Phoenix Sub Zero

by Michael Dimercurio

  With one foot in the hatchway he reached for the rotary switch he had installed, his right hand on it, pulling the rest of his body through until only his hand protruded from the hatch. The deck was inclining

  upward as a result of Hobart fighting the emergency blow.

  Pacino flipped the switch, heart pounding.

  He pulled his arm in and shut the hatch. It latched. He reached for the wheel to spin the dogs to the shut position and heard a roar and an explosion. In the four-inch-diameter high-pressure glass window set into the thick metal of the hatch there was a flash of blinding light. Pacino hadn’t finished dogging the hatch, but he now turned and ran aft to the hatch to the engineroom, his hearing gone from the deafening sound of the explosion, now existing in a world in which he couldn’t even hear his own gasping breaths. He could make out Vaughn on the other side of the hatch and dived toward the opening, smashing himself against the hatch coaming. He felt the men pull him through and felt—not heard—them shut the hatch and dog it, the same flash now shining through the window of the engineroom hatch.

  The deck then pitched downward and the ship shook violently.

  The lights went out.

  The Seawolf’s deck inclined further, to a ten-degree down-angle, when the first of the Nagasaki torpedoes hit and exploded.

  The Nagasaki torpedo had looked up from a hundred meters beneath the

  hull of the Phoenix, recognized it as the target and turned upward, accelerating to attack velocity. The weapon got within a meter of the hull before its proximity detector went to full-current discharge. The explosion train detonated in the few milliseconds it took the nose cone of the torpedo to travel to the hull, so that the blast hit the steel of the cylindrical hull an instant before the nose cone of the torpedo would have if the weapon had been a dud.

  The blast force of the explosive vaporized the steel, forming a five-meter hole and springing back hull plates and structural hoops for five meters on either side of it. The blast effect continued into the compartment, blowing piping apart, smashing several pumps into half-molten pieces of their former selves, shredding the four-inch-thick steel shell of the vessel that formed the heart of the ship, the nuclear reactor.

  The blast force propagated upward, blowing to bits the reactor-compartment tunnel, flexing its pressure against the forward and aft bulkheads, the bulkheads bulging away from the blast but holding. The pressure of the blast was joined by the high energy of 520-degree steam as it escaped from the reactor systems. But within seconds the fireball of the blast was spent, the shock waves from the explosion had traveled outward into the rest of the ship and into the surrounding water and ice, and the explosion lost momentum, attenuated and died. The high-pressure gases from the explosion vented themselves out the hole at

  the bottom of the hull, debris and metal also falling through, until the compartment pressure was equalized with the seawater outside. Cold seawater flooded into the compartment, and when it mixed with the multiple jets of high-energy steam, sent moaning noises into the ocean.

  Finally the seawater robbed the reactor systems of their energy, and the violence of the incident ended. The reactor compartment remained flooded, the equipment ruined and smashed, most of it off its foundations, some of it washed into the sea from the keel hole.

  The submarine’s middle compartment was, for practical purposes, gone. The forward and aft compartments, physically, survived, except for the interconnections between them running through the reactor compartment. The men in the forward compartment were isolated from those aft. Pew of them were conscious.

  Captain Kane pulled himself groggily off the deck and found himself surrounded by blackness. He turned on a bat the lantern and shivered from the sight, and the cold.

  Saturday, 4 January labrador sea, northwest OF godthaab, greenland CNFS hegira “Countdown proceeding. Commander,” al-Maari reported.

  “Launch minus twenty seconds. Missile on internal power, gas generator rock motor ignition charge voltage climbing.

  Twelve volts, relay contacts shutting … now. Gas generator ignition in two seconds …”

  Sharef listened for the sound of the tube’s gas generator solid rocket fuel igniting. It was really not a rocket at all but a charge of solid fuel that, when ignited, would exhaust into a large reservoir of water piped to the aft end of the missile tube. When the hot rocket-exhaust gas hit the reservoir tank the water would flash to steam and pressurize the tube, thrusting the missile from the tube with high pressure. The missile would float to the surface enveloped in the steam from the gas generator and ignite its first-stage rocket motor when it was free of the water. After a six-second burn, the missile would have enough velocity that its jet engine could kick in and lift it to an altitude of ten kilometers, when the ramjet engine would take over and boost the missile to supersonic speed and take it up to eighteen kilometers. The flight to Washington would be over before Hegira had made forty kilometers north on the way home.

