“General. Colonel. In less than a minute the first torpedo will hit us. We have done everything possible to avoid it, but with three weapons coming in from all around we were not likely to evade them all. I wanted you to be prepared for the impact.”
“Is there nothing else you can do. Commodore?” Sihoud asked.
“There is one option, to surface and count on the torpedoes having a ceiling setting to avoid surface-ship traffic, but that will slow us down and the weapons will easily catch up. Our own Nagasaki torpedoes were designed to find a surfacing sub that much easier from the clouds of bubbles put out by the surfacing systems. It is not a good gamble, General. We have a better chance of the attacking torpedoes running out of fuel than we do of evading by surfacing. Other than that, all we can do is run.”
“You said less than a minute,” Ahmed said. “How long now?”
“Twenty seconds,” Tawkidi said.
The SCM system began groaning out false sonar signals even before the incoming sonars could be heard through the hull. Sharef moved to Lieutenant Ishak’s master console. He dropped to one knee, hearing the seconds ticking off in his mind, but tried to keep his voice level.
“Lieutenant, have you told the Second Captain our intended route to the North Atlantic?”
The ship’s navigation plan, worked out with the officers when the mission was first explained, had them sailing a great circle route toward the range circle around Washington, D.C. The plan had called for them to intercept that 2,900-kilometer circle centered on the American capital at a glancing angle to the northeast, the better to have a longer time enroute to assemble and install the Scorpion warheads in the Hiroshima missile airframes. That route would also keep their path heading more toward Greenland than the east coast of America, in case they were tracked or detected sporadically during the trip — making a beeline for Washington would alert the Western Coalition if they were tracked, and the West would expend all possible efforts to sink them. Sharef was convinced that the West had not yet awakened to the situation, that what they faced now were half-measures intended to find Sihoud. If the Americans had the slightest idea that the ship carried a doomsday weapon pointed at their capital, the entire combined navies of the West would hunt him down like a dog.
“Sir, the great circle path toward Greenland has been inserted into the Second Captain since the briefing, but that will not help us if the missiles are not assembled.”
Sharef nodded. The Second Captain was perfectly capable of driving the ship to within missile range of the target and launching the weapons without help from the crew, as long as the system was properly programmed. But without fully assembled and complete missiles, the Second Captain would drive them to their destination but would be useless in hitting the target. It was essential that the weapons be assembled as soon as possible. After the missiles were ready, the mission would practically be accomplished, because at that point the mission no longer needed the crew, just an intact ship and healthy Second Captain—
It was then that the American torpedo caught up with them.
* * *
The Mark 50 torpedo found the pressure hull of the target, notwithstanding the odd sonar pulses coming from its stern, the noises sounding something like echoes but not at the correct angle or frequency. The torpedo had closed the target from an angle since it began homing, and just as the onboard computer had thought, the target submarine had ended up at precisely this point in the sea at the time of interception. The iron proximity sensors set into the Mark 50’s flanks tingled as the hull of the target grew closer, until finally the Mark 50 drove directly under the giant hull of the target, the huge diameter of the hull seeming to be flat at the bottom. The shaped charge of the torpedo automatically was adjusted to blow maximum force in the direction of the hull. Within milliseconds of detecting the hull the high explosive blew.
The torpedo underwent a metamorphosis from solid object to pure-energy fireball.
The fireball erupted upward and ruptured the steel outer hull of the target, the pressure wave going further and blasting apart the exterior reinforcing hoop frames and steel plates welded onto the framing. The blast’s intrusion into the inner hull blew the interior of the compartment to wreckage and pressurized the compartment to a level approaching its design basis, the force threatening to rip a hole in the other side of the cylinder or tear the compartment from the neighboring one. But as fast as the pressure wave came, it was spent, the energy that had breached both the hulls and pulverized the interior of the compartment now expended and attenuated. The pressure level in the compartment fell, the gas by-products of the explosion leaving through the five-meter-wide hole in the inner hull, the gases replaced by the cold seawater that flooded the space except for a small gas bubble trapped in the upper cylinder of the compartment.
Thirty seconds after impact, the damage of the blast was complete.
The submarine outer hull was left with a twenty-meter-wide hole that extended into a hoop-wise rip around almost the entire circumference of the ship. The inner hull of the aftmost compartment was ruptured, the interior equipment— the diesel generator and the battery — blown to pieces. The outer hull’s aft conformal sonar array was obliterated. The interior high-voltage cables for the propulsion AC motor were severely damaged, and the SCM sonar-fooling ventriloquist electronics and sonar array were no more. However, the other inner-hull compartments were undamaged, the stern control X-planes remained intact and functional, and except for the structural rip in the outer hull, the ship was otherwise unharmed. Propulsion had been lost from the shock of the blast, and the ship’s electrical systems were down without the DC battery, but the computer systems of the Second Captain survived, their circuits still complete, their internal power systems still supplying the current for continuing electronic consciousness.
