Although the gas bubble was doomed, fracturing into tiny bubbles, the shock wave from the blast lived on. It traveled at sonic speed in the ocean depths, reinforced by the ice above and the ocean bottom below into a solid wall of a pressure pulse that propagated quickly from the blast zone, reaching out to the sea around it. As the shock wave moved out it crushed hundreds of icepressure ridges, some stalactites of ice vaporizing from the energy of the shock. One slender ice stalactite, roughly the size and even the shape of the Empire State Building, except that it was upside down and submerged, disintegrated instantaneously into several thousand pieces, none larger than a few feet in diameter. The shock wave travelled on in all directions, killing the few fish and animals that inhabited the area of the arctic north. It took three seconds to reach the USS Devilfish, then drifting in the current from the north some three kilometers from the polynya’s west edge. The shock wave took slightly longer to reach the Kaliningrad, almost five seconds. The shock wave was attenuated, eroded, weakened as it travelled further from its origin. With each meter it travelled it grew weaker, its destructive forces spread over more and more area as the wave front expanded, growing weaker with the square of the radius from the detonation. The Devilfish was 5000 meters from the blast, the Kaliningrad almost 7000. It would seem both would sustain equal damage, but the extra 2000 meters meant that the shock wave force was twice as cruel to the Devilfish as it was to the Kaliningrad — though to both vessels it was more than cruel enough. Hundreds of meters beneath the icecap, and several kilometers from the original polynya and the new one formed by the detonation, both submarines were in mortal danger.
NORFOLK, VIRGINIA
NORFOLK NAVAL BASE
The two officers in the F-14 looked toward the base as the cruise missile flew on, oblivious to the tail chase of the two Mongoose missiles. The first Mongoose went wild and dived for the ground, exploding as it impacted on nearby Interstate 64. The hole in the interstate was three-lanes wide. The second Mongoose flew toward the hot exhaust of the SSN-X-27 cruise missile, as it was designed to do, but 200 yards from the target the heat sensor in the Mongoose’s nosecone failed and it lost its direction. It sailed off to the north, effectively blind and with no target, until its rocket motor ran out of fuel. It glided to earth and landed on the roof of one of Norfolk Naval Base’s several administration buildings. Its fuselage was crushed and misshapen as it lay smoldering and inert. The SSN-X-27 had escaped Nikels’ and Tollson’s attack and was now approaching the northwestern edge of the base — the surface ships and submarine piers.
ARCTIC OCEAN
BENEATH THE POLAR ICECAP
FS KALININGRAD
There was no warning when the shock wave of the nuclear explosion hit the Kaliningrad. With the sonar systems out, and the torpedo seven kilometers away, it was inaudible and unexpected. Kaliningrad had slowed to approach the polynya and had turned to the north. In doing so she had exposed her fifth compartment’s portside wound, the dp from the American torpedo that had ripped open the diesel oil shield tank. The rip came halfway up her port flank and had cut through four structural frames. The shock wave smashed into the port side of the ship, a violent, instantaneous pressure-pulse, peaking at 8500 Newtons per square meter. Had the inner and outer hulls been undamaged, the ship would have rolled as the shock wave blasted over her, perhaps damaging only more of the delicate computers. But with the rip in the fifth compartment, there was no metal on the port side to hold the ship together.
The ship snapped in half. The control compartment experienced an immediate seven g’s in the starboard direction, then three to port. Anything not bolted down, including the men, was thrown into one side of the room, then the other. The room was not designed for such impact forces, no padding, no softened edges, practically all metal — metal cabinets, metal seats, metal deck, metal titanium ellipsoid hull, metal pipes and valves and periscopes and conduits. What was not metal was glass — the screens of the computer consoles, the navigation graphic chart table, display faces. The combination of high-g forces, the small metal-filled room, glass screens and vulnerably human flesh turned the room into a meat grinder. It took only seconds, and when those seconds were over not a single man was whole, not a single man was conscious. The stern part of the vessel, the remains of the fifth compartment and the huge turbine compartment, sank backward into the sea, the port high-pressure turbine coming loose from its foundation as the hull fractured. It took only two minutes for the aft-hull to pass through its 2000-meter crush-depth, shallower than the ship’s since the compartment bulkheads were weaker than the hull.
The only man conscious in the aft-hull as it sank at a precipitous tail-down angle was the engineer, Mikhail Geroshkov, who had been strapped into a control seat in nuclear control at the aft section of the sixth compartment, the turbine room. The lights had gone out and the battery had already been destroyed by the American torpedo. Complete darkness made the prospect of death that much more frightening.