  “Launch minus ten seconds, we have gas generator ignition.

  Five seconds, sir.”

  Sihoud turned toward Ahmed, whose face had broken into lines of triumph.

  Sharef looked at the deckplates.

  When Captain Pacino had shut the homemade rotary switch, electrical current had flowed through the wires he had strung, until relay R141 down in the forward space of the torpedo room felt the electrical energy hit its electromagnetic coil. The magnetism pulled the relay’s mechanism closed, completing the circuit to the ignition voltage to the Vortex battery ignition systems.

  Vortex tube one, the tube on top, was first in the sequence.

  A small can of flammables felt the electrical voltage from a spark kit, blowing the can into incandescence. Within milliseconds the flame front propagated to the solid rocket fuel of the Hiroshima missile, the fuel burning violently, the flames spreading across the diameter of the missile’s aft end until the rocket motor achieved full thrust. The missile began to accelerate out of the tube, the rocket motor pushing the weight of the missile and the inertia of the water between the missile nose cone and the skin of the ship. The missile began to move, slowly at first, then picking up speed, the space aft of it opening up. The hot rocket-exhaust gases accumulated in the small space aft of the rocket, the pressure in the tube soaring like that at the base of a gun barrel in the moments after the gunpowder was lit off. The missile continued to move forward, but in the second hundred milliseconds after ignition, the pressure in the tube proved too much for the metal of the

  tube.

  The tube ruptured and spilled flaming exhaust out into the torpedo room, vaporizing the deckplates above, the flames melting and vaporizing the four torpedoes exposed on the upper tier of the torpedo rack. The Mark 50 weapons began to burn, then to explode, the pressure in the torpedo room soaring from the burning, exploding torpedoes as well as the fury of the Vortex-missile exhaust. The metal of the tube gave way, coming apart and blowing the Vortex tubes below it into misshapen wrecks. By the time the top Vortex missile was leaving the ship behind, completely immersed in the waters of the Labrador Sea, the lower two Vortex tubes smashed and dispersed the two missiles’ rocket fuel into the room, the rocket fuel igniting and blowing apart the already crushed lower tubes. Six hundred milliseconds after launch, the Vortex was surging ahead into the water, leaving the Seawolf behind, while the lower two Vortex missiles exploded, both their warheads and their solid rocket fuel adding to the exploding mass inside the torpedo room.

  Outside the ship the Vortex missile accelerated, its rocket nozzle turning under the direction of the onboard computer, directing it to turn to its programmed approach, heading to the target. By the time the Vortex missile was a shiplength away from the launching platform, the nozzle had turned to the proper angle, and the missile felt the lateral g-forces guiding it to its proper heading. At the same time the hull of the firing ship came apart, the torpedo room in the lower level

  vaporized, the hull enclosing it blowing outward, the l
ight from the explosions lighting up the under-ice world in a harsh, foreign glow. After two hundred milliseconds the light dimmed, the explosion faded. The Vortex was now surging ahead, another third of a shiplength further from its launch point. The outgoing missile then passed an incoming torpedo, the incoming weapon smaller and lighter, and by that time much slower than the Vortex. The Vortex continued in its turn, uncaring.

  By the time the Vortex had steadied on its approach course to the target it was 1,500 yards from the firing ship.

  Behind it, obscured by the noise of the roaring solid-rocket exhaust, came the sound of the explosion of the first Nagasaki torpedo as it hit the Seawolfjust under the sonar dome forward. The forward compartment, already breached and flooding from aft at the torpedo room, blew inward at the bottom, all three decks collapsing upward, the hull caving in, the nose cone at the sonar sphere breaking apart, the air that had filled the ballast tanks from Pacino’s emergency blow scattering into the sea.

