Barracuda 945 am-6

by Patrick Robinson

  They did find an application for an R. Kerman, Esq. from the Syrian Embassy. But the highest possible government authority in Damascus told them it was for a professor of poetry named Dr. Rani Kerman, who was writing an ode to Hafiz al-Assad. They even enclosed a photograph of the man, and his address and office phone at the university in Damascus. MI5 never even followed up on this exercise in futility. Neither did they wholly believe the Syrians.

  Jimmy Ramshawe, on receipt of the information in Fort Meade, summed it up with Australian terseness… "Lying towel head bastards." And the fact remained clear in his mind: "The NSA and MI5 are trying to find a Bloody Phantom. And they know it."

  Which made it all the more astounding that the Bloody Phantom was right now striding, large as life, across the jetty in the top-secret Russian Naval Base in Araguba, which stands behind several miles of razor wire, out on the frozen edge of the universe. He was accompanied by two Admirals, ex-Soviet Captains, and three Commanding Officers, one of them the son of the Commander-in-Chief of the Iranian Navy. The Bloody Phantom had just popped in to inspect a $300 million cruise-missile nuclear submarine someone had just bought for him.

  Ben Badr, after almost eight months in Araguba, was delighted to see Ravi, and keen to regale him with his expertise on the workings of a nuclear-powered warship. For the journey to Petropavlovsk, along the Siberian coast, Captain Gregor Vanislav would be in command, and Ben would be his number two, the Executive Officer of the Barracuda. Ravi himself would be given no rank during this 4,000-mile voyage of learning. But the next time she sailed, he would be her Operations Director.

  When they boarded the submarine, the entire party headed straight for the torpedo-proof Reactor Room, constructed on all sides with walls of lead, eight inches thick, the area containing the power plant of the ship, the impenetrable stainless steel, domed nuclear reactor, its core of U-235 uranium, the business end of a nuclear bomb.

  The reactor is the steel heart of the pressurized water system, which creates the steam to drive the turbines of the submarine almost endlessly, requiring only water to keep moving along on full power. The pressure inside that system heats the water to a searing 200 degrees centigrade, under a phenomenal two thousand five hundred pounds pressure per square inch. As a point of comparison, we live in fifteen pounds pressure per square inch.

  Ben Badr led them immediately to the reactor control room where Captain Gregor Vanislav awaited them. He was standing quietly behind three watchkeepers, all Petty Officers, who were operating separate panels of the keyboard control, each one containing six computer screens. The three areas under such close observation were the propulsion system, the reactor itself, and the auxiliary panel.

  One of the screens in this latter group records the tests that reveal the efficiency of the condenser. This is the machinery that turns seawater into fresh water of the purest type, hopefully devoid of every molecule of the dreaded, ultracorrosive NaCl, sodium chloride. Two parts NaCl per million in the pure water system of a nuclear reactor is two parts too many. Way too many.

  It was this screen to which Gregor Vanislav was turned when Ben Badr led his team into the Control Room. "Hello, Gregor," he said, cheerfully. "Always checking on our purity, eh? Pristine water to make us run good, the first concern of a nuclear engineer."

  Captain Vanislav turned to Ravi and smiled. "You see, I teach him priorities, months ago. And he never forget. You got a good man here, General. Young Ben Badr. I like him. Make no mistakes, hah? That's the trick, you wanna stay alive."

  "Yes. I've often found that myself," said Ravi, smiling back. "But I'm afraid you'll have to be more patient with me. I know very little, and I have to learn fast."

  "Right here's a very good place to start," replied the Russian Captain. "These screens show you the quality and temperature of the water flowing into the reactor. But I think Ben should be your professor. That way I can listen to him, make sure he's learned everything good."

  Commander Badr nodded, and stepped up to his task. "Okay, Ravi," he said in English. "I start by telling you the danger of sodium chloride. It's just salt, of course. Seawater is full of it, and we have to get rid of it because it's probably the most corrosive stuff on the planet. You get that stuff in our water system, it seeks out little crevices, maybe in the joints, or the welding, and it builds up, weakening the steel, until one day, under the terrific pressure, it blows. Blows a damned big hole, and a blast of pressurized scalding water rips out of the fracture into the room, flashes off into wet steam of terrific heat."