Mikhail Geroshkov began a prayer, something his mother had taught him decades before. At one time it was a practice he had disapproved. Now he said it aloud, over and over. The deck had become almost vertical, leaving him lying in his seat on his back, strapped in like a cosmonaut in a rocket. “Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name—”
The forward bulkhead of the sixth compartment collapsed and ruptured at a depth of 1970 meters. With a thunderclap of pressure it compressed the contents of the sixth compartment like the air in an engine’s cylinder, and like the air in a diesel engine, the compression shot up the air temperature thousands of degrees. For just an instant the nuclear control room was lit by the bright flash of the approaching flame front, the leading edge of the compression wave. Geroshkov was allowed milliseconds to see the wall of flames coming toward him at sonic velocity, 5500 clicks, but he had no time to open his mouth to scream. By the time the pressure wave reached the aft bulkhead of nuclear control, the scattered tissues that a moment before comprised Mikhail Geroshkov had vaporized in the soaring pressures and temperatures of the fiery air. The aft half of the Kaliningrad hit the Arctic Ocean bottom, a crushed lump of steel and titanium. The debris field it created was a kilometer wide, four kilometers long. The once mighty submarine, the pride of the Northern Fleet, was now little more than a titanium coffin.
USS DEVILFISH
Anyone in the control room of the USS Devilfish at 0945 Greenwich Mean Time would object to being called lucky. Of course, none could know what had just happened to the men in the after-hull of the OMEGA submarine. Pacino had not bothered to grab onto a handhold in the overhead when the Magnum had returned. Convinced that the Magnum detonation would mean his death, he had stood there, rooted to his spot on the Conn, his arms crossed across his chest. The shock wave from the Magnum’s nuclear explosion first hit the screw and passed through the ship longitudinally, its force accelerating the ship forward in an enormous four-g jerk. The ship control team sitting strapped into seats at the forward panel had no headrests, the backs of the seats coming only up to shoulder level. All three were jerked backward so abruptly and forcefully that their necks were broken. One, the Diving Officer, died not from a broken neck but from asphyxiation when vertebrae punctured his throat. The four men sitting at the fire-control console were hurled forward, resulting in broken bones, concussions, deep gashes, finger-amputations. The battlestations watchstanders who had been standing were tossed, sands in a gale-force wind. After the shock wave passed the only sounds in the room were the groans and labored breathing of the wounded.
The acceleration first knocked Michael Pacino off his feet and onto the deck, then threw him aft. He fell all the way back down the operations-compartment upper-level passageway, back almost sixty feet to the hatch to the reactor-compartment tunnel, his headlong plunge broken only by the body of a yeoman seaman just out of bootcamp, the upper-level phone talker, who had hit the aft bulkhead first, fracturing his skull, breaking his back. Pacino’s head had rammed into Miller�
�s abdomen, soft enough to break the mad tumble but not soft enough to avoid a severe shoulder sprain and a hard knock on the head. Dazed, he wiped his hand on his head, now drenched with blood and mucus, wondering briefly whether it was his or the dead seaman’s. He stared for a moment at the boy’s body, his blood now running over the deck. Dimly Pacino heard the sounds of men screaming and moaning in operations upper level, most of the sounds seeming to come from the direction of the control room. He dragged himself to his feet and skidded down the blood-covered deck forward to the control room. As he moved forward, the sounds of agony were joined by a second, even more frightening sound — the flow-noise of water flooding the ship in the lower level.
FS KALININGRAD
Aft of the fourth compartment’s after bulkhead, the steel and titanium skin and framework were mangled and shredded where the vessel had split in two. The reactor-compartment forward-bulkhead at first remained intact in spite of the ship smashing in two. Then the liquid reactor coolant sprayed and flooded the compartment as the number-two reactor vessel flew off its foundation and careened to the aft bulkhead, where it punctured the titanium wall. The hole in the bulkhead invited in the cold arctic water, where the gushing wave mixed with the sodium reactor coolant. The highly reactive sodium and the water exploded with twice the power of the explosives in a 53-centimeter torpedo. The after bulkhead ripped fully open, dropping the number-two reactor vessel down the fifteen kilometers to the ocean floor. The sodium-water reaction continued and melted the titanium walls of the compartment and began to melt through the forward bulkhead, at last breaching it and flooding the third compartment with seawater.
