Too far apart, the launching system would be gone, probably blown apart by the explosion of the first tube.
“Set the interval at 500 milliseconds,” Pacino ordered.
That, he figured, would give the system time to launch the second missile but would also allow the first-launched weapon to clear the tube and the ship. The third unit would probably never make it out of the ship.
“Vortex units are ready, sir.”
“XO, evacuate all watchstanders to the aft compartment. Keep both hatches open. I’ll be right back.”
“Aye, sir,” Vaughn said, not looking at Pacino. “You heard it, men. Everybody aft, now.”
The watchstanders dropped headsets, clipboards, pens, the lot of them stampeding aft to the passageway leading down the ship’s centerline. Holt and his sonarmen joining them from the forward door to the sonar room, Vaughn was last to go. By the time the men were gone the noise of the Nagasaki torpedoes could be heard through the hull, their whining propulsors sounding ghostly.
“Sir?” Vaughn had paused at the aft door to the passageway. “Don’t be too long or I’ll have to shut the hatches.”
“I’ll be right there,” Pacino said, a phone in his ear.
“Engineer,” Hobart’s curt voice said.
“Eng, Captain. Load and launch slot buoy number three.”
“Aye, sir, loading now.”
Pacino hung up and looked at the control room one last time. The ship’s angle was inclining downward, no longer a watchstander to guard the ship-control panel. Pacino pulled up the control yoke and glanced at ship’s speed. Forty-five knots, ship’s depth, 800 feet. He lifted a glance to the ballast-control panel and looked at the emergency-blow levers, stepped back and hoisted the phone again.
“Engineer.”
“Captain, here. Take local control of the sternplanes. Keep the ship’s angle level, no matter what.”
“Aye, sir. The slot buoy is launched.”
Pacino hung up. There was no time. He could hear the clicking of the torpedo sonars as they got closer. He looked down on the weapon-control panel, selected the autosequence variable function key and lined up the system to be fired. He reached over to the trigger, rotated it to the standby position, watched the word standby flash on the panel, then pulled it to the fire position.
Nothing happened. The circuit would be complete as soon as he rotated the switch he had painstakingly installed near the hatch to the reactor compartment. His switch had interrupted the firing circuit. With luck, the system would still work. He ran to the ballast-control panel on the port side, reached for the forward emergency-blow lever and flipped it up. The forward compartment would soon be flooded, and maybe blowing forward ballast would compensate, keep the ship from diving to the bottom.
The roar of the emergency air in his ears, loud enough to drown out the sound of the Nagasaki torpedo sonars, Pacino sprinted for the aft door. He rushed down the passageway, past his and Vaughn’s stateroom, until he got to the stairs.
He slid down the slick stainless rails to the bottom, landing near the hatchway to the reactor compartment.
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. Few 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.
Chapter 34
Saturday, 4 January
“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.