But the men inside the Hegira did not move, and half of them no longer breathed. The lights in the control room were out, only the glaring bulbs of the emergency lighting system energized, the blood running on the deck turning brown as the minutes turned into an hour. The room had not served its masters well, the seats in the room mostly rolling swivel chairs, the only bolted-down control seats those of the ship control officers. The other men had been standing or sitting in the rolling seats when the torpedo detonated. The bodies in the space flew like marbles in a shaken jar. Physically, except for the blank screens of the Second Captain consoles, the room was intact. The men were the difference. Before there had been almost two dozen in the control space, the room normally large and uncluttered but made cramped by the entire ship’s crew of officers jammed in. Now there were piles of bodies thrown about by the intense g-forces from the explosion. Four men had died almost instantly in the blast, more in the ten minutes after, the result of strangling from a pileup of bodies or drowning from blood spilling into lungs.
The unconscious living and the dead lay on the floor, no spark of intelligence in the ship except the core processors of the Second Captain in the process-control modules on the lower level.
After two minutes of waiting with no commands from the human crew, the core module of the Second Captain took action, as it had been programmed to do. Its first action was to power up the peripheral modules made inactive by the loss of AC power. The remainder of its systems were fed off a motor-generator that was powered by the reactor’s electrical grid, and the reactor was down. Almost a third of the system was functional at the end of this action, including the ship-control modules, the air-quality systems and reactor-control cores.
The Second Captain took inventory of the condition of the reactor plant and began the reactor startup recovery routine.
* * *
While the control rods came slowly out of the reactor core, an American ASW patrol plane orbited above the spot where the torpedo had detonated. The Hegira did not hear the plane, the sensor-control processors still dormant. Astern of her, two other torpedoes closed, still in pursuit from before.
* * *
&n
bsp; Sixty nautical miles west of the Hegira’s position, the Phoenix still lay inert on the bottom, her systems shut down, a few souls struggling for survival inside. After initiating emergency-core cooling, Tom Schramford intended to shut his aching eyes for just a moment. If he had realized he was suffering from a severe concussion he would have kept going, but his minute rest was now into its twentieth minute with no sign of ending soon.
Up forward, Commander CB Mcdonne opened his right eye and watched the world swirl around him, unaware of where or even who he was. A few minutes later he felt his tongue, which hurt like hell and was stuck hard to the roof of his mouth. When he tried to move it, it sent pain to his brain that’ went a long way toward shaking off his lethargic state. At least it brought him the realization that he was the executive officer of a submarine in serious trouble. He tried opening both eyes and saw only a dim tangle of feet and limbs, poorly illuminated by a battle lantern that had clicked on by itself when the power had gone down. Mcdonne tried to breathe and felt another streak of pain shoot through his ribcage. He took another breath and pushed outward at the pile of bodies. He barely seemed to notice at the time that some were warm, some slick with blood, others cold and stiff. He gathered himself, got to his feet. He bent to the men and began pulling them apart, careful to avoid moving broken limbs or men who looked like they might have broken their backs or necks. The kid at the helmsman’s station had taken the control yoke on the forehead. The diving officer, originally seated behind and between helmsman and stern planesman, had plunged forward onto the deck. The chief of the watch, originally at the ballast-control panel to port, had smashed his head on the BCP, his head spun nearly around to face his back.
Houser was in the pile that Mcdonne had pulled himself out of. Also in the pile were the three officers originally at the attack-center consoles. All were still breathing. Captain Kane was in the pile, and seemed okay if bruised, his face swollen and covered with dried blood from a forehead gash.
His nose looked like it was broken. Mcdonne pulled the weapons officer, Follicus, off the heap. He was alive but dead white. After separating the bodies, all of them at the forward end of the room, Mcdonne stood again and felt faint. He figured that it must be from the exertion, but then wondered about the atmosphere in the ship. It had a pungent acidic taste to it, more than the smell of bloodthe air had to be contaminated. With no power, the ship’s air would soon be totally polluted. It might already have near-toxic levels of carbon dioxide, maybe even chlorine if the battery compartment was taking in seawater. He moved aft to the damage-control locker and pulled out a dozen masks, plugging in one for himself and began strapping them onto the faces of the men who remained alive. As soon as he felt his initial taste of uncontaminated air, the ache in his head vanished and he had a new energy, and with it, a new series of thoughts, all bad. Such as the reactor fuel assemblies melting; without the emergency cooling system it might now be fried to a radioactive crisp. He might already be dying from a lethal dose of radiation and not feel it. The ship might be flooding, or would be unable to ascend from the bottom if the propulsion machinery were broken — after slamming into the bottom that hard how could the systems be intact?
And if the ship turned out to be paralyzed it meant the unthinkable — a submarine escape. Suddenly he wanted to know their depth, searching the ship-control panel for the old-fashioned Bourbon-tube pressure gauge calibrated in feet of seawater. The one on the panel read 1,355 feet, deeper than crush depth by fifty-five feet. To exceed crush depth and slam into a rocky bottom and still make it in one piece was a testimony to the design engineers and perhaps to a supreme being too, if Mcdonne had been religious. By the end of the day he might well be, he thought, pondering a submarine escape from 1,300 feet.
