“You ready, Whale?”
Chief Petty Officer Tom Albanese looked up at Pacino. “Goddamn, L-T, I sure could use a cigarette right now.”
“And I could use a couple of shots of Pappy Van Winkle,” Pacino said. “But regardless, are you set to go active?”
Albanese nodded, his face hardening. “Let’s do it, L-T.”
“Whale, ping active,” Pacino ordered.
Captain First Rank Georgy Alexeyev’s weapons status console told the bad news. They were down to their last two torpedoes, the reserve he’d promised the crew for the return trip to the Zapadnaya Litsa Naval Base. But after all the launches in defensive mode to keep Kazan alive, the battle had taken his entire weapon load. It was ridiculous. A single nuclear depth charge in a Kalibr cruise missile would have ended all this an hour ago. He could see now why the Americans had fired their nuclear cruise missiles at the Novosibirsk and Voronezh—there was no evading a cruise missile. One either found himself inside the blast damage radius or outside it, there was no middle ground.
He took a moment to wonder whether the Americans were similarly out of torpedoes. They’d been quiet for a few minutes. He looked up from his console to see First Officer Ania Lebedev leaning over to look at him.
“We have to make a choice, Captain,” she said. “Either fire the last two torpedoes or clear the area and break contact.”
“If we break contact, we’re admitting we lost,” Alexeyev said.
“Yes, Captain,” Lebedev said quietly.
“You know, Madam First, those Futlyar torpedoes are useless. I’d just as soon not carry them home and have to explain why we didn’t use them.”
Lebedev nodded, looking at him with sympathy. It must be his wrecked eye, he thought. She’d seen how bad it was the last time he’d replaced the wadding under the patch. Or, he thought, maybe she sensed something, something darker. He’d heard of people having premonitions about their own deaths. Could she be feeling something, their dark fate lumbering toward them, inescapable?
“Sonar Officer,” Alexeyev called to Senior Lieutenant Ilia Kovalev. “Do you still have contact with Panther and the Virginia-class?”
“Yes, Captain, but they are getting more distant. We should turn toward and head northward. And Captain, I have transients from Panther for the last few minutes. His hull is groaning and creaking, then popping. I think he’s changing depth, maximum to mast-broach depth, then back again.”
“Why the hell would he do that?” Lebedev said to Alexeyev.
“He’s trying to unstick a torpedo tube door. That explosion at his bearing, it must have been his own weapon he was trying to jettison. Probably jammed up his doors.”
“There’s no coming back from that, Captain,” Lebedev said. “He’s as good as dead.”
“Agreed. Boatswain, right ten degrees rudder, steady course north. Weapons Officer, tube load the last two torpedoes and make them ready for launch.”
Alexeyev re-buckled his seat belt at the console, his insistence during action stations that everyone be strapped in, but he’d unbuckled it when they had gotten down to two torpedoes, and he had been about to stretch his legs and walk to the navigation chart table when the sonar ping came from the north, the ping long and sustained. “Who pinged that?” he asked the sonar officer.
Kovalev answered from the sonar-and-sensor console. “Captain, it was the Panther.”
“Why would he ping active if his torpedo tube doors are stuck?” Alexeyev asked Lebedev. Her eyes grew wide with alarm. “Because they aren’t stuck anymore. Captain, turn south and put on maximum turns!”
“Boatswain, right full rudder, all ahead full, to nuclear control, fast speed pumps and one hundred percent reactor power!”
The deck tilted dramatically as the Kazan executed a snap-roll in her turn to the south.
AOIC Anthony Pacino mashed the trigger fixed function key on the vertical section of pos two and tube five fired, the deck vibrating and jumping just slightly, the weapon launch much smoother than from a U.S. submarine.
Almost immediately the torpedo’s propellant ignited, the sound of it deafening, and the underwater rocket sailed off into sea toward its designated target, the Russian Yasen-M.
“Dear Yasen-M,” Pacino said. “This evening’s special is a Shkval torpedo, sautéed in onions. Eat it all, you Russian bastard.”
Petty Officer First Class Jay Mercer was the first to hear it. “Captain, Coordinator, OOD, I have a rocket launch from the bearing to the Panther.”
“The hell do you mean, a rocket launch?” Lieutenant Commander Rachel Romanov asked.
“It’s definitely a supercavitating torpedo, Nav. Look at the broadband trace.”
The broadband waterfall display grew a sound that was so loud and so fast that it was ten degrees wide.
“Jesus, Captain, that’s a Shkval torpedo and we’re between it and Master One. Pilot, all ahead flank, left ten degrees rudder, steady course west!”
The Shkval from tube five had ignited its self-oxidizing fuel less than two minutes before and was now flying through the sea on a one-way trip to the target.
The torpedo looked like an old-fashioned air-to-air missile, extremely pointy at the nose, more of a rocket than a torpedo. At its aft end, it had a bell-opening gimbal-mounted nozzle, the flanks of the torpedo featuring thrusters every forty-five degrees around the circumference. As the torpedo had accelerated, the pointed nose caused the water to boil to steam and the steam bubble grew to encompass the entire weapon, the steam vapor coating eliminating the skin friction of the water and allowing the unit to speed up beyond 300 knots as it flew toward the target.
Time of flight was minimal. Most of the torpedo was just a fuel tank. The warhead was relatively small, and truth be told, it was redundant to the kinetic energy of the torpedo hitting a submarine hull.
At 1252:25.580 UTC time, the target grew in the seeker blue laser window from a speck to a form so big it blocked out all else.
At 1252:25.757 UTC, the torpedo hit the hull and the warhead exploded.
By 1252:25.905 UTC, the torpedo no longer existed but for a high temperature plasma from the warhead explosion.
At 1252:26.005 UTC, the jagged rip in the submarine’s hull in the third compartment opened up, the energy from the detonation blasting into the compartment.
1252:26:127 UTC: The explosion’s fireball was extinguished by the massive flooding into the compartment.
1252:26:232 UTC: Three control rods in the central control group of the reactor jumped as their control rod drive mechanisms shattered from the shock, the explosion and the violent water flow. The pressure inside the reactor blew the control rods out to the top of the core.
1252:26:345 UTC: The reactor power went past 3000 % in the overpowering from the control rod ejections and the primary water loop could no longer accept the energy of the core, and the pressure inside the reactor vessel grew to five times the design pressure.