Seventy milliseconds later a small grain can of highly volatile flammables was lit off from a spark generator, the grain can contained in a pocket of solid rocket fuel, a composite clay of complex chemicals that was surprisingly inert until it reached a high temperature, and then became alive with the winds of hell. The grain can exploded into incandescence, and the fuel in the pocket surrounding the can ignited and began to burn the neighboring fuel matrix, a volume of high-pressure combustion gases collecting near the pocket. The pocket was at the end of a long tunnel bored through the fuel assembly, the tunnel becoming wider near the nozzle of the missile farther aft. The combustion gas pressurized the tunnel until the aft part of the tunnel reached nearly the same pressure as the forward pocket, and the missile’s protective nozzle cover blew off into the sea. The missile nozzle began to channel the in creasing rush of exhaust gas, until the entire aft surface of the fuel was burning and nozzle-entry pressure had sailed up to tens of thousands of pounds per square inch. The rocket flames from the nozzle built up until the missile felt the acceleration. The force of the impulse from the fuel sailed beyond five g’s to twenty, and the missile’s speed increased from thirty knots to eighty. The missile body trembled violently as it passed through a region of natural frequency, the ride settling slightly, until suddenly the missile went supercavitating. The skin friction vanished to near zero when the water molecules at the surface of the missile vaporized to steam. The steam bubble grew from the sharp point of the nose cone seeker module all the way aft until it enveloped the missile’s nozzle, and soon the missile accelerated to 100 knots, 150, until it reached supercavitating terminal velocity at 308 knots.
The missile’s attitude was controlled by the nozzle, the rocket engine rotating to keep the thrust in line with the missile’s center of gravity, and adjusting for steam bubble shape variations. The control system was required to be one of the fastest processors on the planet for a silicon computer, since the time constant to control the missile had to be measured in the tenth of a millisecond. In one ten-thousandth of a second, the missile’s flight could degrade from perfection to disastrous, and only that rapid a response from the missile’s nozzle could keep it from tumbling.
The nose cone blue laser seeker came on in test mode, then illuminated the narrow cone of the sea ahead. The cone widened as the laser searched ahead in a spiral shape like a locomotive’s headlight. The laser saw multiple returns from the waves high above, but nothing yet from the target. The processor compared the sea ahead to its model of the sea from the target solution given it by the mother ship. It expected the target location to change with time, the target locus becoming a probability matrix, a circle of possibility that enclosed the target, and the circle grew at the maximum speed of the target, which had been assumed to be forty-five knots. The missile had been ordered to aim for the center of
the probability circle, even though that had a minimal chance of being the location of the target. It was expected that as the missile transited the Target Probability Circle, the TPC, that it had at most a ten percent chance of detecting the target. The attack profile called for the missile to sail through the TPC and continue on for one TPC diameter and execute an Anderson turn, a loop in the sea that would put the missile on a reverse course on its exact transit line, except offset by five hundred yards to the west, and it would cruise through the TPC again, still seeking, and if that did not yield the target, it would turn again and reenter the TPC, this time another five hundred yards to the west. As this search continued, the weapon would chart a grid through TPC until the TPC was completely covered, even though the TPC grew bigger with each second, its boundaries expanding at forty-five knots. Eventually the target would be detected, and the missile would connect.
The weapons console lit up with the green light annunciator that the Tsunami was powered up, but there was a red light indicating that it lacked a target.
“Sonar, Captain,” Lien said into the intercom microphone, “do you have a contact to the south?”
“Captain, Sonar, no, sir. We’re blued out from the bearing of the torpedo launch to the torpedo.”
“Report the bearing of the beginning of the torpedo wake.”
“One seven five, sir.”
Lien dialed in a phantom target to the weapon control function of his command console.
“I’ve got a bearing line, Mr. First,” Captain Lien said, “but I need to decide whether to have the unit search and, if it fails to find a target, shut down and sink, or to send it out to search and on failure-to-acquire, execute a default detonation.”
