by Tom Clancy
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.
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.
His duty electrician moved along the electrical control panels switching from main power to emergency, since residual steam power in the turboalternators would die in a few more seconds. In a moment the submarine’s power completely depended on standby batteries.
In the control room power was lost to the electrically controlled trim tabs on the trailing edge of the diving planes, which automatically switched back to electrohydraulic control. This powered not just the small trim tabs but the diving planes as well. The control assemblies moved instantly to a fifteen-degree up-angle—and she was still moving at thirty-nine knots. With all her ballast tanks now blasted free of water by compressed air, the submarine was very light, and she rose like a climbing aircraft. In seconds the astonished control room crew felt their boat rise to an up-angle that was forty-five degrees and getting worse. A moment later they were too busy trying to stand to come to grips with the problem. Now the Alfa was climbing almost vertically at thirty miles per hour. Every man and unsecured item aboard fell sternward.
In the motor control room aft, a crewman crashed against the main electrical switchboard, short-circuiting it with his body, and all power aboard was lost. A cook who had been inventorying survival gear in the torpedo room forward struggled into the escape trunk as he fought his way into an exposure suit. Even with only a year’s experience, he was quick to understand the meaning of the hooting alarms and unprecedented actions of his boat. He yanked the hatch shut and began to work the escape controls as he had been taught in submarine school.
The Politovskiy soared through the surface of the Atlantic like a broaching whale, coming three quarters of her length out of the water before crashing back.
The USS Pogy
“Conn, sonar.”
“Conn, aye, Captain speaking.”
“Skipper, you better hear this. Something just went crazy on Bait 2,” Pogy’s chief reported. Wood was in the sonar room in seconds, putting on earphones plugged into a tape recorder which had a two-minute offset. Commander Wood heard a whooshing sound. The engine noises stopped. A few seconds later there was an explosion of compressed air, and a staccato of hull popping noises as a submarine changed depth rapidly.
“What’s going on?” Wood asked quickly.
The E. S. Politovskiy
In the Politovskiy’s reactor, the runaway fission reaction had virtually annihilated both the incoming seawater and the uranium fuel rods. Their debris settled on the after wall of the reactor vessel. In a minute there was a meter-wide puddle of radioactive slag, enough to form its own critical mass. The reaction continued unabated, this time directly attacking the tough stainless steel of the vessel. Nothing man made could long withstand five thousand degrees of direct heat. In ten seconds the vessel wall failed. The uranium mass dropped free, against the
aft bulkhead.
Petchukocov knew he was dead. He saw the paint on the forward bulkhead turn black, and his last impression was of a dark mass surrounded with the blue glow. The engineer’s body vaporized an instant later, and the mass of slag dropped to the next bulkhead aft.
Forward, the submarine’s nearly vertical angle in the water eased. The high-pressure air in the ballast tanks spilled out of the bottom floods and the tanks filled with water, dropping the angle of the boat and submerging her. In the forward part of the submarine men were screaming. The captain struggled to his feet, ignoring his broken leg, trying to get control, to get his men organized and out of the submarine before it was too late, but the luck of Evgeni Sigismondavich Politovskiy would plague his namesake one last time. Only one man escaped. The cook opened the escape trunk hatch and got out. Following what he had learned during the drill, he began to seal the hatch so that men behind him could use it, but a wave slapped him off the hull as the sub slid backwards.
In the engine room, the changing angle dropped the melted core to the deck. The hot mass attacked the steel deck first, burning through that, then the titanium of the hull. Five seconds later the engine room was vented to the sea. The Politovskiy’s largest compartment filled rapidly with water. This destroyed what little reserve buoyancy the ship had, and the acute down-angle returned. The Alfa began her last dive.
The stern dropped just as the captain began to get his control room crew to react to orders again. His head struck an instrument console. What slim hopes his crew had died with him. The Politovskiy was falling backwards, her propeller windmilling the wrong way as she slid to the bottom of the sea.
The Pogy
“Skipper, I was on the Chopper back in sixty-nine,” the Pogy’s chief said, referring to a horrifying accident on a diesel-powered submarine.
“That’s what it sounds like,” his captain said. He was now listening to direct sonar input. There was no mistaking it. The submarine was flooding. They had heard the ballast tanks refill; this could only mean interior compartments were filling with water. If they had been closer, they might have heard the screams of men in that doomed hull. Wood was just as happy he couldn’t. The continuing rush of water was dreadful enough. Men were dying. Russians, his enemy, but men not unlike himself, and there was not a thing that could be done about it.
Bait 1, he saw, was proceeding, unmindful of what had happened to her trailing sister.
The E. S. Politovskiy
It took nine minutes for the Politovskiy to fall the two thousand feet to the ocean floor. She impacted savagely on the hard sand bottom at the edge of the continental shelf. It was a tribute to her builders that her interior bulkheads held. All the compartments from the reactor room aft were flooded and half the crew killed in them, but the forward compartments were dry. Even this was more curse than blessing. With the aft air storage banks unusable and only emergency battery power to run the complex environmental control systems, the forty men had only a limited supply of air. They were spared a rapid death from the crushing North Atlantic only to face a slower one from asphyxiation.
THE NINTH DAY
SATURDAY, 11 DECEMBER
The Pentagon
A female yeoman first class held the door open for Tyler. He walked in to find General Harris standing alone over the large chart table pondering the placement of tiny ship models.
“You must be Skip Tyler.” Harris looked up.
“Yes, sir.” Tyler was standing as rigidly at attention as his prosthetic leg allowed. Harris came over quickly to shake hands.
“Greer says you used to play ball.”
