Ahead standard, 16 knots, was all the speed the ship would make with one main engine. Pacino walked through the space, the men dazed except for the XO, and grabbed the helmsman’s seatbelt. With a click and a gentle nudge, the helmsman collapsed to the deck on top of the Diving Officer. Pacino kneeled on the seat, looked up at the gyrocompass, still functioning. He watched as the speed-indicator needle came off the peg and pointed up to 16 knots, then turned the helmsman’s wheel to port, bringing the ship around to a course of zero three zero to get back to the polynya. Flying by the seat of his pants as he was, he could overshoot, undershoot or drive right or left of it. But one thing was very clear. They were still under thick ice. If he couldn’t get to the polynya, he and his crew would join his father at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.
For the SSN-X-27 cruise missile, it was time. Time to detonate the device in the nosecone. A thick steel plate in the detonator train rotated, lining up two pieces of the main detonator. The electrical system sent a spark to the main detonator, and it exploded into a ball of flames. The flames propagated to the igniters, six pie-shaped explosive charges set in a circle around a doughnut of plutonium surrounded by a can of heavy water, the deuterium. The flame front reached the six igniters. Two microseconds later the igniters imploded the plutonium doughnut inward, collapsing it into a massive ball.
Lieutenant Commander Todd Nikels didn’t need to be reminded of what a Kamikaze was. He estimated the SSN-X27 cruise missile to be about 500 feet ahead, beginning to fly over the deserted submarine piers below. The F-14’s wings were already swept back, ready to let him go supersonic. Nikels slammed the keys on the port console forward to the stops and felt a burst of acceleration as the thrust threw the massive jet toward the missile ahead. The missile grew, and within seconds it was just slightly to starboard and above, putting out a visible hot gas exhaust in the dawning light.
Nikels pulled the control stick back, aiming the F-14’s right-wing leading edge at the missile. As the jet passed through MacH 2 the starboard wing sliced through the cruise missile forward of its intake-duct. The missile, already exploding, blew itself apart in pieces that flew backward in the airstream outside the F-14. The cruise missile was destroyed, making it almost harmless, only its cloud of poisonous and radioactive plutonium a concern. Compared to a nuclear explosion, the contamination was almost minor. That was the good news for Nikels.
The bad news was that his starboard wing had been cut off at the fuselage reinforcement, ripping out the starboard engine compressor, turbine and intake duct with it. The debris from the ripped-off wing and engine removed both tail vertical stabilizers and the starboard horizontal stabilizer. The fuel, contained in the wings and the central fuselage, instantly caught fire, enveloping the already spinning aircraft in flames. Nikels watched his aircraft disintegrate. As it began to tumble out of control, he felt the blast of air when the canopy flew off the cockpit. Only then did he realize his radar-intercept officer. Brad Tollson, had started the ejection sequence. Nikels tried to pull his arms tight into his ribcage and grab the ejection seat curtain above his head, but apparently Tollson was too far ahead of him. The ejection-seat rockets fired while Nikels was still trying to pull his arms in toward his body. The cockpit flew away from him. As he cleared the canopy his flopping right arm was torn off by the force of the 1200-knot jet-stream. Nikels stared at his shoulder, at blood flying off into the slipstream. Now the rest of the F14 exploded, transforming it into a fireball. As blood poured out of his shoulder wound, Nikels lost blood pressure, and with it consciousness… Mercifully.
Two seconds later his parachute opened, a mere ten feet from the concrete of Norfolk Naval Station’s Pier Seven. Nikels hit the concrete at over 600 knots, his body scattering down the narrow strip some 200 feet. Almost immediately it became covered with radioactive contamination from the plutonium/deuterium fusion bomb he had just destroyed.
CHAPTER 22
Pacino visualized the geometry of the sea around him. He had always kept the ship’s position in reference to a polynya committed to memory, just like they’d taught in Prospective Commanding Officer School. He estimated the ship to be only one nautical mile from the southwest edge of the polynya… one mile, only 2000 yards, and they could vertical surface as if nothing had happened. A quick radio call for help and this nightmare could be over.
Pacino’s lifted spirits would have been crushed if he could have taken a single glance at Delaney’s reactor plant control panel. The 2000 yards to the polynya might as well have been 2000 miles. Matt Delaney looked over Manderson’s shoulder at the reactor plant control panel. It was like the Three Mile Island nuclear accident all over again and there was nothing he could do about it. The reactor leak from the starboard loop had not been completely isolated by the reactor main-coolant cutoutvalves as he had hoped. The gate valves, designed to seal the coolant system off from a massive pipe rupture, had failed them. Probably from the shock. All the time the ship had been driving toward the polynya the starboard reactor main-coolant cutoutvalves had been leaking and dumping the radioactive coolant into the reactor-compartment bilges. The reactor’s lifeblood was spilling into the bilges, setting off radiation alarms aft of frame 57, the entrance to the reactor-compartment tunnel.
Delaney had tried to compensate by charging to the coolant system with the charge pump and the valve-operating waterflasks, but he was soon out of pure water. The number one and two charging water-storage tanks, the charging-water day tank and the valve-operating waterflasks were dry. The evaporator, which made pure water from seawater, had been out of commission since the collision. So Delaney had been forced to charge seawater into the coolant system in spite of the fact that the plant had been specifically designed to prevent the introduction of seawater into the delicate nuclear systems. The chlorine could corrode the pressure vessel within hours, maybe minutes, in addition to the contaminants in the seawater becoming radioactive.
The seawater hose had been hooked up and the seawater was charged in, but the high-pressure charging pump could only barely keep up with the loss rate, and finally the overworked pump had burned up in a cloud of black smoke. With no water makeup, the loss-of-coolant accident began. While Delaney watched, helpless, the level in the pressurizer tank dropped from 65 inches to 10 in less than a minute. The pressurizer was what kept the 500-degree water liquid instead of steam; when the pressurizer emptied, the entire system would boil to steam. The reactor siren broke the eerie silence of the room.
“Low-pressure port loop, sir,” Manderson shouted.
“Low-pressure cutback, group one rods!” The reactor “realized” it was depressurizing and was trying to lower power by driving in control rods, as it was programmed to do.
“Override the cutback and silence the alarm,” Delaney ordered. He would get every last ounce of propulsion out of the plant — it was a goner anyway, and who knew, maybe they were only a shiplength from thin ice…
As the level in the pressurizer dropped to zero, water still leaking out of the system, the little water remaining began to boil to steam in the core. The siren, just silenced a moment before, wailed again in the small room, which seemed suddenly even smaller.