“Captain, we have nothing to lose. Order it to search and if it fails, have it come back to an aim-point range and detonate.”
“Give me a range to aim-point.”
“Twenty miles, Captain.”
“No, closer.”
“Fifteen?”
“Ten,” Lien decided, and dialed in the aim-point.
“Sir, if the incoming torpedo misses, the Tsunami will take us out at ten.”
“Fine, twenty miles.” The Tsunami had a full line of green lights. “Tsunami auto-sequence in five seconds, Mr. First.”
Zhou waited, biting the inside of his lip, wondering what the incoming torpedo was doing. It should have arrived by now. The deck trembled as the torpedo tube’s gas generator detonated, ejecting the Tsunami.
“Tube six fired, Mr. First, and the Tsunami is on its way. A pity we don’t have more.”
“Perhaps we should put the Dong Feng units in tubes one through five down the bearing line, sir—”
Zhou never finished the sentence.
After a flight time of four minutes, the missile hit the southern boundary of the TPC, and the arming circuit in the plasma warhead energized. The warhead was a fusion weapon—a hydrogen bomb—encased in the materials that would interact in the hundred-million-degree temperatures of the detonation to act to contain the blast to a small volume plasma, a tiny spoonful of the center of the sun, and that plasma would vaporize a third of the target and blow the rest of it to shrapnel. The seeker searched in the wide and narrow search cones as the missile flew through the TPC, but there was no target. The missile continued on past the TPC by a diameter, then turned and came back. The north-south grid search continued through the TPC over the next four minutes, but came up empty.
There was no target.
The missile executed an east-west grid search of the TPC, this time above the layer depth of two hundred feet, on the off chance that the target had come above layer and that the thermal layer might be interfering with blue laser reception. The missile was careful to avoid coming within a hundred
feet of the surface, since the suction from the interface between water and air could pull the missile into an unstable angle of attack, and the missile could tumble faster than the control system could correct it. Some of the test units had even rocketed out of the water and spun out of control and broken up on impact with water. Above the layer, there was still no target.
The missile realized it was about to run out of fuel, and it was time to execute the default detonation. Had the missile been programmed, it would have removed the plasma enhancements from the warhead casing, making the warhead a wider distribution fusion bomb, but this had been strictly prohibited by the Mod Echo designers. All it could do was detonate a plasma at a default point. The default detonation point had been selected as the centro id of the northern third of the TPC, under the assumption that the probability held that the target would have run away from the missile rather than toward it. The missile timed its arrival at the default point so that it would still have two minutes of fuel remaining, in case as it prepared to default detonate it found the target. But there was still nothing.
The missile dived back below the layer to a depth of five hundred feet, sailed toward the default detonation point, and seeing nothing, executed the default routine. The low-explosive initiator train ignited, setting off the medium explosives, which detonated the high-explosive shaped
charges that caused separated pie-shaped elements of plutonium to collide and form a critical mass. The combined plutonium exploded in a nuclear blast that vaporized the tritium bottles, which then in the millions of degrees of the small high-energy blast reacted to fuse together into helium molecules. The resulting helium was slightly lighter than its reactants, because the mass loss was converted into pure energy, and the fission explosion became an even more powerful fusion explosion. Had the reaction continued from there, the sea would have erupted in a five-mile-wide mushroom cloud with radiation scattering over the seascape, but instead the plasma-containment chemicals
fused and reacted and surrounded the blast in the most powerful magnetic field ever invented by human hands. The mag bottle contained the nuclear blast and focused its energy into a three-meter-diameter sphere of high-energy plasma. The mass inside the bottle rose to hundreds of millions of degrees while the exterior—for a few tens of microseconds—remained undisturbed.