“Yes, General, I played right tackle at Annapolis. Those were good years.” Tyler smiled, flexing his fingers. Harris looked like an iron-pumper.
“Okay, if you used to play ball, you can call me Ed.” Harris poked him in the chest. “Your number was seventy-eight, and you made All American, right?”
“Second string, sir. Nice to know somebody remembers.”
“I was on temporary duty at the Academy for a few months back then, and I caught a couple games. I never forget a good offensive lineman. I made All Conference at Montana—long time ago. What happened to the leg?”
“Drunk driver clipped me. I was the lucky one. The drunk didn’t make it.”
“Serves the bastard right.”
Tyler nodded agreement, but remembered that the drunken shipfitter had had his own wife and family, according to the police. “Where is everybody?”
“The chiefs are at their normal—well, normal for a weekday, not a Saturday—intelligence briefing. They ought to be down in a few minutes. So, you’re teaching engineering at Annapolis now, eh?”
“Yes, sir. I got a doctorate in that along the way.”
“Name’s Ed, Skip. And this morning you’re going to tell us how we can hold onto that maverick Russian sub?”
“Yes, sir—Ed.”
“Tell me about it, but let’s get some coffee first.” The two men went to a table in the corner with coffee and donuts. Harris listened to the younger man for five minutes, sipping his coffee and devouring a couple of jelly donuts. It took a lot of food to support his frame.
“Son of a gun,” the J-3 observed when Tyler finished. He walked over to the chart. “That’s interesting. Your idea depends a lot on sleight of hand. We’d have to keep them away from where we’re pulling this off. About here, you say?” He tapped the chart.
“Yes, General. The thing is, the way they seem to be operating we can do this to seaward of them—”
“And do a double shuffle. I like it. Yeah, I like it, but Dan Foster won’t like losing one of our own boats.”
“I’d say it’s worth the trade.”
“So would I,” Harris agreed. “But they’re not my boats. After we do this, where do we hide her—if we get her?”
“General, there are some nice places right here on the Chesapeake Bay. There’s a deep spot on the York River and another on the Patuxent, both owned by the navy, both marked Keep Out on the charts. Nice thing about subs, they’re supposed to be invisible. You just find a deep enough spot and flood your tanks. That’s temporary, of course. For a more permanent spot, maybe Truk or Kwajalein in the Pacific. Nice and far from any place.”
“And the Soviets would never notice the presence of a sub tender and three hundred submarine technicians there all of a sudden? Besides, those islands don’t really belong to us anymore, remember?”
Tyler hadn’t expected this man to be a dummy. “So, what if they do find out in a few months? What will they do, announce it to the whole world? I don’t think so. By that time we’ll have all the information we want, and we can always produce the defecting officers in a nice news conference. How would that look for them? Anyway, it figures that after we’ve had her for a while, we’ll break her up. The reactor’ll go to Idaho for tests. The missiles and warheads will get taken off. The electronics gear will be taken to California for testing, and the CIA, NSA, and navy will have gunfights over the crypto gear. The stripped hulk will be taken to a nice deep spot and scuttled. No evidence. We don’t have to keep this a secret forever, just for a few months.”
Harris set his cup down. “You’ll have to forgive me for playing devil’s advocate. I see you’ve thought this out. Fine, I think it’s worth a hard look. It means coordinating a lot of hardware, but it doesn’t really interfere with what we’re already doing. Okay, you have my vote.”
The Joint Chiefs arrived three minutes later. Tyler had never seen so many stars in one room.
“You wanted to see all of us, Eddie?” Hilton asked.
“Yes, General. This is Dr. Skip Tyler.”
Admiral Foster came over first to take his hand. “You got us that performance data on Red October that we were just briefed on. Good work, Commander.”
“Dr. Tyler thinks we should hold onto her if we get her,” Harris said deadpan. “And he thinks he has a way we can do it.”
“We already thought of killing th
e crew,” Commandant Maxwell said. “The president won’t let us.”
“Gentlemen, what if I told you that there was a way to send the crewmen home without them knowing that we have her? That’s the issue, right? We have to send the crewmen back to Mother Russia. I say there’s a way to do that, and the remaining question is where to hide her.”
“We’re listening,” Hilton said suspiciously.
“Well, sir, we’ll have to move quickly to get everything in place. We’ll need Avalon from the West Coast. Mystic is already aboard the Pigeon in Charleston. We need both of them, and we need an old boomer of our own that we can afford to do without. That’s the hardware. The real trick, however, is the timing—and we have to find her. That may be the hardest part.”
“Maybe not,” Foster said. “Admiral Gallery reported this morning that Dallas may be onto her. Her report dovetails nicely with your engineering model. We’ll know more in a few days. Go on.”
Tyler explained. It took ten minutes since he had to answer questions and use the chart to diagram time and space constraints. When he was finished, General Barnes was at the phone calling the commander of the Military Airlift Command. Foster left the room to call Norfolk, and Hilton was on his way to the White House.
The Red October
Except for those on watch, every officer was in the wardroom. Several pots of tea were on the table, all untouched, and again the door was locked.
“Comrades,” Petrov reported, “the second set of badges was contaminated, worse than the first.”
Ramius noted that Petrov was rattled. It wasn’t the first set of badges, or the second. It was the third and fourth since sailing. He had chosen his ship’s doctor well.
“Bad badges,” Melekhin growled. “Some bastard of a trickster in Severomorsk—or perhaps an imperialist spy playing a typical enemy trick on us. When they catch the son of a bitch I will shoot him myself—whoever he is! This sort of thing is treasonous!”
“Regulations require that I report this,” Petrov noted. “Even though the instruments show safe levels.”
