“Target status?” Ivanov asked. Chekechev: “Still masked by the Magnum.”
“Aim point range?”
“Range to aimpoint, sixteen point five kilometers.”
They were going east at record speed, the polymer slipping down the metal of the hull, greasing their way through the cold water. With every passing minute they drove further from the aimpoint of the Magnum torpedo, closer to safety. But at the same time they also drove further from the polynya, pushing transmission of Novskoyy’s molniya order further into the future. He interrupted the smooth functioning of the three-man fire-control team: “Deck Officer,” he said to Ivanov, “turn the ship around and drive us back west to the polynya.”
“But sir,” Ivanov shot back, shocked, “that will put us in the blast zone—”
“Turn the ship, course, due west.”
Ivanov stared at Novskoyy. Then: “Admiral, I can’t do that. It means this ship will be destroyed.”
“Conn, Sonar, more transients from zero seven zero Conn, Sonar! Torpedo in the water! Large-bore weapon screw pattern! It’s… Jesus, it’s a Magnum!”
“Skipper,” Rapier said, one hand on his earpiece, “the son of a bitch just launched a nuke at us!” Pacino said nothing. The OMEGA had just responded as he’d hoped. This was the confrontation he’d been waiting for. He took a deep breath and issued a string of orders.
“Helm, all stop.” He watched as the speed indicator went from 34 knots to near zero, aware of the eyes on him.
“Offsa’deck, shift propulsion to the Emergency Propulsion Motor. And relay the word to maneuvering: group scram the reactor, secure all reactor main coolant pumps, engage emergency cooling, shut main steam valves one and two and secure steam to the engine room.”
Rapier, standing down by the fire-control console, looked at Pacino, sweat breaking out on his forehead. Pacino had, after all, just ordered the ship to be completely shut down, the only lights remaining supplied from the battery. Finally Stokes found his voice: “Sir, that torpedo’ll be running up our ass in about three minutes. We’ve gotta run.”
Rapier joined in, looking at the chronometer. “Sir, we can’t play possum here under the ice. With the reactor dead and no steam and without a hovering system we’ll need to go two knots on the Emergency Propulsion Motor just to maintain depth control. That kind of currentdraw will kill the battery in twenty minutes, maybe less. Under the ice we can’t recover from that. We could try to restart the reactor right now and we’d never make it.” There was no time to argue. Pacino looked Rapier in the eyes.
“XO, when we shut down, that torpedo will never hear us. It’ll go by like we’re invisible. Besides, if we run we’ll either hit a pressure ridge and sink from a ripped-open hull or get killed from the nuke — we can’t outrun that SOB, it goes sixty god damned knots.”
Stokes’ hand shook as he picked up the P.A. Circuit Seven microphone to maneuvering in the engine room and passed the orders. As the reactor was shut down the ventilation fans whined to a halt. The room grew immediately stuffy and lights winked out in the overhead. The heart and lungs of the USS Devilfish had stopped. She drifted south in the current, a 100-kiloton nuclear warhead crashing toward her at 60 knots.
CHAPTER 17
The SSN-X-27 canister was buoyant, nose-light, tail-heavy. On leaving tube four of the Vladivostok, the canister was already going forty clicks and angling upward. Two fins had popped out from the stem of the canister as it left the torpedo tube, both fins horizontal, both slightly angled upward at their trailing edges. The nose-light canister, aided by the tail fins, rose to the surface of the Atlantic, leaving the Vladivostok, by then imploding and sinking to the bottom, far behind. Launch depth had been fifty meters. It would take almost thirty seconds for the SSN-X-27 to broach the surface. Every second of those thirty was vital to the missile’s success as it ran through internal checks and arming sequences.
A failure on any of the dozens of logic circuits and interlocks would cause the weapon to inert itself and shut down. But each interlock checked out.
Behind and astern of the missile, the twin detonations of Billfish’s Mark 49 torpedoes hit the Vladivostok amidships and forward, first blowing holes in the hulls, inner and outer, and filling a sphere thirty meters in diameter with hot expanding gases. The gas expansion was much too slow to affect the missile. The disintegrating hull of the firing ship was also of no concern to the SSN-X-27. Long since separated from the Vladivostok’s fire-control system, the missile was completely independent. Autonomous. It swam to the surface, encapsulated, waterproof. When the broach sensors indicated that the nose had broken through the waves and was touching air, the nosecone of the capsule would blow off from the action of thirty-two explosive bolts. The rest of the capsule, suspended momentarily half-submerged, half-broached, would serve as a launch pad, and the rocket motor first stage would ignite, lifting the missile out of the cylindrical capsule, which would then sink.
The SSN-X-27 would have proceeded in this fashion, oblivious to the death throes of its mother ship, if not for the shock wave that travelled at sonic velocity through the water, hitting the missile’s capsule when it was just ten meters short of the surface. But the only effect of the pressure pulse was to force the capsule to the surface a few seconds sooner. The capsule broached. Thirty-two explosive bolts fired the cruise missile’s nosecone into the dark sky of the dawn, the fiberglass tumbling end over end, the faint moonlight, now peeking between the clouds, glinting off its orange surface with each revolution. The computer software, knowing the next command in the sequence, lit a small grain can at the far aft-end of the solid rocket stage. The grain can exploded into incandescence. In a chain reaction, the solid-fuel rocket-motor ignited. Under the influence of almost 100,000 newtons of thrust, the missile lifted itself out of the elongated capsule. The capsule sank from the hot gas reaction forces. The missile flew skyward with an acceleration of four g’s that caused it to reach 600 kilometers per hour within five seconds. Three seconds later the rocket motor cut out. The missile arced over in a ballistic trajectory, feeling zero-g at the peak. On the way back down, the first-stage solid rocket-motor blew off from eight explosive bolts at an altitude of 500 meters; it was no longer needed. The intake diffuser popped out of the underside of the missile’s fuselage, ramming in the predawn Atlantic air into the suction box of the axial compressor. The highspeed air windmilled the compressor, spinning up the unit on its near frictionless journal bearings. As the compressor speed came up to several thousand RPM, the computer processing unit amidships sensed that it was time for fuel injection. An air-driven fuel pump, also windmilled by the 400 click airspeed, pressurized the kerosene jet fuel in the fuel lines. The missile measured the pressure buildup in its fuel lines. When the compressor RPM was high enough a solenoid valve in the fuel line popped open, sending the pressurized fuel into the six-canned combustion chambers. The air in the combustion chamber was very hot as a result of being raised to so high a pressure by the compressor vanes. With the injection of fuel, all that was needed was the light-off of the chamber spark plugs, and black smoke came out the tail of the missile as the fuel partially burned in the cans.