Voyage of the Devilfish mp-1

by Michael Dimercurio

  Delaney had tried to compensate by charging to the coolant system with the charge pump and the valve-operating waterflasks, but he was soon out of pure water. The number one and two charging water-storage tanks, the charging-water day tank and the valve-operating waterflasks were dry. The evaporator, which made pure water from seawater, had been out of commission since the collision. So Delaney had been forced to charge seawater into the coolant system in spite of the fact that the plant had been specifically designed to prevent the introduction of seawater into the delicate nuclear systems. The chlorine could corrode the pressure vessel within hours, maybe minutes, in addition to the contaminants in the seawater becoming radioactive.

  The seawater hose had been hooked up and the seawater was charged in, but the high-pressure charging pump could only barely keep up with the loss rate, and finally the overworked pump had burned up in a cloud of black smoke. With no water makeup, the loss-of-coolant accident began. While Delaney watched, helpless, the level in the pressurizer tank dropped from 65 inches to 10 in less than a minute. The pressurizer was what kept the 500-degree water liquid instead of steam; when the pressurizer emptied, the entire system would boil to steam. The reactor siren broke the eerie silence of the room.

  “Low-pressure port loop, sir,” Manderson shouted.

  “Low-pressure cutback, group one rods!” The reactor “realized” it was depressurizing and was trying to lower power by driving in control rods, as it was programmed to do.

  “Override the cutback and silence the alarm,” Delaney ordered. He would get every last ounce of propulsion out of the plant — it was a goner anyway, and who knew, maybe they were only a shiplength from thin ice…

  As the level in the pressurizer dropped to zero, water still leaking out of the system, the little water remaining began to boil to steam in the core. The siren, just silenced a moment before, wailed again in the small room, which seemed suddenly even smaller.

  “Low-level pressurizer, sir. Heater cutout.”

  As pressure dropped, Delaney ordered the plant to be shut down. “Manderson, insert a full scram.”

  “Rods aren’t dropping, sir. The fuel elements must be melting!”

  The nuclear reactor became uncovered, boiling away the last remaining coolant. The fuel elements in the core melted, fuel pooled in the lower head of the reactor vessel and began to melt through the thick steel. Up to this point Delaney hadn’t notified Pacino in control — what the hell could the captain do about it? An alarm bell sounded in the room, announcing the high radiation in the engine room. Delaney pulled the microphone down out of the overhead.

  “CAPTAIN, ENGINEER. REACTOR SCRAM. CORE IS UNCOVERED AND FUEL IS MELTING. BATTERY’S DEAD AND STEAM POWER IS GONE. RECOMMEND YOU EMERGENCY BLOW TO THE … TO THE ICE.”

  Delaney put down the microphone. Suddenly it was very cold in the engine room.

  FS KALININGRAD

  Vlasenko lowered his aching body down the rungs of the ladder, now at a crazy 50-degree angle to the vertical. Actually he came more over than down — and stepped over a limp form… Novskoyy. Some previous head injury must have knocked out the admiral with more force than his punch. He hadn’t really connected solidly.

  A booming noise diverted him from his inspection of the escape-pod-release-system, and he looked over to the port side to see the signal-analysis console explode. The deck was too steep to climb far enough aft to see exactly what had happened. But he didn’t have to see the console at close range to know the cause of the console explosion— the titanium inner-hull framing was sticking out in a large bulge just on top of the console. The hull was beginning to fail, and as he thought this, the console under the bulge started to leak seawater onto the deck.

  Vlasenko stared at the leak, refusing to believe that this high-tech hull had actually been breached… Titanium failure could only mean that they had gone below 2000 meters, the maximum-safety depth, though there were no working pressure indicators in the space now that the computers were dead. The ominous flicker of the overhead battle lantern brought him back to grim reality. The water stream was raining down at him now, the forward bulkhead was a deck as the submarine dived at a 90-degree angle.

  Vlasenko looked over at the ladder to the escape pod — it was completely horizontal. He realized he had only moments left to get the crew out before the hull of the compartment gave way. He decided on Ship Control Officer Katmonov, still strapped into his seat. He tried to release the five-point seat-harness, but with Katmonov’s body weight on it the release lever wouldn’t work. He left him and pulled Ivanov’s body up by his armpits. Ivanov was still breathing, going in and out of consciousness. Vlasenko hauled him up and staggered over to the ladder to the pod. The straightdown angle of the ship actually helped at this point, giving him a level surface on which to carry Ivanov. But the treads of the escapepod ladder would trip him. Vlasenko set Ivanov down on the ladder and slid him over to the hatch, then with one final push he got the man into the pod. The compartment shuddered, the flooding got worse.