  The Vortex continued accelerating, its velocity climbing to what would be terminal velocity at 300 knots, an underwater speed unknown outside of the Vortex test program. It passed and left behind the second Nagasaki torpedo and continued.

  When the second Nagasaki torpedo exploded, the Vortex was a third of the way to its target.

  The second Nagasaki smashed into the Seawolf amidships, at the bulkhead separating the forward compartment from the reactor compartment. The torpedo-room explosion had already carried away half the bulkhead of the compartment.

  The torpedo explosion added to the damage, blowing the reactor vessel off its mounting and slamming it into the pressurizer vessel further aft, the steam pipes rupturing. The hull skin had already been breached and blown off at the keel from the aftermath of the Vortex-tube explosions. The second Nagasaki detonation completed the damage, the hull giving way and letting go at the top surface, the ship shearing into two pieces—the forward half violently damaged.

  The aft half of the ship, with a barely intact bulkhead that was once the aft reactor compartment wall, was by comparison unharmed, but it had lost stability on all three axes. It spun and tumbled to the depths, its buoyancy lost.

  The rocky ground of the Ungava Ridge rose up to meet it as it sank. The hull fragment hit the bottom at terminal velocity, the hull-half crushing, the stern planes and rudder at the far aft point shearing off and scattering across the rocks.

  Inside the hull, the equipment shook against the mounting bolts, the lighter pieces—pumps and pipes—coming loose and rattling around inside. The hull came to rest with a fifteen-degree incline downward, a list of nearly twenty degrees.

  Inside there was no light, but there was, for the moment, air. The hull began flooding through the steam system; the steam pipes that had drawn their pressure and flow from the reactor compartment had been sheared off at the forward bulkhead, and now, instead of steam, seawater poured down the pipes, filling the turbine casings, the condensers and coming out the steam traps and cracks formed in the piping by the admission of freezing salty seawater into what moments before had been a 500-degree carbon-steel pipe. A refrigeration unit in the lower deck of the space began leaking high-pressure refrigerant gas into the hull, the R-lll toxic but nearly odorless. Bodies littered the upper deck of the hull, the men who had been evacuated from the forward hatch. Those conscious began to choke from the atmospheric contamination.

  The depth of the hull was 1,260 feet, above crush depth but deep enough that the souls trapped inside could be considered to have no future.

  “Four, three, two, one, full thrust, and tube release! The weapon is away!” al-Maari seemed caught up in the countdown and the launch of the Hiroshima missile.

  Sharef looked at the jubilant faces around him, wondering if he were the only one who remembered that one, maybe two million deaths would come of it. The men around him, even Sihoud—or perhaps especially Sihoud—at this moment seemed like children to him, embroiled in their games and their fighting, ignorant of larger issues and realities. It was a big game to them, he thought. In a few seconds the sonar system would report the health of the missile, whether its first stage had ignited and lifted it to its trajectory—

  A rushing sound suddenly could be made out, coming directly from outside the hull. At first Sharef assumed it to be the rocket motor of the Hiroshima missile igniting, but it was coming from abeam to port, sounding like it was right outside the control room. The noise grew louder, incredibly loud.

  Tawkidi barely had time to say, “What the—”

  The Vortex missile’s swim-time was extraordinarily brief. It had raced beneath the ice floes faster than anything else had ever gone. Its blue laser target-acquisition system activated as it searched the water ahead for signs of the manmade hull. It picked up the target, just in time for a momentary correction of its directional nozzle, pointing the nose cone of the missile directly at the midpoint of the target hull.

  The hull grew from a dot to a giant in a tenth of a second.

  The forward nose cone of the missile smashed into the hull midsection at 300 knots, the signal for the Plastic-Pac explosive to detonate. The ultrasecret explosive package had achieved, with molecular densities unknown outside of the lab, the compacting of a conventional explosive into a tiny space, the huge Vortex missile packed with several tons of the material. The explosive power compared to the yield of a small nuclear warhead.

  The warhead detonated into a high-temperature, ultrahigh-pressure plasma, the fireball temperature momentarily reaching up to nearly the temperature of the surface of the sun.

