The acceleration first knocked Michael Pacino off his feet and onto the deck, then threw him aft. He fell all the way back down the operations-compartment upper-level passageway, back almost sixty feet to the hatch to the reactor-compartment tunnel, his headlong plunge broken only by the body of a yeoman seaman just out of bootcamp, the upper-level phone talker, who had hit the aft bulkhead first, fracturing his skull, breaking his back. Pacino’s head had rammed into Miller’s abdomen, soft enough to break the mad tumble but not soft enough to avoid a severe shoulder sprain and a hard knock on the head. Dazed, he wiped his hand on his head, now drenched with blood and mucus, wondering briefly whether it was his or the dead seaman’s. He stared for a moment at the boy’s body, his blood now running over the deck. Dimly Pacino heard the sounds of men screaming and moaning in operations upper level, most of the sounds seeming to come from the direction of the control room. He dragged himself to his feet and skidded down the blood-covered deck forward to the control room. As he moved forward, the sounds of agony were joined by a second, even more frightening sound — the flow-noise of water flooding the ship in the lower level.
Aft of the fourth compartment’s after bulkhead, the steel and titanium skin and framework were mangled and shredded where the vessel had split in two. The reactor-compartment forward-bulkhead at first remained intact in spite of the ship smashing in two. Then the liquid reactor coolant sprayed and flooded the compartment as the number-two reactor vessel flew off its foundation and careened to the aft bulkhead, where it punctured the titanium wall. The hole in the bulkhead invited in the cold arctic water, where the gushing wave mixed with the sodium reactor coolant. The highly reactive sodium and the water exploded with twice the power of the explosives in a 53-centimeter torpedo. The after bulkhead ripped fully open, dropping the number-two reactor vessel down the fifteen kilometers to the ocean floor. The sodium-water reaction continued and melted the titanium walls of the compartment and began to melt through the forward bulkhead, at last breaching it and flooding the third compartment with seawater.
The loss of the aft part of the ship had left the forward portion unstable, no longer self-righting in roll or pitch. And the flooding in the first compartment, adding the additional weight of the water, made matters worse. The forward spaces took on a down angle with a list to port that increased as the loose weapons in the first compartment skidded into the port bulkhead, and the water in the lower deck washed over from the tilt. On the first compartment’s middle-level deck the grain can at the aft end of one of the 53-centimeter torpedoes sparked as the wrecked weapon crashed into the port bulkhead, and the spark lit the explosive self-oxidizing fuel. The resulting explosion first set off fuel fires in the other weapons in the compartment, and moments later the warheads of the weapons went off in a tremendous detonation, blowing holes in the side walls of the compartment and breaching the decks above and below. The Magnums in the lower level were crushed, setting off fuel fires and rupturing the warhead casings. The forward bulkhead of the deserted second compartment dimpled from the explosions up forward but held, making it one of two compartments of the Kaliningrad to retain its structural integrity. The other to survive was the control compartment, the oval-shaped bubble of titanium anchored to the top of the second compartment and faired into the superstructure. But with the power loss the control compartment, the nerve center, in effect died — no hydraulics, no electricity, no lights, no fans, no displays or computers or live consoles.
Admiral Novskoyy lay unconscious at the lip of the periscope well, with a bloody head wound and concussion from one of the periscopes. He had sustained countless minor injuries, scrapes and bruises and sprains but was the one in the compartment who had been spared the wrath of the shock wave, having landed near the ship-control console.
Ivanov, Deck Officer and Acting Captain, had been at the ship-control console supervising Lieutenant Katmonov. He had been thrown into the ladder going to the escape pod, been spun around and collided with the bulkhead on the port side, a relatively smooth surface with nothing hanging from it, so built to allow entry up to the escape-pod ladder without snagging the climber’s clothes or body. He collided with Warrant Officer Danalov, with only a moment to register the sound of bones crunching but did not yet feel any pain. On the trip to the starboard side Ivanov’s leg was caught on the back of the ship-control seat while his body continued toward the starboard side. Finally he broke the hold of the seat, and when he landed he hit the starboard forward corner of the room, opening a gash in his arm. With a compound fracture of his leg and a gash in his arm, he regained consciousness in time to see arterial blood spurting from his arm and two bones protruding from his left thigh, one pointing forward and one sideways. He promptly fainted. When he came to, the pain hit him like an electric shock.
Lieutenant Katmonov, the Control Officer, had been strapped into his seat and survived with cartilage damage to his spine and pulled muscles in his back. In shock, he stared straight ahead at his dead panel, illuminated only by the compartment’s four weak battle lanterns, and waited, and waited…
Captain-Lieutenant Viktor Chekechev, Weapons Officer, had been at the fire-control console at the time of the Magnum detonation. He was thrown into the periscope well, smashing his back into the periscope. From there he was hurled back into his console, where broken glass in the computer display broke his fall, and cut his ear half off. Three ribs had been snapped jaggedly on the fall to the periscope well, one entering his left lung and piercing a pulmonary artery. Immediately his heart began pumping blood into his chest cavity, his abdomen swelling with the blood, his skin turning white as he silently bled to death.
The only other crewmember in the compartment was Warrant Officer Dmitri Danalov, head of the security crew. On hand only to guard Vlasenko in the escape pod, he had been standing at the base of the short tunnel to the escape pod lower hatch between the control console and the communications station. The shock of the Magnum blast had sent him into the smooth ladder bulkhead, only smashing his nose. But the acceleration to port brought a missile to bear — Ivanov’s body travelling at some forty meters per second. Danalov’s head was smashed against the bulkhead, fracturing his skull. The acceleration to starboard threw him into the opening mechanism to the escapepod lower hatch. If he had hit the mechanism a few inches to the right he would have escaped with only the top of his skull fractured.
No such luck. The opening mechanism of the escapepod lower hatch was a steel wheel set horizontally onto a shaft that controlled the steel dogs of the hatch as above. At the outside of the wheel was a long handle that protruded horizontally and was used to crank the wheel by hand. Danalov’s head hit the crank handle with sufficient force to send it through his forehead deep into his brain. The crank handle rotated the wheel until the handle released him. Danalov was still breathing when the weight of his body pulled him off the handle and then sent him to the deck, leaving a residue of brain tissue on the crank handle. As the deck developed a down angle, Danalov’s breathing had slowed to a wheeze. By the time the self-oxidizing fuel of a Magnum had ignited below in the first compartment his body functions had shut down. And when the rest of the ship passed through a depth of 1000 meters, the deck at a 40-degree down-angle, Dmitri Danalov was dead.
Pacino pulled himself off the deck of the operations compartment and ran to the control room, his body a symphony of aches but intact. The sounds around him formed the cacophony of a nightmare… the rushing sound of flooding, the screams and moans from the control room not as loud but audible, a knife in Pacino’s heart. The smell of the ship had changed. What before was oil residue, ozone, perspiration, sewage and cooking grease was now salty seawater, hydraulic fluid, burning insulation and the smell of burning hair.