Joe Farrell, throttles open wide, gripped the stick, his knuckles ivory as the Hornet screamed flat-out down the catapult, leaving a hot blast in its wake. Every veteran pilot and air crewman watching the takeoff held his breath. Up in the island, Colonel Frank Hart, standing with the admiral, found his hands shaking at the sheer formal drama of the moment as Joe Farrell set off to destroy USS Seawolf.
The nose of the Hornet rose as she thundered forward, and a collective sigh of relief broke out as the spectacular U.S. Navy fighter attack aircraft rocketed off the deck and then lumbered into the night sky, carrying her deadly steel burden below, making almost 200 knots, climbing out to port. “Tower to Hornet one-zero-zero…good job there…you’re cleared out.”
“Hornet one-zero-zero, roger that.”
10
Lieutenant Commander Farrell had his eyes down on the instrument panel as the fighter attack aircraft screamed across the South China Sea, 250 feet above the waves, covering six and a half miles every minute. This was the most demanding part of the combat flyer’s art, staying low, below all military radar, knowing that one too-firm touch on the stick will send you hurtling upward onto the screens of the enemy, or alternatively straight into the sea and instant death in a pirouetting fireball.
U.S. Navy pilots practice low-level flying constantly, but the dangers remain, and the concentration required to stay precisely 250 feet above the water at high speed is nothing short of awesome, especially at night.
Farrell’s Hornet was cruising at only 400 knots, but any time he saw a light on the ocean up ahead, say 1.5 miles ahead, he was past it in 13 seconds. And he held the stick hard, his gaze switching from course to height, from windshield to trim, murmuring occasionally into his microphone, back to the carrier, which was now 120 miles astern, 15 minutes into his journey.
And now he made a course change, just as he howled across the unseen line of longitude at 113.30 degrees, due south of the port of Macao. He turned the aircraft north for the 30-mile run up to the mouth of the estuary to the Pearl River, straight over the Wanshan Dao, less than five minutes flying time.
He saw the island lights right below, and over to the left was the brightness of Macao. He swung nine degrees west of due north, settling momentarily on course three-five-one, hugging the shore in the shadow of the 1,500-foot mountains west of the city of Sanxiang.
One touch on the stick and he was out over the central channel of the river, east of Kowloon, passing the island of Qiao, and then he turned back with split-second timing onto course three-five-zero, right over the vast wetlands. He rammed open the throttle and felt the surge in power as the Hornet accelerated to a speed just below 600 knots, just short of the speed where she might make a giveaway sonic boom. He had her on a beeline for the Canton dockyards right now…and he was ten miles southeast…nine…eight…seven…the miles scorched by under his wings…and now it was six. His automatic preset bomb sight, counting down the seconds, told him to pitch up.
Lieutenant Commander Farrell reached out with his gloved right hand and made the PERMISSIVE button. He pulled back on the stick and the Hornet, for the first time, gained height, coming up on a precise 45-degree climb angle. Right below the fuselage, the bomb automatically released, and the big Paveway 3 was flung upward by the sheer force and momentum of the aircraft 3,000 feet farther into the sky, whistling through the darkness at a decreasing velocity, the first mile in four and a half seconds, the second, third and fourth in less than 30.
And now, as it reached the top of its trajectory, it began to head down into its long flight to the ground, its laser guidance system scanning the terrain below, searching for the tiny illumination so meticulously aimed by Quinlei Dong.
Lieutenant Commander Farrell made an Immelmann turn, racing higher in the sharpest loop he could, upside-down and then rolling out, carefully easing back down to 250 feet above the wetlands. Then he gunned the aircraft back over the central channel, turning south toward the open ocean. Still making almost 600 knots, he was past Kowloon just a few moments before Quinlei Dong parked his car at Hong Kong International Airport.
And like Dong, he would keep going until he touched down on American soil, or at least American steel.
Meanwhile the bomb hurtled downward through the darkness, silently locking on to Dong’s laser illumination, its fins making the course adjustments as it fell, steering the dark green killer immaculately toward its target. No one could see it. No one could hear it. No one could possibly know it was coming.
There were six guards on the foredeck, six Chinese technicians in the sonar room, and twenty other submarine experts in various parts of the ship, several of them Russian. No one knew a thing about it when the Paveway 3 smashed into the casing at 2140 precisely. It came in making a strange, soft, eerie whistle. Inside one millisecond its armor-piercing head had smashed straight through the pressure hull and into the massively protected reactor compartment, exploding with a dull, shuddering K-E-R-R-B-A-A-M six feet from the seething mass of the reactor core.
The actual explosion of the Paveway was brilliantly contained by the iron grip of the American-built compartment, but the bomb wreaked fearsome damage internally, catastrophically rupturing the steel pipes of the primary coolant circuit in four places. The water system driving through the reactor under pressure of 2,300 pounds per square inch blew open, flashing off to steam instantly, blasting into the compartment.
The pumps stopped as the control rods automatically dropped into the core to scram the reactor. Both of the big isolation valves, failing safe even after the explosion of the bomb, slammed shut, automatically sensing the cataclysmic drop in pressure in the circuit outside the steel reactor vessel. And now the reactor was being starved of the purified, pressurized water that takes away the heat caused by the fission of the enriched uranium-235 in the core. Control of the lethal fast neutrons was quickly slipping away as the core grew hotter and hotter and hotter.
There was only one chance to save the reactor, and that was the automatic emergency cooler system built to cope with occasions such as this — catastrophic failure of the primary coolant circuit. This, too, has two big valves and is designed to suck in seawater — any water, for God’s sake — and drive it through the core, for its hydrogen content to fight the diabolical energy of the neutrons, the basic energy of an atomic bomb. And the water was life-giving in more senses than one: Its sheer cooling effect is designed to prevent the meltdown of the whole core.
The incoming water is known as the “cold leg.” By the time it powers away from the mass of seething silver-colored uranium-235, it is outrageously hot, and will be driven out through the pipes of the second part of the system, the “hot leg.” But, thanks to the thoughtful activities of Judd Crocker and Mike Schulz while Seawolf was being towed into Canton, the isolation valve had been sabotaged to drift open, and now the ship had two hot legs, which represented a total disaster.
The emergency cooler circuit was dead. And the Chinese in the machinery control room, already terrified by the tremor of the bomb’s blast, now saw to their horror how dead it was. They could see the core temperature rising spectacularly, racing upward toward inevitable meltdown. This was a Chinese Chernobyl.
They struggled against it, praying to whatever god might be available on this Sunday night that the emergency system would suddenly kick in. But Mike Schultz had made no mistake. Nothing was kicking anything, except for the bomb, in the context of Chinese ass.