  "Unbelievable," said Ravi.

  "You know what happens then?"

  "Not really."

  "Well, remember the whole system works on stability. Inside the nuclear reactor, the core consists of these cleverly shaped and machined slugs of highly active uranium, and in general terms, the neutrons split away, millions of them, and if they were allowed to just get on with it, they'd collide with U-235 atoms, hitting and splitting, causing a too-rapid chain reaction, generating colossal heat, until you had, in a very few minutes, a core meltdown. However, we don't allow this… "

  "Oh, good," said Ravi.

  "No. We have a system of rods inside the reactor. They're made of some stuff called hafnium, which absorbs the neutrons, stops the reaction running out of control. So when all these rods are down, deep in the uranium, the activity is neglible. Just a quiet, scarcely active, hunk of machinery.

  "Then we want to get going, right? So we begin to 'pull the rods'—lifting first one group and then another out of the uranium core. And as we do so the neutrons have more and more freedom to split and cause further fissions. And as this happens, the system gets wanner. But we have total control of the process, and we create the heat precisely as we wish — a self-sustaining critical mass."

  "Okay," said Ravi. "I'm with you."

  "But remember," said Ben Badr. "This is a circuit. The pressurized water is pumped out of the reactor, into a simple steam generator, and this surges off down the pipeline to drive the turbines. The whole thing is just a steam engine. But we control how much steam goes to the turbines, and we control how much turns back into water and surges around the circuit, back into the reactor to begin the process all over again. It's called the Carnot Cycle, the difference between water temperature coming out of the reactor and going back into the reactor… this is the power factor driving the ship."

  "When the water flows into the reactor, does it actually touch the uranium?"

  "Oh, yes," replied Ben. "It flows right over the solid U-235, and the temperature of the water is absolutely critical. If it's a little too cold, the neutrons react, speed up, and get hotter. And in my view the really scary thing about a nuclear reactor is that the hotter it gets, the hotter it wants to get."

  "So we get a corrosion leak, like you just said," asked Ravi, "and the pressure drops and the water cools, and comes in at too low a temperature, we have big trouble?"

  "With a leak like that in the prime circuit, the core loses its water flow and rapidly starts to overheat."

  "I imagine you have some kind of 'fail-safe' in there, right?"

  "Absolutely. The rods crash straight back in, all of them, immediately reducing the activity of the core. But in a submarine, you have a problem right there. The rods actually stop the reactor. It's called a reactor SCRAM. But at that moment the submarine's power plant is dead. That means we soon have no propulsion, no fresh water plant, no fresh air system, and no heat. Should we be one thousand feet below the surface this is relatively bad news."

  "There's an emergency system, I suppose?" said Ravi.

  "Yes. One to keep the now inactive reactor cool, and a diesel engine, which we immediately fire up, once we get back to periscope-depth or on the surface."

  At this point Captain Vanislav interrupted. "Remember, General," he said. "Ben is speaking to you as a submarine officer, not a scientist. And you don't need to be a scientist to command an SSN. But you do need to understand the system, and you need to know what t
hose screens are telling you. But most of all, you need the ability to recognize a problem and to know what action to take. You will have very knowledgeable nuclear engineers down here in this part of the ship. They will keep you well informed. But you must be aware of the potential snags, and how to react to them."

  "Have you taught Ben everything during sea trials?" asked Ravi.

  "Oh no. We have a superb simulator on shore, and all of our future submarine officers learn the profession in there. Ben has spent literally weeks in that simulator, just like an airline pilot studying big passenger jets. He's been right through the entire course, from the smallest emergency to core meltdown."

  "I'm not sure I like the sound of that last part," replied Ravi.

  "No," interjected Captain Vanislav. "That last part is bad."

  "When does it happen?"

  "Tell him, Ben."

