He could only wait. Sensing the eyes of the men around him, he kept his war face on: a deep frown, narrowed eyes, jaw muscles clenched. His vision of Becky’s face was starkly real. He blinked her away and looked over at the ship-control console, abstractly wondering how fast the ship could go full out. The electromagnetic log speed indicator read 42.9 knots, the last twenty percent of reactor power barely able to push them another 1.5 feet per

  second faster.

  The torpedo’s sonar grew louder, then stopped, just before the explosion.

  The Nagasaki was fifteen seconds away from detonation when the alarm was received in its upper functions from the self-check module reporting low pressure in the port and starboard fuel cells. A half-second after the alarm sounded the drive turbine began to spool down as the last drops of fuel flowed into the combustion chamber, the chamber cooling, the drag of the water almost immediately bringing the propulsor speed to windmill velocity. With the loss of the turbine, the AC and DC power generators winked out, dropping electrical power to circuits and systems across the board with minor exceptions that were supplied by the onboard battery.

  The torpedo, too long in its tail chase, had run out of fuel, but even this eventuality had been planned for. There was just enough power left to complete the final relay contacts in . the fuse-arming circuit, just enough consciousness remaining in the weapon’s dying brain—in an imitation of a human reflex—to order the detonation of the high explosives. The torpedo’s computer intelligence blacked out, but not before the relay in the detonation circuit clicked home and the trickle of current found the fuse, igniting it into incandescence and detonating the high explosive.

  At the time the torpedo was 125 meters astern of and twenty meters below the target submarine’s screw, tantalizingly close but too far to guarantee a kill. The fireball from the six-ton explosive blew outward, the shock wave reaching far out for the hull of its intended kill.

  The disruption of the ocean region where the torpedo had once been was momentary, and within seconds the violence of the explosion was replaced by bubbles of combustion gases and a shock wave expanding outward in a forceful pressure pulse, its power smashing into the aft hull of the submarine target. Although the pressure pulse was cruel, the sub’s hull was not cut in two, not ruptured, not even cracked, the high-tensile HY-80 steel holding against the stress of the pressure wave as its hammer slammed into the vessel. Had that been the end of the explosion’s effect, the submarine would have sailed on.

  But hull integrity was not sufficient by itself to allow survival in an underwater six-ton plastique explosion … the pressure pulse did three things to the sub that made her survival doubtful, perhaps impossible.

  The first was to blow the horizontal stabilizer surfaces upward from the blast angle, coming as it had from below. The stern plane surfaces’ hydraulics were overcome by the force of the shock wave, the force of it rotating the surfaces up on their massive hinges, the ship lucky that the stern planes were not completely torn off.

  The second was to shake the ship in such a violent acceleration that the electrical breakers all opened, from the smaller scram breakers providing power to the reactor’s control rods to the main grid turbine breakers and motor generator output breakers supplying the vital loads, even the battery output breaker. As the circuit breakers were jostled open the ship’s electricity was completely lost, the reactor one of the biggest consumers of its own electrical output, the system eating thousands of horsepower in the coolant recirc pumps and the two dozen other pumps that circulated the power plant’s various fluids. It was, in effect, the vessel’s heart failure at the same time as a central nervous system shutdown, brain death.

  The third result was more a response to the first effect and an aftermath of the explosion: the force that had smashed the sternplanes upward from the tail section of the sub had compressed hydraulic oil in the cylinders that pushed the stern plane surfaces, the oil returning to the air-loaded accumulators, the pressurized oil embued now with more energy than the air pressure after the explosion. The high-pressure oil set up a hydraulic pendulum, the same sort of hydraulic pendulum observed by sloshing back and forth in a bathtub, the rising water on one end inevitably bound to rush to the other end. Now that the explosive power of the detonation was dissipating, the force pushing on the stern plane vanished.

  The high-pressure oil rushed from the accumulators unchecked, back to

  the cylinders that controlled the sternplanes, now unopposed by the seawater force on the sternplanes, likewise unopposed by the actions of the sternplanes man in the control room, the youth slumped in his control seat dazed and on the border of consciousness. The cylinders forced the stern planes back down to the full-dive position and kept them there.

  The final result was a jam dive—the ship speeding ahead at over forty knots, the stern planes in the full-dive position, inclining the ship downward at high speed heading for crush depth, her dead reactor unable to pull her back, her dazed crew no longer capable of pulling the ship out.

  In the control room, Kane watched his ship’s lethal dive toward the bottom.

