“I’ll be god damned, the Mongooses missed, I don’t believe it… they both missed. The cruise missile is still inbound…” The F-14 crew lapsed into stunned silence, the commentary on the Mongoose missiles coming to a sudden halt.
In the COMSUBLANT Flag Plot room Admiral Richard Donchez was the center of attention. Donchez’s eyes narrowed as he looked at Lieutenant Commander Kodiak.
“See if CINCLANT’s DC-9 is at the Pattern Charlie point. If it is patch in Admiral McGee.”
Kodiak nodded. Until McGee could get outside the 100-mile radius of the city Donchez would remain in command, but once the DC-9 hit the Pattern Charlie point McGee was to take over.
“Sir, the DC-9 is at Pattern Charlie,” Kodiak said. Donchez took the red radiotelephone handset from Kodiak and clicked the speak button. “Nathan Hale, this is Underdog, over.”
A longish silence, then: “Nathan Hale standing by,” McGee’s distorted voice replied. “Go ahead. Underdog. Over.” The speaker rasped McGee’s voice, ending with a beep as the NESTOR secure-voice signal made its way through the encryption equipment.
“Execute Pattern Charlie. Repeat, execute Pattern Charlie. Break. Acknowledge Pattern Charlie. Break. Over,” Donchez said, transferring operational control of all CINCLANTFLEET to the airborne admiral. This operation was now officially McGee’s problem, along with the President’s and General Tyler’s.
“Dick, McGee here. Copy your Pattern Charlie and acknowledge same. Break…” There was a pause, followed by McGee’s “Good luck, Dick, see you soon.”
When Donchez spoke, his voice was gravelly. “Kodiak, get on the horn to that F-14 driver. If he hasn’t figured it out yet, you ask him if he remembers what a Kamikaze is.”
Commander Henry Duckett heard the long, rumbling roar come through the hull followed by a vibration that started to shake the ship. The deck trembled, the rumbling got louder, then diminished to a dim growl, which after a moment faded, leaving Duckett’s small cabin in silence. Duckett went to the control room and stepped up on the Conn. Senior Chief Sonarman Jameson emerged from Sonar.
“The noise you heard was an explosion. Captain, a definite underwater explosion. Bearing was north-northeast, covered a broad sector. The bearing line points to an underice explosion.”
“Was it a hull breaking up?”
“No,” Jameson said, shaking his head. “There’s a sonar blueout for ten degrees on either side of the bearing.”
“A blueout? But blueouts can only be caused by bubbles and echoes from a… a nuclear detonation—”
Jameson gave him a look. “Exactly, skipper. We believe the explosion was nuclear… Was there any warhead test going on out here? Anything in the intel brief about Russian tests under the icecap?”
Duckett shook his head.
“Is there a chance there’s a U.S. boat up here?”
“If there is I’m not supposed to know about it,” Duckett said.
“British? French?”
“Don’t think so.”
But Duckett did know more than he was saying. The Squadron Twelve intelligence officer had told him about the weird Russian deployment. He’d also blabbed about a concurrent SNCP mission under the icecap, a secret OP involving covert surveillance. Who did the spook say was going north? “Devilfish?”
“Oh, God,” Duckett said slowly. Incredibly, the Russian must have gotten the Devilfish. With the Russian subs on the coastline, only Devilfish and Allentown were this far north, everyone else was tied down with the Russian attack boats. Which meant one thing. Allentown would have to go under ice and see for sure what had happened. Duckett had never liked that wiseass Michael Pacino and his screw-off boat, but they were American submariners.
“What’s going on?” The voice belonged to the XO, Lieutenant Commander Pat Bishop, a short, slight man with a high-pitched, nasal voice. Duckett couldn’t stand the voice, couldn’t stand the man. The XO was competent, but he was a weasel. More than once Duckett had found him compromising his orders. He had tried to transfer him but the thing had gotten snarled in typical navy red tape.
“You didn’t hear the explosion?” Duckett said. He turned to Jameson. “Any idea on range?”
“Negative.”
Duckett went to the aft part of the Conn and peered down at the chart table.
“Quartermaster,” he called, “plot a bearing line to this detonation.” The line pointed up under the icepack.
“Cap’n,” Bishop put in, “you’re not thinking of going north, are you?”
Duckett looked at the bearing line, calculating how long it would take to get to the pole.
“Because if you are, let me remind you this ship doesn’t have the depth control for an underice transit. It also doesn’t have a decent underice sonar — no SHARKTOOTH. We can’t rotate the fairwater planes vertical for penetrating ice with the sail, and even if we could, the sail isn’t two-inch-thick steel like on a Piranha, it’s fiberglass over aluminum. If you tried to smash through ice we’d wreck it. Besides, we don’t have the charts, damn little arctic gear, and we don’t have a clearance from COMSUBLANT. We’d have to radio in a request for clearance and we can’t transmit this close to Russia, they’d detect us…”
“You done?” Duckett asked quietly.
“Yes, I am.”
“Good, because you’re absolutely right. You got all the reasons not to go north.”
“Well, sir, I’m glad you agree,” and he moved off to his stateroom.
“God,” Duckett muttered, “where does NAVPERS even get these bozos?” The OOD, Lieutenant Mills, heard with pleasure the captain’s thought, which he shared.
“Off sa’deck,” Duckett said to Mills, “bring us around to the north, course zero one five, fifteen knots, head under the ice. Keep following the bearing to the explosions. Break out the underice procedure. It’s been a while since I’ve been under the icepack…”
Chief Engineer Delaney wasted no time giving the order to restart the nuclear reactor. The procedures he was about to execute would have made a civilian nuclear operator faint dead away… the emergency reactor startup procedure was so dangerous that it was not even practiced unless the ship was beyond fifty miles from land, and even then only with rigorous controls and supervision. This day Man Delaney would see how sharp the pencils of naval reactors’ design-engineers were. This startup would stress the reactor like it had never been stressed, including the shock from the Magnum hit. Delaney started with a reactor plant in poor condition. With less than minutes left on the battery in this reduced-load status, the running of the reactor main coolant pumps to get flow through the core would exhaust the battery in three minutes or less. The coolant inventory in the core was dangerously low from the previous fast leak from the starboard loop. It would be like trying to start up the Three Mile Island plant in the middle of the accident.
Delaney scanned the instruments. The primary coolant, without the heat input from the nuclear fissions, had cooled to 350 degrees. To warm it to 500 Delaney would be using an emergency heat-up rate. Usually the core was warmed gently at a degree per minute to avoid stressing the thick steel reactor vessel already made brittle by radiation. The emergency heat-up rate had never been done before, on any reactor. It might put enough stress on the plant to blow the head off the reactor vessel, or fracture the six-inch-thick steel.
Even if the warm-up went well the plant was only partly operational. The leak had dumped one coolant loop of highly radioactive water to the reactor compartment bilges. The port steam system was useless with the condenser isolated from the seawater flooding, which left one coolant loop and one steam generator to power one electrical turbine and one main engine. Assuming he could get the reactor critical fast enough.