  "It is most likely caused by either a leak in the prime circuit, as we mentioned. Or by the sudden arrival in the reactor of very cold water. For whatever reason. If, for instance, there is no returning water, because of a chronic system failure, an emergency valve will open, and seawater will gush in from outside the hull. This is not good, but it's not as bad as no water at all, because no water increases the fission of the neutrons to a very severe degree in about seven seconds. Right then you have the potential for a core meltdown.

  "Not a bomb, just uranium getting so hot it will eventually melt through the stainless steel floor of the reactor, maybe through the deck, and then both hulls. But this is rare. Almost unheard of.

  "The most common crisis is a slug of cold water surging in through the emergency valve, which will trigger increased fission. But it's all a bit slower, in time for the rods to drop, get things back under control. Back to what we call the Negative Temperature Co-Efficient, which means the reactor is self-governing, heating the water right where we want it, self-regulating."

  General Rashood was all business right now, concentrating all of his considerable intellect on the words of Ben Badr. "Okay," he said. "You say self-regulating? What changes? What's getting regulated?"

  "Every time we open the throttles on the submarine, we are drawing off power, drawing off the steam, cooling off the returning water, effecting a change in the temperature of the water being received by the reactor.

  "Always remember one thing, Ravi… The neutron population increases immediately to that cooling water, more fissions occur, more energy is released in the core. That gets transferred to the primary coolant, then to the secondary system. That's the water that boils to steam to drive the turbines. Thus, when you draw off more power, the reactor automatically increases its fission rate to provide it.

  "Vice versa, it's a similar chain. Reduce power draw-off, increase temperature of water back into the core. Reduce neutron population, reduce fission rate.

  "But that doesn't mean we all have a nervous breakdown whenever we speed up. The whole system is very largely self-regulating. Strictly hands-off. We don't do anything; we watch. We watch like fucking arctic eagles for anything that can go wrong… That's the engineering officer's task."

  "Ben's a very good student, right?" said Captain Vanislav, chuckling, and adding with a mock-serious expression, "Of course, I had to get him into shape at first. He's a little impatient, sometimes little bit arrogant. You know, his daddy's a very big man. But he's very good. He was Russian, I give him command of nuclear ship any time."

  He placed his arm around the shoulders of Commander Ben Badr, and stated quietly, "Right now, I can say that in thirty years in the Russian Navy, I never met a better young submarine officer."

  "I'm feeling better about this by the minute," said Ravi. "But I have one question… What's the range of our power accelerating?… Do we have two pumps, one for each turbine, with, presumably, slow and high speeds?"

  "No," said Ben, quickly. "We have six pumps. Very powerful. At low speeds we use two of them, working slowly. But we can have six of them, working fast, if we really want to get moving. That's a big power range. This Barracuda can make over thirty-five knots under the water. Very hard to catch."

  General Rashood nodded, gazing back to where the watch keeper was checking the purity of the water. "That's a key man, right there," he said distractedly. "Two particles of sodium chloride per million, and he's searching for them."

  "And remember the testing process," said Ben. "We take a sample from the circuits frequently. And even the beaker we use must be surgically clean — in chemical terms, as clean as a hospital operating room."

  Ravi Rashood had stood among the supreme professionals of his trade before. But rarely had he experienced such a degree of confidence and efficiency as he sensed in this Barracuda Type 945.

  Captain Vanislav seemed to sense his thoughts. "We're not supermen, General," he said. "But we make fewer mistakes than most people. It goes with the territory. Mistakes down here can mean a very quick and somewhat unpleasant death. So, we tend not to make them."

  Five days and more than forty hours' intensive study in the simulator had transformed General Ravi Rashood into a passable, theoretical submarine engineer. And now they were almost ready to go. In wide Kola Sound, downstream from Severomorsk, a small Navy escort out of Murmansk awaited the Barracuda on her final voyage under the command of Russia's Northern Fleet.

  One of the latest nuclear submarines, the Gepard, a nine thousand-ton Akula II, built in Severodvinsk and commissioned in 2004, was on the surface six miles east of the Cypnavolok headland. Two hundred yards off her port bow stood the frigate Neustrashimy, a four-year-old guided missile ship with an exceptional four thousand five hundred-mile range.

