A rushing sound suddenly could be made out, coming directly from outside the hull. At first Sharef assumed it to be the rocket motor of the Hiroshima missile igniting, but it was coming from abeam to port, sounding like it was right outside the control room. The noise grew louder, incredibly loud.
Tawkidi barely had time to say, “What the—”
The Vortex missile’s swim-time was extraordinarily brief. It had raced beneath the ice floes faster than anything else had ever gone. Its blue laser target-acquisition system activated as it searched the water ahead for signs of the manmade hull. It picked up the target, just in time for a momentary correction of its directional nozzle, pointing the nose cone of the missile directly at the midpoint of the target hull.
The hull grew from a dot to a giant in a tenth of a second.
The forward nose cone of the missile smashed into the hull midsection at 300 knots, the signal for the Plastic-Pac explosive to detonate. The ultrasecret explosive package had achieved, with molecular densities unknown outside of the lab, the compacting of a conventional explosive into a tiny space, the huge Vortex missile packed with several tons of the material. The explosive power compared to the yield of a small nuclear warhead.
The warhead detonated into a high-temperature, ultrahigh-pressure plasma, the fireball temperature momentarily reaching up to nearly the temperature of the surface of the sun.
The metal and plastic fiber optics inside the hull was vaporized in the first several milliseconds of the explosion. The blast ripped the bow from the stern, blew the hull to splinters and rained a debris field down to the bottom of the sea, only the forward ballast-tank section and the furthest aft X-tail intact, the remainder pulverized and half-melted.
The men aboard died so quickly that their eyes, seeing the white flash of light of the explosion, did not have time to pass the vision down the optic nerves to their brains. By the time the impulses were halfway down their optic nerves, their brains were vaporized by the plasma. The Second Captain, operating at much higher thought-processing speeds, registered the blast and the sequential loss of function, feeling itself die, its last processing resembling human panic, then settling into sadness, and it too succumbed.
A piece of debris mostly intact at the bottom of the sea, 3,700 meters below the icy surface, was a jewelled dagger, the scarred blade still bearing the barely legible inscription: general MOHAMMED AL-SIHOUD, KHALIB AND SWORD OF ISLAM.
There was nothing else left of him. Or of any of the other crew members.
The Hiroshima missile airframe, just clearing the tube door when the Vortex missile exploded, was blown into three pieces by the blast and shock wave of the fiery detonation. It drifted to the bottom, the Scorpion warhead mostly intact. The warhead mechanics, the ethylene gas bottle and the plutonium dispersion matrix, imploded from the pressure at a depth of some 2,000 meters, scattering the plutonium dust over the bottom, making the debris field of what had been the Combined Naval Force vessel Hegira a radioactive dustbin.
Chapter 35
Saturday, 4 January
Donchez yawned, sat up and took the message board.
“How about a cup of coffee? You got anything brewed fresh? Like this week?”
“Coming up. Admiral.”
Donchez read the message, another one from the Seawolf.
As he read it, he felt like he’d been punched in the gut. The air whistled out of him.
He read the terse message again, then again. Until its words blurred across the page, the pain of them burning into him.
DATE/TIME: TIME OF RECEIPT OF SLOT MESSAGE
FROM: USS SEAWOLF SSN-21
TO: C.N.O WASHINGTON, DC // CINCLANT NORFOLK, VA // COMSUBLANT NORFOLK, VA
SUBJ: CONTACT REPORT NO. 3
//BT//
1. DESTINY IS WINNING.
2. COMMENCING ATTACK WITH VORTEX MISSILE BATTERY.
//BT//
Kane felt the arctic cold pouring into his bones. His breath formed vapor clouds in front of his face, the eerie fog making the room look haunted in the glaring bright spots and dark shadows of the battle lanterns.
“Hard to believe,” he said. “At least up forward it seems we had less damage from the Nagasaki than from the grounding.”
“That’s not true,” Mcdonne said. “Look at the ship. We’re blown to hell. No reactor, no communications with the engineroom, under the ice cover …”
“But the impact didn’t kill anybody. Anybody new …”
“The g-loading must have been less. We were pinned up against the ice and it hit us from below. Not much room for the hull to shake. But it gutted us. We’d have been better off if we’d been killed by the explosion.”
“I don’t think so, XO,” Houser said. “We still have a battery. With luck we can run the emergency propulsion motor and move us out of here.”
“You’re dreaming, Houser. With nobody aft, how are we gonna run the EPM?”
“We don’t know they’re dead aft. All we have is that there’s no one answering the phone. Maybe the phone lines are blown away where they went through the RC.”
“Sure, but what about the DC cables from the battery? If the phone lines are blown away how will battery power get to our guys aft?”
“The DC cables are as big around as your arm, XO. They’d stand a hell of a lot better chance than the phone lines.”
“Maybe. So what do we do? With no communications, with us trapped up here, them trapped aft, and all of us trapped under the ice, how are we going to get out of this?”
“Schramford,” Kane said. “Schramford’s the engineer, but he’s finished his command quals. Which means he’ll be thinking the same things we are. He’ll run the EPM without orders and try to get us out of here. He’ll take local control of the rudder and stern planes and try to drive us out.”
“Sure, Captain. But he’ll need depth control to do it. He’s not going anywhere without us flooding a depth-control tank to take some of the buoyancy off.”
“Okay,” Kane said. “We’ll get ready to flood a DCT manually, or we can rig up the ballast-control panel so it’ll work.”
“How will he know where to go?” Mcdonne said. “He’s got no compass back there.”
“We’ll tell him,” Kane said. “We may not have a phone but we’ve got something just as good.”
“What, sir? Tomato-soup cans and string? If we were surfaced we could just walk outside the hull and bang on his hatch and set up the soup cans, but we’ve got a hundred-foot-thick ice raft between us and the surface.”
“You forgot the underwater telephone, XO.”
Mcdonne looked stunned. The UWT system was an active sonar hydrophone that broadcast the human voice instead of pings or pulses. “You think the UWT works? Damn, maybe you’re right. Let’s power it up and see what we can — hey, wait, we don’t have AC power. It won’t work on DC.”
“Yes it will,” Sanderson said from behind them. “As soon as I make some changes in its wiring. All I’ve got to do is retie in the static inverter to the battery supply and hardwire and fuses. Well, there’s more to it, but in three or four hours we’ll have a UWT.”
“If we can stay warm that long,” Mcdonne said.
“Break out the parkas, Houser,” Kane ordered. “Grab all the sweaters, sweatshirts and long Johns you can find.”