  Now there were ten centimeters of water covering the control console. Vlasenko pulled Chekechev over out of the water and checked to see if he was breathing. He was dead. Blood came out of his mouth. Vlasenko felt a rush of anger — at Novskoyy, at the attacking submarine. The water was lapping now at the pod’s hatch. If he took any more time the pod would be flooded, finishing them all. He waded back to Katmonov through the water that now submerged the long dead control console. Katmonov was still suspended by his safety harness to the control seat. The water had swallowed his arms and legs. His head hung into the black water but he was not conscious enough to raise up from it and sputtered while he tried to breathe, coughing the water out.

  Vlasenko took a deep breath, dived below the oily water and grabbed Katmonov’s seat harness, trying to release the kid’s harness before the water drowned him. But the water was too high, now submerging the back of the chair. Vlasenko’s fingers, numbed from the cold, fumbled at the harness release, jammed by the shock of the weapon or frozen by the cold. Lungs bursting, Vlasenko forced himself back to the surface and gasped for air, spitting up the dirty water. He realized his feet were no longer touching bottom—

  A rumbling explosion jarred the ship, then another. The weapons in the first compartment were exploding.

  Vlasenko dived into the water, pulled himself down by pulling on Katmonov’s shirt. As he made his way into the blackness of the water he felt Katmonov’s hand grab his arm. The kid was still alive. Vlasenko found the harness, pulled hard on it… the harness was still frozen. He gave the release lever one last jerk, and it finally yielded. He managed to pull Katmonov from the seat, then got to the surface.

  As he burst through, he saw Novskoyy, and felt a wave of fatigue that nearly destroyed his will to survive. He looked up at the flooding from the upper bulkhead of the compartment, then hauled Katmonov to the pod hatch, now half underwater, and floated him in. It was easier now, with the water in the compartment. He was about to slide into the pod hatch himself when the face of Alexi Novskoyy came floating into view in the semi-darkness. At first Vlasenko thought that the admiral must be dead, but as he turned to swim away Novskoyy’s eyes fluttered open and the admiral looked directly at him, grabbed his sleeve and collar. No time to gloat, no time even to push Novskoyy away, much as he was tempted. However mixed his feelings, he told himself it would take less time to pull Novskoyy into the pod than to fight him off.

  As he pulled the admiral to the ladder, the man lost consciousness and his head began to bump on the rungs of the ladder, now horizontal to the pod. By the time Vlasenko reached the pod hatch it was half gone, the water flooding the pod. He pulled Novskoyy in, saw that the admiral had collapsed and was floating face down, pulled him up away from the water and struggled to shut the hatch. It took all his strength to push the hatch against the water and turn the wheel. When he turned away from the hatch he saw that Novskoyy had fallen back into the murky water. He set him back up, out of reach o
f the icy water and draped his arm around a handhold. Ivanov and Katmonov had their eyes open now and were shivering. Ivanov, hands grasping his leg, rocked back and forth in pain.

  Vlasenko began to make his way to the pod control panel just as the lantern in the pod flickered and died, shorted by the water. He felt his way to the panel, maneuvering through the numbingly cold seawater, found the panel in the dark, reached to its upper right corner, shut his eyes and pulled up on the toggle switch, praying that the pod would release from the mortally wounded submarine. The switch clicked home into the RELEASE position. Nothing happened.

  USS DEVILFISH

  Two thousand lousy yards from survival and the reactor melts down. Pacino couldn’t blame Delaney, he couldn’t have done any better. He let go of the yoke of the control panel and climbed to the ballast panel as the lights went out. The ventilation fans wound down again and the room plunged into silence, illuminated by the single bulb of the battle lantern Pacino had turned on just moments before after the blast. He plugged his gas mask into the manifold of the ballast control panel, looking up into the overhead as if he could see through the dark water to the ice cover. The ice was probably 100 feet thick here, he thought, and ice that thick was equivalent to five feet of steel. Even if he could get the ship up to 20 knots on an emergency blow, wouldn’t the ice crush them? Try, damn it. Pacino got ready to blow all main ballast tanks under the thick ice cover. He reached up to the forward lever, pulled the plunger cap down and rotated the lever from straight-down to straight-up.