  She was a Jastreb Class Type 1154, larger than the old Krivaks with the same turbine propulsion system as the Udaloys, but, like the Barracuda, she was very expensive. The Russians built only two of them, and then sold the third hull for scrap to pay outstanding debts.

  The Neustrashimy was commissioned in the Baltic, but moved north a year later. Now she was bound for the Pacific Fleet and almost certainly would not return from Petropavlovsk.

  One mile to the east, stark against the bright, low sun, which had only briefly dipped below the horizon all night, was the giant icebreaker Ural. This broad-shouldered, steel-hulled ruffian of the Arctic would lead the way as they moved across the gleaming but freezing blue waters of the northern ocean, avoiding or smashing the lingering ice floes, hugging the immense, bleak coastline of Siberia.

  Back on the jetties of Araguba, a small crowd had gathered to watch the departure of their former Barracuda Class submarine Tula. General Ravi and Captain Vanislav stood with a Russian navigation officer on the bridge. Commander Badr, the Executive Officer, was below with the helmsman, another Russian veteran.

  Deep in the Reactor Room, Lt.Comdr. Ali Akbar Mohtaj had observed the Russian Chief Petty Officer "pulling the rods," bringing the reactor up to self-sustaining at the correct temperature and pressure. CPOs Ali Zahedi and Ardeshir Tikku were positioned at two of the three panels in the reactor control room — Zahedi in propulsion, Tikku in auxiliary. Both men were now experienced in their areas of operation, and in overall command of the control area was the most senior of the Iranian submariners, Lt. Comdr. Abbas Shafii, who had been in Araguba for more than nine months.

  Eight other Iranian Naval staff, four young Officers and four seasoned Chiefs, were also in the crew, occupying positions of serious responsibility in the turbine room and the air-cleansing plant. Two others had understudied the planesman, another worked in the electronics area. He was a Lieutenant Commander from Tehran, with two excellent degrees in electrical engineering, and three tours of duty in one of the Iranian Kilos.

  All of the Iranians were dressed in the uniform of the People's Liberation Army/Navy. And in addition there were fifteen Chinese members of the crew, five officers including a Lieutenant Commander who had been Missile Director in a large, absurdly noisy ICBM submarine out of Shanghai. Four Chiefs and six regular POs made up the number, a
nd they were spread evenly through the ship mingling with the thirty Russians, and two interpreters who would often be working longer days than anyone.

  Captain Vanislav called down through the communications system, "ATTEND BELLS!" And the Chief of Boat ordered the last dock line cast off.

  The turbines came to life, and the huge propeller churned the water, as the jet black hull moved off the jetty, assisted by a tug; first in reverse, then sliding forward, on Vanislav's command, "HALF-AHEAD."

  The Helmsman settled on to his ordered course north, straight at the Pole, 1,250 miles away. Ravi Rashood, standing on the bridge, felt on his face the winds off the Kola Peninsula, which now gusted out of the northwest, from across the vast ice cap that covers the top of the world, one thousand eight hundred miles in diameter.

  They held course for only one mile as they stood down the outward channel from the sound, running fair through the short sea, to make their rendezvous with the Gepard and the Neustrashimy, and then falling in behind the mighty Ural.

  Captain Vanislav called a course change to the northeast… Zero-four-two, half-ahead… make your speed twelve knots.

  Up ahead they could see the colossal outline of the Ural, moving forward now, toward the outer edges of the Skolpen Bank, one of the shallow inshore shoals of the Barents Sea, where there's only two hundred feet of water.

  By 6 a.m., Barracuda 945 was tucked in, three hundred yards astern of the icebreaker, with the frigate steaming on her starboard quarter, four hundred yards south of the Gepard, which was also on the surface.

  Ahead of them stretched eight hundred miles of deep ocean, all the way to the northern headland of the rugged Novaya Zemlya islands, one a 460-mile-long, cresent-shaped island, only fifty miles wide. It looks like a forgotten extension of the Ural Mountains, which peter out just to the south, on the jagged hills of Vajgac Island. Almost certainly, when the mammoth roamed the tundra a million years ago, the Novaya Zemlya islands were actually joined to the mainland.