  The metal and plastic fiber optics inside the hull was vaporized in the first several milliseconds of the explosion. The blast ripped the bow from the stern, blew the hull to splinters and rained a debris field down to the bottom of the sea, only the forward ballast-tank section and the furthest aft X-tail intact, the remainder pulverized and half-melted.

  The men aboard died so quickly that their eyes, seeing the white flash of light of the explosion, did not have time to pass the vision down the optic nerves to their brains. By the time the impulses were halfway down their optic nerves, their brains were vaporized by the plasma. The Second Captain, operating at much higher thought-processing speeds,

  registered the blast and the sequential loss of function, feeling itself die, its last processing resembling human panic, then settling into sadness, and it too succumbed.

  A piece of debris mostly intact at the bottom of the sea, 3,700 meters below the icy surface, was a jewelled dagger, the scarred blade still bearing the barely legible inscription: general MOHAMMED AL-SIHOUD, KHALIB AND SWORD OF ISLAM.

  There was nothing else left of him. Or of any of the other crew members.

  The Hiroshima missile airframe, just clearing the tube door when the Vortex missile exploded, was blown into three pieces by the blast and shock wave of the fiery detonation. It drifted to the bottom, the Scorpion warhead mostly intact. The warhead mechanics, the ethylene gas bottle and the plutonium dispersion matrix, imploded from the pressure at a depth of some 2,000 meters, scattering the plutonium dust over the bottom, making the debris field of what had been the Combined Naval Force vessel Hegira a radioactive dustbin.

  Saturday, 4 January fort meade, maryland, headquarters, national security agency building 427 secure communications room Donchez yawned, sat up and took the message board.

  “How about a cup of coffee? You got anything brewed fresh? Like this

  week?”

  “Coming up. Admiral.”

  Donchez read the message, another one from the Seawolf.

  As he read it, he felt like he’d been punched in the gut. The air whistled out of him.

  He read the terse message again, then again. Until its words blurred across the page, the pain of them burning into him.

  DATE/TIME: TIME OF RECEIPT OF SLOT MESSAGE FROM: USS SEAWOLF SSN-21 TO: C.N.O WASHINGTON, DC // CINCLANT NORFOLK, VA // COMSUBLANT NORFOLK, VA SUBJ: CONTACT REPORT NO. 3 //BT// 1. DESTINY IS WINNING. 2. COM
MENCING ATTACK WITH VORTEX MISSILE BATTERY. //BT//

  labrador sea, northwest OF godthaab, greenland USS phoenix Kane felt the arctic cold pouring into his bones. His breath formed vapor clouds in front of his face, the eerie fog making the room look haunted in the glaring bright spots and dark shadows of the battle lanterns.

  “Hard to believe,” he said. “At least up forward it seems we had less damage from the Nagasaki than from the grounding.”

  “That’s not true,” Mcdonne said. “Look at the ship.

  We’re blown to hell. No reactor, no communications with the engineroom, under the ice cover …”

  “But the impact didn’t kill anybody. Anybody new …”

  “The g-loading must have been less. We were pinned up against the ice and it hit us from below. Not much room for the hull to shake. But it gutted us. We’d have been better off if we’d been killed by the explosion.”

  “I don’t think so, XO,” Houser said. “We still have a battery. With luck we can run the emergency propulsion motor and move us out of here.”

  “You’re dreaming, Houser. With nobody aft, how are we gonna run the EPM?”

  “We don’t know they’re dead aft. All we have is that there’s no one answering the phone. Maybe the phone lines are blown away where they went through the RC.”

  “Sure, but what about the DC cables from the battery? If the phone lines are blown away how will battery power get to our guys aft?”

  “The DC cables are as big around as your arm, XO.

  They’d stand a hell of a lot better chance than the phone lines.”

  “Maybe. So what do we do? With no communications, with us trapped up here, them trapped aft, and all of us trapped under the ice, how are we going to get out of this?” “Schramford,” Kane said. “Schramford’s the engineer, but he’s finished his command quals. Which means he’ll be thinking the same things we are. He’ll run the EPM without orders and try to get us out of here. He’ll take local control of the rudder and stern planes and try to drive us out.”