  The explosion of the Nagasaki torpedo was picked up by several dozen sonobuoys floating below the orbiting P3 Orion at the western strait mouth. The sonar technician shared a look with the ASW officer. The explosion detections were all at the position of the submarine contact they had tracked as the 688class USS Phoenix. There was nothing the airplane could do except continue the effort to find the Destiny-class if and when it outchopped the Med. The ASW officer, hoping for good luck, and needing to do something, ordered the spinup of the Mark 52 torpedo nestled in .the weapon bay beneath the wings. When the torpedo

  was warm, its computer asked for target coordinates. The ASW officer, frustrated, was unable to answer the question.

  CNPS hegira Sharef looked back to the chart table to see their progress through the strait, debating with himself whether he should increase speed, finally deciding against it out of unwillingness to generate a louder sound-signature with the aircraft so close. Behind him, on the fifth and sixth sensor-display consoles, lines of noise intensity jumped and danced as the ship’s hull arrays picked up the propulsors of the America
n Mark 50 torpedoes orbiting at the mouth of the strait, as yet unnoticed by the officers at the consoles, who had been suddenly distracted by the indication of a dozen sonobuoys that had just splashed into the water above them.

  Sharef’s mouth opened to order evasive action when Tawkidi, his eyes wide, his characteristic calm cracking, announced the next jumping graph on the display, much worse than sonobuoys: “Low aircraft overhead, sir, looks like he’s got a positive detection.”

  Two sonar techs and the ASW officer of the midchannel P-3 Orion leaned over the central console, reviewing the incoming data from the last field of sonobuoys dropped five minutes earlier.

  “That’s him,” the sonar tech said.

  “One last volley, about here,” Lieutenant Commander Quaid said, speaking into a lip-mike intercom to the pilots up forward.

  The plane turned, pulling many more g’s in the turn than its ungainly turboprop appearance would indicate. Quaid held himself on a handhold as the plane lumbered back around to the south, watching the displays as the next round of sonobuoys dropped out of the plane’s belly and splashed into the water below. The console display curves filled the display, the lines incomprehensible to the uninitiated but full of detail and luscious information to the fraternity of flying antisubmarine warriors.

  “Definite contact. Destiny submarine. Lock-in solution, shift to internal power and prepare to drop.”

  “Weapon ready, solution set.”

  “Skipper, ASW, target located and confirmed. Right turn now to zero one five. Request release.”

  “Turning now … on zero one five. Permission to release.”

  “Drop!”

  “She’s down.”

  The aircraft, glinting silver in the moonlight, dropped its payload into the strait, the torpedo looking like a large bomb as it separated from the P-3 and dived nose-first toward the black waves, a parachute popping astern to slow its entry into the water. A flash of phosphorus foam, and the torpedo vanished.

  The Mark 52 torpedo was still, in effect, groggy, half-asleep as it hit the water, but the sudden deceleration jolted it into full electronic consciousness. It immediately began listening to its seeker sonar as it dived to 300 feet and turned two complete circles. Its computer had been loaded with the bearing to the hostile submarine, but targets had a nasty habit of evading once they heard the heavy splash of a Mark 52 hitting the water. The unit turned, on its first circle hearing something to the west, ignoring it to make sure there wasn’t another target closer, its electronics trained to discriminate between cheap decoys and real submarines. Now at 300 feet, the unit turned again past west and heard the target again, somewhat fainter this time. The torpedo abandoned its second circle and spun the propulsor to maximum speed while pinging with active sonar.

  The return came back, solid, hard. The target was directly ahead, the range minimal. The weapon sped up to fifty-three knots and bore down on the sub, diving slightly to a depth of 450 feet, the depth of the target. As the target grew closer, the torpedo shortened the

  pulse-repetition frequency. It would be a short run. In anticipation, the unit armed its warhead and continued speeding toward the target.

  “Loud splash, bearing of the aircraft at one one two, sir,” Tawkidi reported, his voice level but unnaturally loud in the hushed room. “We’ve got a propulsor, definite torpedo in the water … and the unit is active and closing.”

  “Reactor control, emergency ahead, maximum power to the point of nucleate boiling in the exit plenum, transfer loads to the battery and disable the overload protection in the propulsion motor breakers. Ship control, steer two six five, depth 200 meters, report speed.”

  Sharef had ordered reactor control to put out maximum power short of melting down the fuel assemblies, the calculations for emergency-ahead speed predicting a speed of eighty-eight clicks. Sharef did not smile as the display wound out to ninety-three clicks, since the American airborne-launched torpedoes could do well over ninety-five clicks, perhaps even 100. Sharef continued heading west, out of the Mediterranean with its flocks of aircraft launching torpedoes and their damned sonobuoys toward open ocean and the Atlantic. The torpedo was still driving up on them but it was small. Sharef hoped that it would not harm them too badly. Still, no commander took a hit without evading. At that moment he devoutly wished for another Dash-Five evasion device.

  “Commander, report status of the SCM.”

