The missile now activated the six-can spark plugs, the cans instantly coming up several hundred degrees in temperature, and the air fuel mixture burned at a rate just shy of explosion. The hot gases were passed into the turbine connected by a shaft to the compressor — the turbine designed to keep the compressor running during the journey. The hot high-energy gases flew by the turbine and out the missile’s aft nozzle, which sped the gases up to supersonic velocity, creating the reaction thrust. As the exhaust flowed out the nozzle, the missile felt the push of 50,000 newtons of thrust, and the jet engine was self-sustaining. While the missile was injecting fuel into the combustion chamber cans it extended its amidships fins, horizontal square miniwings, then rotated the wings to pull out into level flight. Just in time. Altitude was a mere ten meters above the water.
At 790 kilometers per hour, the 1.1 megaton hydrogen bomb flew toward its target.
The engine room was the furthest aft compartment of the ship, going from the escape-trunk hatch all the way to the shaft seals near the screw and rudder. The compartment was conical and large, the biggest aboard. It was humid, miserably hot even in the arctic water, from the massive steam pipes threading their way through the space.
Maneuvering, the nuclear control room, was close to the forward bulkhead of engine room upper level on the starboard side. It was a closet-sized space filled to bursting with three control panels facing forward, a large panel on the aft wall and four watchstanders. Nearest the door of maneuvering on the ship’s centerline the throttleman stood at the steel wheel of the throttle. His panel was the steam plant control panel, his gages read steam pressures and temperatures — the heartbeat of the steam plant. Touching the throttleman’s right shoulder was the reactor operator, who sat in front of the reactor-plant control panel. Its slanting lower surface had a mock-up piping diagram of the main coolant system that showed the portcoolant loop on the left and its mirror image on the right. In the center of the coolant system was a reactor core with a pistol-grip lever protruding from it that moved the control rods. With the plant critical, the rods only affected coolant temperature, but when the plant was shut down the rods were withdrawn to start the nuclear fission reactions that heated the main coolant water, boiling the water in the steam generators and thereby providing steam to the turbines. The vertical section of the panel was mostly stuffed with electrical gages showing reactor-plant temperatures and pressures and the reactor-power meter, which went from zero to 150 %. Above 100 % the meter face was painted blood red. No naval reactor had ever been above 103 % power. Much over 100 %, the core would experience some fuel melting. At some level above that, say 130 %, the fuel melting would get substantially worse, irradiating the crew.
Against the starboard bulkhead was the electric-plant control panel where the remote circuit breakers that channelled the electricity to ship’s distribution were operated. Behind the electrical operator was the Engineering Officer of the Watch, the EOOW, a nuclear-qualified officer who supervised the watchstanders and was responsible for the engineering spaces. The battle stations EOOW was Lieutenant Commander Matthew Delaney, a rotund red-faced man with a seemingly perpetual frown. Delaney, a deadly serious man, could be at odds with Captain Pacino over what he perceived as the sometimes not sufficient concern showed by Pacino toward the potentially dangerous reactor. After all, unlike civilian reactors with their low-power density-cores, a Navy reactor could blow sky high. Navy engineers called such a potential catastrophe a “rapid prompt critical disassembly.” Delaney called it a nuclear explosion. In the moments after the “torpedo in the water” announcement, the order to scram the plant took Delaney by surprise. An exchange of weapons with the Russian he could understand. Under the ice, it had been rumored to happen. But with an exchange of torpedoes came standard evasive tactics — all-ahead flank, cavitate the screw, run like hell at max speed until the ship was hit or the weapon exhausted its fuel.
Delaney, though assigned as the ship’s engineer, was also qualified for command of a nuclear submarine. The U.S. Navy insisted on all officers being tactically qualified. So the goings-on in the control room were no mystery to Matt Delaney. However, the order to scram the reactor was. Instead of continuing the run at flank, as the plant was just seconds before, the Conn had ordered all stop. That was wrong, Delaney thought. He realized that fear of an ice-raft collision and subsequent hull rupture was justified. But an underice collision was a roll of the dice. Maybe it would happen, maybe not. A Russian torpedo was not a game of chance. If the target failed to run it had less chance of surviving than a wide-eyed doe staring down a hungry wolf. Pacino must be playing dead, Delaney realized. But under the ice there was no surface to go to when the battery died. Delaney would need power to restart the reactor, especially for the power-hungry reactor main coolant pumps. And without juice from the battery, the ship would die. Worse, the loss of the hovering system after the collision meant the ship would need to keep bare steerage way over the fairwater and sternplanes to keep from sinking — which required propulsion — another reason to stay critical. But with a dead reactor they’d have to use the Emergency Propulsion Motor, another damned electricity hog. The battery would be exhausted in fifteen minutes, and when it died so would the Devilfish.