But soon the plasma envelope collapsed, and the blast effect began. The explosion was still powerful when viewed from the surface, but nothing like the weapon’s nuclear ancestors. The pressure pulse, the shock wave, from the explosion traveled through the water and blew the surface into a rising cloud of spray, then traveled sideways in all directions, eventually reaching the hull of a surfaced shape of high-yield low-magnetic steel that had been given the name Nung Yahtsu.
In the first tenth of a second the ship rolled violently to starboard and the deck seemed to tilt to the vertical. Zhou Ping felt like he hung in the air for a terrifying instant, the objects of the command post flying by him. He flew into a console and felt his elbow penetrate the glass of the display screen as the lights went out, and the remainder of the nightmare happened by the lightning flashes of electrical arcs in the space. He realized that he was deafened by the explosion, as the captain had put his face close to Zhou’s and was screaming, but there was no sound. Zhou shook his head, the motion making him so dizzy that he vomited explosively on the console. The world spun again in a flash of sparks just before it went dark.
The Tsunami torpedo fired by the Nung Yahtsu left tube six on the port forward quarter, the tube canted outward by ten degrees from the ship’s centerline. The impulse from the tube’s gas generator accelerated the torpedo to thirty knots, and a speed sensor in the torpedo’s flank activated. A small bottle of compressed air at the nose cone activated, blowing compressed air out a ring distributor that spread out a bubble
of air over the forward sixth of the torpedo’s length, the predecessor to the torpedo’s future supercavitating steam bubble, the bubble inserted into the prototypes when test weapons all tumbled at rocket ignition. The jump start of the boundary layer gas bubble fixed the problem, so that when the rocket lit off, the weapon would sail straight as an arrow and the steam bubble would form and take over from the initial gas bubble.
As the compressed air spread out over the nose cone and aft, the rocket fuel ignited. The torpedo rapidly accelerated to attack velocity, and as designed, the steam bubble extended down the skin of the torpedo to the aft nozzle. The torpedo sped up to two hundred knots, heading south down the bearing line to the target. At two minutes into the flight the blue laser seeker came on, the design of it nicely transferred by the payment of a moderate fee to a lab scientist at the David Taylor Naval Research and Development Center owned and operated by DynaCorp. The seeker looked down the bearing line in a spiral search, seeking the target. At twenty miles downrange, it reported to the processor that there was nothing seen, that the target was inconveniently missing.
The processor sent the weapon on a wiggle pattern, searching for the target, but the weapon was relatively small, designed to fit in a torpedo tube dimensioned for the Dong Feng units, and since it had a large and heavy nuclear warhead and a fairly voluminous processor, there was not much fuel space left. The weapon turned back from its last-resort wiggle search, and returned to the twenty-mile distant aim-point from the Nung Yahtsu. At a depth of three hundred meters, the hydrogen bomb warhead detonated, and the ocean was lit up with the light of day.
The explosion shock wave reached outward in the sea in all directions, the wave traveling westward from the center of the detonation, eventually finding the hull of the American submarine Leopard eighteen nautical miles away. The water of the sea acted as an anvil and the shock wave as a hammer as it impacted the submarine.
“What the hell is that?” Commander Dixon asked, hearing something through the hull to the east. “Sonar, Captain, what is that?” he screamed.
Chief Herndon’s mouth had dropped open in the window showing his face on Dixon’s display. He looked at his camera. “Control, supercavitating torpedo in the water, bearing two eight one, bearing drift left.”
“Dive, right full rudder, all ahead emergency flank and cavitate! Weapons Officer, snapshot tube one, Alert/ Acute torpedo, targeted at the previous position of Target Three Zero, set in speed zero! Off’sa’deck, arm the sub-sunk buoy and program in our latitude and longitude, and set it for the Internet Email function, encrypted with an SAS authenticator—send a two man detail to the SAS safe and get it out now! Dive, report speed!”
“Sir, throttles at emergency flank, reactor at one five zero percent power, making five nine knots.”