  SCM was sonar countermeasures, a torpedo-deception system designed by the Japanese shipbuilders, a sort of ventriloquist sonar pulse generator built to fool an incoming torpedo and make it explode too early, the transmitters mounted in the two lower X-fins aft. The sea-trials test results on it had been inconclusive, but in a torpedo tail chase the SCM sonar received the pulse of a torpedo sonar, listened for how often the pulse came in, then on the next ping-listen cycle the SCM would transmit an identical pulse back to the torpedo.

  The SCM transmission was designed to be heard by the torpedo before it heard the echo return of its own original transmission bouncing off the sub. It was simple in concept but close to impossible to make it succeed at sea. The problem that came up first was making the ship able to transmit a ping that exactly matched the torpedo’s ping, then changing it so it would sound like an echo return, adjusting the timing and frequency of the bogus echo so that the torpedo would be fooled into thinking the target was nearer, farther, slower or faster than it actually was. The system required the most sensitive receivers, the most perfect transmitters and the dedication of an entire supercomputer.

  All these requirements had been worried over for years, the final hurdle for the computer. Computing resources were most at a premium during a torpedo evasion. Sensors were straining to hear another threat or locate

  another target, weapons systems were programming the counterfire, reactor systems were controlling the potentially dangerous core as it approached its design limits, and ship-control systems were preparing to maneuver to evade—there simply was not time or machinery to do the intense calculations needed to put out the ventriloquist sonar pulses. The Japanese, as usual, had relished the chance to solve a seemingly impossible technical problem and had installed a separate compact supercomputer tied into a new hydrophone array on the X-tails. The system was expensive and not guaranteed to work, but about half of the tests had shown impressive results.

  As they ran from the torpedo, Tawkidi and Sharef had been too involved with the incoming torpedo and activating the SCM system to notice what lay ahead: the minefield of two dozen Mark 50 weapons circling and quietly waiting for the Destiny submarine.

  David Kane’s mind was operating on parallel tracks, and if he were not seconds from disaster he might have found the effect fascinating, the sudden expanded mental capacity the result of the rush of adrenaline and his own sense that he probably had less than thirty seconds to live.

  Phoenix’s deck had plunged to a steep down-angle as a result of the diving-angle on the stern planes. One part of Kane’s mind acted as a recorder and impartial observer, seeing that the inclinometer mounted above the ballast-control panel was off the scale, which would be over a

  fifty-degree down-angle. A grease pencil on a string suspended from the O.O.D’s status board hung very nearly horizontal relative to the deck—the ship was headed damn near straight down, a fact Kane could swear to if for no other reason than he and the other battle stations watchstanders had fallen to the forward bulkhead, the cluster of almost two dozen bodies at rest against the door to the forward passageway, the door to sonar and the ship-control station. The stern planesman was out cold after being slammed into his control yoke by the hit he took from XO Mcdonne, the safety harness either failing or unused. The diving officer was the man next in line to save the ship, his duties to supervise ship’s course and depth and angle, this incident fitting right into his job description, but who was not up to the task. Usually the DO sat behind the flight-deck-style controls, behind the console that separated helmsman/stern planesman from
the fairwater planes man.

  He had been knocked from his seat by the impact of several plotters and a phone talker. the pile at rest against the ship-control panel, blocking view of the plane indicators and depth gauge. Houser, the O.O.D, was apparently missing, but could have been under the pile of bodies. Which left Kane himself, who was initially on the conn and had slid down the deck and hit someone else, too pumped up to experience the shock or surprise he would have expected.

  It was obvious to Kane that the ship was dying and had only seconds to go before changing from a submarine to a submerged debris field. The

  ship had been going full-out at the time of the Nagasaki detonation, the initial blast giving them a slight up-angle, then suddenly pushing them into a dive. The reactor had tripped, that much was obvious from the loss of the ventilation system. The ship would now plunge until it exceeded crush depth, at 1,300 feet below the surface, a trip that would probably take only a few seconds.

  Once below 1,300, the sea pressure outside the hull would become greater than the ship was designed for, the enormous force built up from the weight of the water above. The submarine force had lost three nuclear subs to the crushing pressure; the first, the Thresher in 1963, went down on sea trials and made a crater when it hit the bottom. There was not much left of her intact, just a square mile of ocean bottom scattered with wreckage.

  If the water was not deep enough to crush the hull, the ship would hit bottom and rupture like an egg hurled to the kitchen floor. A fleeting mental vision flashed through Kane’s mind, that when the Russian submarine Komsomolets sank a decade before, it had hit the rocky bottom of the Norwegian Sea so hard that it broke into several pieces, two of her own torpedoes detonating from the violent impact.

  Kane next saw the chart as if it were suspended in front of his face, blocking his nightmare view of his submarine.