The shock of the detonation had quickly penetrated Vlasenko’s sluggish doze induced by exposure to the cold. The bare titanium of the escape pod was so cold that his cheek burned from the direct contact. With a major effort he lifted his head off the curved wall of the sphere, skin sticking to the metal, pulling off a patch of flesh. The wound was the least of his problems. The onset of hypothermia from the freezing pod was evident in his numb limbs, and if he had been able to check a mirror he would have seen that his lips were blue. He tried to force himself to motion, struggling against the pain, struggling against the cold… The intruding submarine, he decided, must have managed to get a torpedo in close, and the fact that he was still alive at least meant that the enemy did not use nuclear warheads on their torpedoes — Severomorsk’s intelligence estimates had been correct, after all. Conventional explosives were relatively ineffective against Kaliningrad’s hardened combination of titanium and steel, and Vlasenko allowed himself a moment of pride in the ship that had, after all, survived a direct hit. He listened for the sounds of another torpedolaunch but heard none. Strange. If he had been in command he would have pumped out more weapons, even if he had already launched a salvo of Magnums. But the torpedo tubes were silent. Why?
A loud explosion reverberated from the port side of the stuffy control room. The control room watchstanders believed the OMEGA was sinking. Pacino, stone-faced, held up his palm for quiet.
A sound came from the other side of the control room, faint, high-pitched. A screw at high speed, coming from… the west… the direction the Magnum had driven off to. Commander Jon Rapier’s face lost its color. “Captain… it’s coming back. The Magnum. We fooled it once…”
“I know, XO. It could be doing a default routine. Why else would it have turned around and come back? This thing may detonate with or without contact on us, a nuisance detonation—”
“A damned sight worse than a nuisance, skipper.” Pacino looked at Rapier, standing there at the base of the periscope stand, scanning his face, looking for answers. Pacino was out of answers.
“Yes, XO. Much worse than a nuisance,” was all he said.
Captain Vlasenko strained to hear sounds from the inside of the control compartment. What was going on below now? Was Novskoyy approaching the enemy to return fire? Was he headed back to the polynya to transmit his doomsday message? He heard nothing. Complete silence.
A new thought occurred — what if the attacking submarine was Russian? What if Northern Fleet Headquarters had pieced together Novskoyy’s wild scheme and sent an attack submarine to stop him. It made sense — another Russian ship would try a collision before shooting them, to stop the transmission and try to save a crew held hostage by Novskoyy. The thought buoyed him as he began to hope for the success of the other submarine. Who would HQ have sent? The Smolensk? The Novgorod? The Nevski? The Leningrad? That would be an irony — Novskoyy sunk by his own former submarine Leningrad. How could he himself help them? There was nothing to bang on the pod wall with, so he couldn’t make noise. Wait — there was the lever for the manual-pod release. But then he realized the attacking submarine would not need noise. They had already found Kaliningrad with a close torpedo. Perhaps they would finish it off with their own Magnum. Was it right to hope for the sinking of his own ship?
After thinking on it a moment, he decided it would be better for the Kaliningrad to sink than for Novskoyy to let loose his incredibly destructive plan. Still, the thought of losing the Kaliningrad made him sick. As Vlasenko sat in the cold of the pod, his breath still clouding the air, his mind on terrible events he had no power to change, a Magnum nuclear-tipped torpedo only seven kilometers away, launched by the Kaliningrad, began to explode.
CHAPTER 20
The main detonator of the Magnum’s warhead was set in motion by a spark cap, making the thumb-sized high explosive burn into a white-hot miniature fireball. In turn the main detonator caused six larger igniters to explode within ten microseconds of each other. Each of the six igniters then caused its pie-shaped trinitrotoluene charge to detonate. The points of the pie-shaped charges faced the center of the forward section of the Magnum torpedo, and the charges went up in one coordinated explosion. More accurately it would be called an implosion, since the shaped charges were designed to cause a pressure pulse to move inward, toward the center of the torpedo.
As the explosives at the skin of the warhead blew inward they forced a doughnut-shaped piece of plutonium to collapse into a dense sphere, the mass blown into the hole of the doughnut. As the plutonium collapsed into a dense ball from the force of the explosion it achieved critical mass. There had long been a background of nuclear fissions, the splitting apart of the heavy plutonium atom’s nuclei, ever since the plutonium had been assembled into the Magnum torpedo a year before, but each fission had sent its neutrons flying off into space. The leaking neutrons were lost forever, and continued to leak out of the doughnut, useless in causing any further fissions. And although each fission gave off a tremendous amount of energy, the fissions were sporadic, infrequent. But as the plutonium was blown into a dense ball, the critical mass, the neutrons stopped leaking. The sporadic fissions still happened but each neutron flew not out into space but directly into another plutonium atom’s nucleus, splitting that nucleus into two smaller isotopes and sending out another three neutrons. And as those three flew away from the fissioning atom they didn’t leak but collided with other plutonium nuclei in the densely packed mass. And each of the three neutrons of that fission generation created three more fissions, with three more neutrons. Those three caused nine new fissions, creating 27 neutrons that led to 81 fissions, then 243, then 729, then 2187, until after 47 generations of fissions nearly every molecule of plutonium present had experienced an energy-releasing fission. The whole process took less than fifty microseconds. The result was a nuclear explosion, a fission bomb. Even so, it was only the beginning. The original plutonium doughnut had been surrounded with a canister of deuterium, heavy water. The fission explosion was a trigger for the fusion reaction, giving the deuterium atoms’ nuclei enough energy to come together and form a heavier element, helium, releasing even greater quantities of energy per reaction. The deuterium atoms experienced fusion on an incredible scale, forming the helium and bringing the area in the vicinity of what was once the Russian Magnum torpedo to the temperature of the sun’s surface, several million degrees. The icecap itself, 600 meters above, over 30 meters thick, jumped into the air. A series of cracks in the ice formed, some as far as 70 kilometers from the blast. The ice immediately above the blast zone was blown hundreds of meters skyward in a tower of steam. The sphere of million-degree gas expanded rapidly, growing hundreds of meters in diameter. But even the hydrogen bomb had met its match in the coldness and near-infinite stretches of frigid ocean water. As the gas cloud expanded at high pressure, the cold arctic water cooled it, calmed it and eventually collapsed it. The gas bubble, defeated by the cold arctic sea, gave up and decomposed into several hundred trillion bubbles, all rising upward in the radioactive water that had rushed back in to fill in the hole left by the explosion.