Goddamnit, Dixon thought. Fifty percent reactor power over maximum, and it had only added a lousy eight knots, the reactor now effectively ruined and irradiating the entire ship. The deck trembled even more violently at emergency flank than she did at a hundred percent power, as he would have expected.
“Weapons Officer, report status!”
“Sir, tube one is ready in all respects, outer door open, weapon ready.”
“Snapshot tube one, Target Three Zero!”
“Tube one set,” the Cyclops system barked in its artificially excited state. “Unit fourteen, stand by. Unit fourteen, fire. Unit fourteen—shoot!”
The deck jumped just before the explosion on the port side, rolling the deck to starboard suddenly. It wasn’t the normal crash of a torpedo launch, Dixon thought.
“XO, what happened?” he shouted at Phillips.
“Weps,” she shouted, “what’ve you got?”
Taussig’s face looked thunderstruck in the weapons control
cubicle. “Ma’am, the torpedo detonated as it left the tube—the speed at emergency flank must have snapped the weapon in half as it was leaving, and it blew the high explosive on the hull. I’ve got a wire continuity open circuit, outer door won’t shut, and the tube is leaking—”
“Flooding in the torpedo room!” Chief Joyce’s voice called on the tactical circuit. “Flooding in the torpedo room from tube one door!”
“Flooding in the torpedo room,” Officer of the Deck King man announced on the 1ME ship wide announcing system. “Casualty assistance team lay to the torpedo room.”
“XO,” Dixon said to Donna Phillips, “turn the coordinator watch over to the navigator and lay to the torpedo room and take charge at the scene.”
“Aye, sir,” Phillips said, her window going black as she pulled off her headset.
“Sonar, Captain! Report status of the torpedo in the water!”
“Conn, Sonar, bearing drift high left on the torpedo, sir, it doesn’t have us.”
Dixon nodded. He might evade the torpedo, and all he had to do was save the ship from the flooding in the torpedo room. If anyone could do that, Donna Phillips could. He took a deep breath, his only regret that the flooding casualty meant that further torpedo launches at the Julang position would have to wait. The torpedo had to have been a counterfire that the Julang launched just before it died in the Vortex detonation, a sort of goodbye present from the Chinese crew just before they checked out, the bastards.
Dixon selected his view to come above the ASW bowl, looking down on the display from high above, and ordered Cyclops to display the chart. He looked at the bearings to the torpedo, the solution on it weak since they had done no maneuvers on the tor
pedo. He debating pinging an active sonar pulse to determine the torpedo’s range, but decided against it. No sense alerting the unit to his presence if it hadn’t found him. It would be nicely fading far astern of them by now.
Dixon hadn’t counted on a nuclear detonation from the torpedo. The Shockwave hit the Leopard from aft without warning. The ship in one instant was running full out to the west to evade the torpedo. The next it was slammed by a giant sledgehammer. Dixon’s body smashed into the wall of the cubicle hard enough to break his collarbone and his right arm. The boom microphone of his headset broke off and cut clear through the flesh of his cheek and into his tongue, the helmet visor broken. He slipped to the deck on a trail of blood from a laceration to his shoulder, and his unconscious body collapsed in the tight cubicle.
The other members of the battle stations firecontrol party in the control room were also thrown against bulkheads and injured beyond the point of helping themselves with one exception —the diving officer of the watch, an ensign studying for his OOD quals, the electrical officer Brendon “Tiny” Farragut, the nickname in reference to his 250-pound frame. Farragut was strapped into the ship-control console’s diving officer seat with a five-point harness, and though he suffered whiplash from the blast of the torpedo and couldn’t see after every electrical circuit aboard went dead, he did the one thing he’d been trained to do over and over again at the dive simulator in New London—he reached for the dual stainless-steel emergency main ballast tank blow chicken switches, pulled their lock mechanisms downward, and lifted both levers high into the overhead. He reached for the 1MC microphone to announce an emergency surface, but the circuit was as dead as the rest of the ship.
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