  The six eight-inch ball valves in the high-pressure air lines were self-actuated by air pressure, the huge valves clunked open with a crash, then connected 4500 psi air in the air bottles with the seawater-filled forward ballast tanks. In an explosion of expanding air, the seawater was forced out of the tanks, making the Devilfish light forward. The room filled up with a vapor cloud as the blast of air noise slammed into Pacino’s eardrums. He pulled the aft emergency-blow lever up to the open position, the air noise got even louder. Now the aft ballast tanks, assaulted by the ultrahigh-pressure air, gave up their seawater. Seconds later the air bottles of the emergency blow system were empty of air, and all main ballast tanks of the Devilfish were empty of seawater.

  Pacino looked expectantly at the depth gage, waiting for it to click their depth up a foot. It was silent. Of course, it was dead… no electricity, the reactor down, the battery flooded and excreting chlorine gas. Pacino found a flashlight by the blow switches and turned it onto one of the back-up analog pressure gages, the primitive bourdon-tube type that didn’t need electricity to sense pressure. It showed them deep—740 feet; it would take a while for the gage to sense the ship rising. Pacino saw the first sign in the ship’s liquid-filled inclinometer. It took on a degree-up angle — they were on the way up. The water in the forward and aft bilges must be rushing aft, he thought, the angle inclining upward much faster than during a normal emergency blow. He hoped the up-angle wouldn’t spill the air out of the ballast tanks and, God forbid, send them back to the bottom.

  He shined the flashlight around the room, taking in the stunned faces behind the gas masks. Even if they made it through the hundred-foot-thick icecap, how in hell would he get them out of the ship? And if he did, what then? Concentrate on the control panel, he told himself. The depth gage read 690 feet. At last the ascent had started. Pacino sucked the stale dry air of the emergency system, waiting, waiting for…?

  FS KALININGRAD

  Vlasenko reached over for the release lever — gone, lost in the black water half-flooding the pod. He dived into the water, twice, and found it. He struggled back up to the control panel, took a long moment to find it again in the dark, pushed the lever into the retaining bolt and rotated the lever to release the pod. Again, nothing happened. Exhausted, frustrated, Vlasenko leaned back against the freezing bulkhead of the pod, then searched for the flashlight cradle. At least he could die with the lights on. It took a while but he found the flashlight bolted to a spot on the sphere skin, pulled it free and clicked on the switch. Its weak yellow light barely lit the pod.

  The pod shuddered — the control compartment finally collapsing and imploding from the depth. Vlasenko aimed the lantern at the depth gage—2100 meters and still sinking. And the pod’s interior-orientation still showed the ship pointed straight down, the wooden benches crazily vertical, a hatch on one side, another opposite it. The air in the pod was not as cold as before, with the four of them breathing into it, but it was stuffier. The water was agonizingly cold.

  Vlasenko decided there was no longer any hope. He felt like grabbing Novskoyy’s pistol and shooting himself. He glanced at the admiral. The pistol was gone, lost during the explosion. The pod hull creaked, starting to dimple, to give from the pressure, the titanium flowing. Undergoing creep deformation, the pressure outside too much. It wouldn’t be long now.

  The depth gage read 2375 meters. The ship, what was left of it, shuddered again and a long loud rumbling propagated through the water and steel, the last of it a ripping, tearing sound. The shock and vibration slammed Ivanov’s head into the dimpling titanium bulkhead. Drifting in and out of consciousness, the last impact knocked him out. The last remaining compartment of the Kaliningrad, the second, had imploded from the seawater pressure.

  Vlasenko shined his light at Ivanov and saw blood on his collar. He shook his head, and then a crazy curiosity, irrelevant under the circumstances, came over him… he wanted to know the crush depth of the pod. He directed the light at the depth gage again, expecting to see it read 2500 meters. Instead it read 1900. 1900. The pod was moving differently now, shaking and swaying — not the motion of the hull of the ship but of an escape pod on ascent. The last impact must have jarred the pod loose from the hull. He looked again at the gage. 1800 meters, then 1750 … they were rising quickly, even with the water they had shipped through the hatch. Vlasenko checked the gage. 1000 meters. They were rising like a bubble from the sea, soon they would be at the surface— The surface is thick ice cover.

