Although the gas bubble was doomed, fracturing into tiny bubbles, the shock wave from the blast lived on. It traveled at sonic speed in the ocean depths, reinforced by the ice above and the ocean bottom below into a solid wall of a pressure pulse that propagated quickly from the blast zone, reaching out to the sea around it. As the shock wave moved out it crushed hundreds of icepressure ridges, some stalactites of ice vaporizing from the energy of the shock. One slender ice stalactite, roughly the size and even the shape of the Empire State Building, except that it was upside down and submerged, disintegrated instantaneously into several thousand pieces, none larger than a few feet in diameter. The shock wave travelled on in all directions, killing the few fish and animals that inhabited the area of the arctic north. It took three seconds to reach the USS Devilfish, then drifting in the current from the north some three kilometers from the polynya’s west edge. The shock wave took slightly longer to reach the Kaliningrad, almost five seconds. The shock wave was attenuated, eroded, weakened as it travelled further from its origin. With each meter it travelled it grew weaker, its destructive forces spread over more and more area as the wave front expanded, growing weaker with the square of the radius from the detonation. The Devilfish was 5000 meters from the blast, the Kaliningrad almost 7000. It would seem both would sustain equal damage, but the extra 2000 meters meant that the shock wave force was twice as cruel to the Devilfish as it was to the Kaliningrad — though to both vessels it was more than cruel enough. Hundreds of meters beneath the icecap, and several kilometers from the original polynya and the new one formed by the detonation, both submarines were in mortal danger.
The two officers in the F-14 looked toward the base as the cruise missile flew on, oblivious to the tail chase of the two Mongoose missiles. The first Mongoose went wild and dived for the ground, exploding as it impacted on nearby Interstate 64. The hole in the interstate was three-lanes wide. The second Mongoose flew toward the hot exhaust of the SSN-X-27 cruise missile, as it was designed to do, but 200 yards from the target the heat sensor in the Mongoose’s nosecone failed and it lost its direction. It sailed off to the north, effectively blind and with no target, until its rocket motor ran out of fuel. It glided to earth and landed on the roof of one of Norfolk Naval Base’s several administration buildings. Its fuselage was crushed and misshapen as it lay smoldering and inert. The SSN-X-27 had escaped Nikels’ and Tollson’s attack and was now approaching the northwestern edge of the base — the surface ships and submarine piers.
There was no warning when the shock wave of the nuclear explosion hit the Kaliningrad. With the sonar systems out, and the torpedo seven kilometers away, it was inaudible and unexpected. Kaliningrad had slowed to approach the polynya and had turned to the north. In doing so she had exposed her fifth compartment’s portside wound, the dp from the American torpedo that had ripped open the diesel oil shield tank. The rip came halfway up her port flank and had cut through four structural frames. The shock wave smashed into the port side of the ship, a violent, instantaneous pressure-pulse, peaking at 8500 Newtons per square meter. Had the inner and outer hulls been undamaged, the ship would have rolled as the shock wave blasted over her, perhaps damaging only more of the delicate computers. But with the rip in the fifth compartment, there was no metal on the port side to hold the ship together.
The ship snapped in half. The control compartment experienced an immediate seven g’s in the starboard direction, then three to port. Anything not bolted down, including the men, was thrown into one side of the room, then the other. The room was not designed for such impact forces, no padding, no softened edges, practically all metal — metal cabinets, metal seats, metal deck, metal titanium ellipsoid hull, metal pipes and valves and periscopes and conduits. What was not metal was glass — the screens of the computer consoles, the navigation graphic chart table, display faces. The combination of high-g forces, the small metal-filled room, glass screens and vulnerably human flesh turned the room into a meat grinder. It took only seconds, and when those seconds were over not a single man was whole, not a single man was conscious. The stern part of the vessel, the remains of the fifth compartment and the huge turbine compartment, sank backward into the sea, the port high-pressure turbine coming loose from its foundation as the hull fractured. It took only two minutes for the aft-hull to pass through its 2000-meter crush-depth, shallower than the ship’s since the compartment bulkheads were weaker than the hull.
The only man conscious in the aft-hull as it sank at a precipitous tail-down angle was the engineer, Mikhail Geroshkov, who had been strapped into a control seat in nuclear control at the aft section of the sixth compartment, the turbine room. The lights had gone out and the battery had already been destroyed by the American torpedo. Complete darkness made the prospect of death that much more frightening.
Mikhail Geroshkov began a prayer, something his mother had taught him decades before. At one time it was a practice he had disapproved. Now he said it aloud, over and over. The deck had become almost vertical, leaving him lying in his seat on his back, strapped in like a cosmonaut in a rocket. “Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name—”
The forward bulkhead of the sixth compartment collapsed and ruptured at a depth of 1970 meters. With a thunderclap of pressure it compressed the contents of the sixth compartment like the air in an engine’s cylinder, and like the air in a diesel engine, the compression shot up the air temperature thousands of degrees. For just an instant the nuclear control room was lit by the bright flash of the approaching flame front, the leading edge of the compression wave. Geroshkov was allowed milliseconds to see the wall of flames coming toward him at sonic velocity, 5500 clicks, but he had no time to open his mouth to scream. By the time the pressure wave reached the aft bulkhead of nuclear control, the scattered tissues that a moment before comprised Mikhail Geroshkov had vaporized in the soaring pressures and temperatures of the fiery air. The aft half of the Kaliningrad hit the Arctic Ocean bottom, a crushed lump of steel and titanium. The debris field it created was a kilometer wide, four kilometers long. The once mighty submarine, the pride of the Northern Fleet, was now little more than a titanium coffin.
Anyone in the control room of the USS Devilfish at 0945 Greenwich Mean Time would object to being called lucky. Of course, none could know what had just happened to the men in the after-hull of the OMEGA submarine. Pacino had not bothered to grab onto a handhold in the overhead when the Magnum had returned. Convinced that the Magnum detonation would mean his death, he had stood there, rooted to his spot on the Conn, his arms crossed across his chest. The shock wave from the Magnum’s nuclear explosion first hit the screw and passed through the ship longitudinally, its force accelerating the ship forward in an enormous four-g jerk. The ship control team sitting strapped into seats at the forward panel had no headrests, the backs of the seats coming only up to shoulder level. All three were jerked backward so abruptly and forcefully that their necks were broken. One, the Diving Officer, died not from a broken neck but from asphyxiation when vertebrae punctured his throat. The four men sitting at the fire-control console were hurled forward, resulting in broken bones, concussions, deep gashes, finger-amputations. The battlestations watchstanders who had been standing were tossed, sands in a gale-force wind. After the shock wave passed the only sounds in the room were the groans and labored breathing of the wounded.