Delaney did not like the commands from the Conn, but he also believed in Navy Regulations, the Reactor Plant Manual and the Ten Commandments. In about that order. So, reluctantly, he gave the next orders: “Reactor operator, shift reactor main coolant pumps one, two, three and four to slow speed. Manual group scram the reactor and secure pumps one, two and three.” The reactor operator, an aggressive first-class petty officer named Manderson, acknowledged and flipped each reactor main coolant pump T-switch on the lower reactor control panel to the slow speed position, then pulled each switch upward. The indicating lights at the pumps changed from FAST to SLOW. Manderson stood and lifted a square Plexiglas cover over a rotary switch at the top of the reactor control paneclass="underline" the switch was marked MANUAL SCRAM. Manderson looked over his shoulder at Delaney. Delaney nodded. Manderson rotated the switch. As the switch handle came to rest at the position marked GROUP SCRAM, a dozen things happened in the nuclear plant within fifty milliseconds. And as far as Delaney was concerned, all those things were bad. The reactor siren sounded, a wailing police-car siren in the maneuvering room. The control rod bottom lights lit for group one, the controlling rod group. The rod position digital counter began dialing group one’s indicated position down to zero.
The reactor power meter dropped from 15 percent, normal for all stop with slow pumps, to zero. Within seconds, main coolant average temperature dropped from 496 degrees Fahrenheit to 465 and continued to fall. The STARTUP RATE meter on the RPCP went from zero to minus 0.3 decades per minute as the power level crashed into the immediate range, enroute within minutes to the startup range. These were only the indications at the reactor plant control panel. Two compartments forward, inside the reactor compartment, the six control-rod drive mechanisms of group-one rods lost their magnetic latch voltage. As the electrical power was interrupted from the scram breakers tripping, the magnetic flux holding the rods engaged to the drive motors collapsed, and as the magnetic attraction disappeared, springs opened alligator assemblies, disconnecting the rods from the holding mechanisms. Massive vertical springs pushed the six control rods made of an obscure element named hafnium to the bottom of the reactor vessel. The hafnium had the odd property of acting as a black hole for the subatomic neutron particles that made the Devilfish’s screw turn. When the six rods hit the bottom of the core, most of the neutrons flying around in the center of the reactor were absorbed by the hafnium instead of by uranium atoms. As the uranium atoms stopped absorbing neutrons, the fission reactions came to a halt like popcorn removed from an oven, going from full frantic popping to sporadic pops at odd intervals. The fissions stopped. The uranium atoms, stuffed deeply into the fuel elements, stopped splitting, and so no longer added 200 megaelectron volts each of energy to the fuel element material. The end of the energy input was sensed immediately by the water coolant flowing in the fuel elements that no longer were superhot. The coolant stopped being heated by the fuel and arrived at the steam generators relatively cool at 465 degrees. Such coolant in the steam generators was useless in boiling the water from the condensers to turn it into steam. Low steam pressure in the steam generators starved the propulsion turbines and turbine generators in the engine room. For a moment, the blare of the alarms was accompanied by the sickening, shrieking howl of the two huge steam turbines aft as they wound down from 3600 RPM to a complete stop. To Delaney it was the sound of the Devilfish starting to die. The electrical operator opened the breakers to the turbine generators as the steam pressure went away. Now the ship was on battery power alone. The fans in the ventilation ducts spun down and stopped. The air stopped flowing. The room grew hot and stuffy as the air conditioning disappeared. For a few moments the residual heat of the plant was overcoming the arctic cold. Soon, however, the boat would be as cold as the arctic sea surrounding it.