  The gage needle unwound. 500 meters. 400. 300. Vlasenko tried to steady the men against the shock to come when the buoyant pod, rushing up from the deep, slammed into the ice. He grabbed lifejackets and plastic wrapped ration kits and tried to cushion the overhead of the pod. The pod was still rising sideways, with no stability. A final glance at the depth gage—50 meters and rising fast. He could only hope that the ice had been broken up by the explosion…

  The escape pod of the Kaliningrad hit the ice raft going five meters per second, causing a jarring impact in the pod. The depth gage read under 5 meters, by the look of the needle maybe only one meter. So they would float here, separated from the frigid world above, by a single meter of merciless, mocking, unforgiving ice. Vlasenko could no longer feel any sensation in his arms or legs. He lay there in the trapped pod with the wounded, waiting for sleep and an end to the cold.

  USS DEVILFISH

  The USS Devilfish rose toward the surface at a 45-degree angle, speeding up to 19 knots from the buoyant force. Pacino held onto the control panel, watching the face of the analog depth gage, the needle unwinding as the paralyzed ship rose from the air in her ballast tanks. Still 1800 yards southwest of the polynya, they were about to challenge thick ice.

  Pacino had a final command decision: to shut his eyes or watch the gage as the ship shot upward. He decided to keep his eyes open. The needle unwound. 400 feet, 300, 150… Pacino changed his mind. He shut his eyes tight.

  CHAPTER 23

  SUNDAY, 19 DECEMBER, 0958 GREENWICH MEAN TIME

  ARCTIC OCEAN

  POLAR ICECAP SURFACE

  The pressure ridge at the southwest edge of the polynya was 80 feet thick. The molecules that formed the crystalline structure of the ice had been motionless, frozen for centuries, last existing as liquid water a thousand years before. For those centuries the structure of the ice had been solid as concrete, one piece of a massive structure forming the polar icecap.

  At 0945 Greenwich Mean
Time a nuclear explosion had detonated under the ice pack five kilometers to the northwest. Its chief effect was a multitude of hairline cracks formed throughout the structure of the ice, but being hairline cracks, the tremendous cold and pressure from the weight of the ice raft was already rewelding the ice together into one piece.

  At 0958 a 4500-ton nuclear submarine smashed into the ice’s underside. The submarine was travelling at 32 feet per second. The force of the impact was equivalent to that of a locomotive going 231 miles per hour, or twelve one-thousand-pound artillery shells fired at point-blank range. Or a small nuclear detonation.

  The ice exploded upward as if slammed by the fist of God.

  * * *

  The Devilfish’s sonar sphere was crushed, flattened to a plate and slammed into the thick steel of the bow compartment, which was also crushed, rupturing and bursting. By the time the bow compartment had ruptured, the ice’s protest was over and a hole 50 feet in diameter formed. The displaced ice flew upward and outward, splintering into fragments and shards. The cylindrical hull of the Devilfish flew through the hole onto the ice, the first third of her smashed into a compressed lump, her sail sheared off at the hull. The rest continued up and forward through the hole, the entire length of her coming out of the ice like some giant whale, moving over the edge of a slight ridge and coming to rest two hundred feet from the hole on the downhill slope of the pressure ridge. At the bottom of the gentle slope, a thousand feet away, was the lake of thin ice that Devilfish had been aiming for.

  * * *

  The control room, already devastated by the shock of the Magnum, changed violently. Where before the room had retained its shape and symmetry, the collision with the ice fractured the steel hoop frames of the pressure hull. The energy of the sudden deceleration threw people and consoles and seats and chunks of steel forward, a rain of flesh and pieces of steel. Several of the men who had survived the first shock, including Lieutenant Rod Van Dyne, the sonar officer, were hurled forward and killed instantly. Pacino was thrown face-first into the ballast control panel, the wraparound console in the control room’s forward port corner, taking the force of the collision in the face. The emergency air-breathing mask Plexiglas faceplate caved in, the remainder of the impact-load transferred to Pacino’s face. The mask came off as he slid down the panel, his face hitting the Chief of the Watch’s seat, his arms limp. He hung there for a moment, then fell to the deck, his head facing the lower portion of the console, the deck slick with oil or blood or seawater — in the dim light of the lantern it was impossible to say.