* * *
The whole concept of sub escapes had been rethought after the Russian Navy opened their archives and provided details of submarine accidents. One of them stuck in Medonne’s mind, that of the Kaliningrad, which sank under polar ice cover. Several men had made it inside an escape pod when the ship broke in half. The cause of the sinking was still classified, but evidently several of the Russian officers had escaped and survived the cold of an arctic storm.
The other accident that came to mind was the sinking of the Komsomolets; the escape pod from that incident brought a handful of men up from below test depth but they later died of complications. The U.S. Navy opened an inquiry into submarine escapes, wondering if it was missing something by not including escape pods on American subs. Mcdonne had done some of the work for the study during his shore tour at navsea in Crystal City. The report’s conclusion: “Submarine sinkings generally lead to depth excursions below crush depth and hence to complete hull failure with 100 % crew casualties. Hence, installation of escape vehicles is not considered a worthwhile safety investment.” In real English, why put in escape pods when the crew would die in a sinking when the hull imploded?
But there was a positive result — the escape trunks, the ship’s airlocks — were redesigned to allow crewmen to leave down the ship’s full crush depth, rather than from 400 feet.
The escape trunk changeout had been done in that messy shipyard period when the reactor was replaced by the new hotrod core. The installation had taken months, but the escape trunk was now able to function down to 1,300 feet.
Still, surviving a free ascent to the surface from a quarter mile deep was unlikely. The bends, the cold, the length of the trip, all would conspire to kill a man. And who would want to leave the ship at 1,300 feet with nothing between him and the sea than a Steinke hood? It would be worse than suicide, it would be madness.
Mcdonne tried to forget the idea while he strapped emergency air masks on the men in the space. He slapped several cheeks and saw a few regain consciousness. Captain Kane’s eyelids fluttered open, blinking away the blood. As soon as he got the men in their masks he unplugged and moved aft through the middle level, wondering what the status of the reactor was, a thought still nagging at him that the ship might well have turned into a tomb if they couldn’t get off the bottom.
* * *
In the eastern Atlantic, late evening Sunday became early morning Monday as the circling P-3 patrol planes ran out of fuel and departed station to head home, one of the planes remaining as it detected the sound of a Mark 50 torpedo explosion with no sound afterward except that of the other two pursuing torpedoes. But those two weapons were as lost as the lone P-3, never finding their target, searching until they ran out of fuel and shut down. After another half-hour on the search with no sign of a hull breakup, the ocean empty, the P-3 was so low on fuel it had to divert to Rota, Spain. The replacement P-3s arrived an hour into the morning, but by then the sea was calm and quiet except for the lonely noises of a few passing whales and a school of clicking shrimp.
Several messages were transmitted to CINCNAVFORCEMED, which at first ordered the aircraft to continue the search, but the fleet of P-3s could not be maintained airborne indefinitely.
Between maintenance problems and crew fatigue, the planes’ numbers steadily dwindled. By sunrise Monday, only the Burke-class ASW destroyers patrolled the area, and they heard exactly nothing.
The DSRV deep-submergence rescue vehicle Avalon and the supporting equipment and crew that had been flown to Naples for the Augusta wreckage-site search was called away just as submergence operations had commenced. The Avalon’s mission was redefined to go down to the hull of the USS Phoenix.
Assuming she could be found.
Chapter 20
Monday, 30 December
EASTERN ATLANTIC
David Kane opened his swollen eyes and tried to focus. The light was too dim. The headache was worse, compounded by the straps of the mask cinched around his head. It took him some five minutes to rise to his knees, another several to find a seat where he could rest. While he sat on the control seat for attach console position one, not a soul stirred in the dim room. Finally he decided to remove the mask and fumbled with the rubber stra
ps for some minutes before it came off. His first breath of the ship’s air sent him back to the deck, its high carbon-dioxide level like a nail in his skull.
Eventually he struggled back into the mask. He didn’t remember what had happened.
Forty feet aft and fifteen feet below Kane, Executive Officer Mcdonne leaned over the prone figure of Tom Schramford. Mcdonne slapped the engineer’s Plexiglas mask. Schramford was alive but showed no response.
Mcdonne hurried on to the aft compartment to check the damage to the reactor plant. It had to be healthy or they would have to try a dead-stick, ascent to the surface with the emergency blow system, and if that didn’t work … wait for rescue. The alternative of a submarine escape, Mcdonne had decided, was just not viable.
Mcdonne moved into the compartment through the large hatchway and felt the stuffy, humid heat of the shutdown steam plant as it cooled, its only heat sink the atmosphere of the compartment. He entered maneuvering first, sickened at the sight of the blood on the panels. The crew aft had taken the grounding as hard as the control-room crew.
Mcdonne pulled the cold body of the electrical operator off the panel, his hands covered with congealing gore that he wiped on his coveralls as he stared at the panel in the dim light of the battle lantern. He rotated a selector switch on the panel near a DC voltmeter, selected the battery and held his breath. If the battery were still okay the trip up would be less awful. The needle zipped up to 280 volts. Mcdonne let out his breath, reached down to the console and snapped the battery-breaker switch to shut the breaker and bring up the DC grid.
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