The loss of the aft part of the ship had left the forward portion unstable, no longer self-righting in roll or pitch. And the flooding in the first compartment, adding the additional weight of the water, made matters worse. The forward spaces took on a down angle with a list to port that increased as the loose weapons in the first compartment skidded into the port bulkhead, and the water in the lower deck washed over from the tilt. On the first compartment’s middle-level deck the grain can at the aft end of one of the 53-centimeter torpedoes sparked as the wrecked weapon crashed into the port bulkhead, and the spark lit the explosive self-oxidizing fuel. The resulting explosion first set off fuel fires in the other weapons in the compartment, and moments later the warheads of the weapons went off in a tremendous detonation, blowing holes in the side walls of the compartment and breaching the decks above and below. The Magnums in the lower level were crushed, setting off fuel fires and rupturing the warhead casings. The forward bulkhead of the deserted second compartment dimpled from the explosions up forward but held, making it one of two compartments of the Kaliningrad to retain its structural integrity. The other to survive was the control compartment, the oval-shaped bubble of titanium anchored to the top of the second compartment and faired into the superstructure. But with the power loss the control compartment, the nerve center, in effect died — no hydraulics, no electricity, no lights, no fans, no displays or computers or live consoles.
Admiral Novskoyy lay unconscious at the lip of the periscope well, with a bloody head wound and concussion from one of the periscopes. He had sustained countless minor injuries, scrapes and bruises and sprains but was the one in the compartment who had been spared the wrath of the shock wave, having landed near the ship-control console.
Ivanov, Deck Officer and Acting Captain, had been at the ship-control console supervising Lieutenant Katmonov. He had been thrown into the ladder going to the escape pod, been spun around and collided with the bulkhead on the port side, a relatively smooth surface with nothing hanging from it, so built to allow entry up to the escape-pod ladder without snagging the climber’s clothes or body. He collided with Warrant Officer Danalov, with only a moment to register the sound of bones crunching but did not yet feel any pain. On the trip to the starboard side Ivanov’s leg was caught on the back of the ship-control seat while his body continued toward the starboard side. Finally he broke the hold of the seat, and when he landed he hit the starboard forward corner of the room, opening a gash in his arm. With a compound fracture of his leg and a gash in his arm, he regained consciousness in time to see arterial blood spurting from his arm and two bones protruding from his left thigh, one pointing forward and one sideways. He promptly fainted. When he came to, the pain hit him like an electric shock.
Lieutenant Katmonov, the Control Officer, had been strapped into his seat and survived with cartilage damage to his spine and pulled muscles in his back. In shock, he stared straight ahead at his dead panel, illuminated only by the compartment’s four weak battle lanterns, and waited, and waited…
Captain-Lieutenant Viktor Chekechev, Weapons Officer, had been at the fire-control console at the time of the Magnum detonation. He was thrown into the periscope well, smashing his back into the periscope. From there he was hurled back into his console, where broken glass in the computer display broke his fall, and cut his ear half off. Three ribs had been snapped jaggedly on the fall to the periscope well, one entering his left lung and piercing a pulmonary artery. Immediately his heart began pumping blood into his chest cavity, his abdomen swelling with the blood, his skin turning white as he silently bled to death.
The only other crewmember in the compartment was Warrant Officer Dmitri Danalov, head of the security crew. On hand only to guard Vlasenko in the escape pod, he had been standing at the base of the short tunnel to the escape pod lower hatch between the control console and the communications station. The shock of the Magnum blast had sent him into the smooth ladder bulkhead, only smashing his nose. But the acceleration to port brought a missile to bear — Ivanov’s body travelling at some forty meters per second. Danalov’s head was smashed against the bulkhead, fracturing his skull. The acceleration to starboard threw him into the opening mechanism to the escapepod lower hatch. If he had hit the mechanism a few inches to the right he would have escaped with only the top of his skull fractured.
No such luck. The opening mechanism of the escapepod lower hatch was a steel wheel set horizontally onto a shaft that controlled the steel dogs of the hatch as above. At the outside of the wheel was a long handle that protruded horizontally and was used to crank the wheel by hand. Danalov’s head hit the crank handle with sufficient force to send it through his forehead deep into his brain. The crank handle rotated the wheel until the handle released him. Danalov was still breathing when the weight of his body pulled him off the handle and then sent him to the deck, leaving a residue of brain tissue on the crank handle. As the deck developed a down angle, Danalov’s breathing had slowed to a wheeze. By the time the self-oxidizing fuel of a Magnum had ignited below in the first compartment his body functions had shut down. And when the rest of the ship passed through a depth of 1000 meters, the deck at a 40-degree down-angle, Dmitri Danalov was dead.
USS DEVILFISH
Pacino pulled himself off the deck of the operations compartment and ran to the control room, his body a symphony of aches but intact. The sounds around him formed the cacophony of a nightmare… the rushing sound of flooding, the screams and moans from the control room not as loud but audible, a knife in Pacino’s heart. The smell of the ship had changed. What before was oil residue, ozone, perspiration, sewage and cooking grease was now salty seawater, hydraulic fluid, burning insulation and the smell of burning hair.
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