Phoenix Sub Zero

Kane had tried everything, putting the reactor in the red, running as hard as he could. He wondered if he should emergency blow to the surface, then rejected the idea. From the sonar tapes of Augusta’s sinking, he suspected that an emergency blow had been Rocket Ron’s last action, and it had not saved him. The bubbles from the ballast tanks had probably made them an even bigger target, or the blow had slowed them down.

Kane was out of alternatives. He could only wait. Sensing the eyes of the men around him, he kept his war face on: a deep frown, narrowed eyes, jaw muscles clenched. His vision of Becky’s face was starkly real. He blinked her away and looked over at the ship-control console, abstractly wondering how fast the ship could go full out. The electromagnetic log speed indicator read 42.9 knots, the last twenty percent of reactor power barely able to push them another 1.5 feet per second faster.

The torpedo’s sonar grew louder, then stopped, just before the explosion.

* * *

The Nagasaki was fifteen seconds away from detonation when the alarm was received in its upper functions from the self-check module reporting low pressure in the port and starboard fuel cells. A half-second after the alarm sounded the drive turbine began to spool down as the last drops of fuel flowed into the combustion chamber, the chamber cooling, the drag of the water almost immediately bringing the propulsor speed to windmill velocity. With the loss of the turbine, the AC and DC power generators winked out, dropping electrical power to circuits and systems across the board with minor exceptions that were supplied by the onboard battery.

The torpedo, too long in its tail chase, had run out of fuel, but even this eventuality had been planned for. There was just enough power left to complete the final relay contacts in. the fuse-arming circuit, just enough consciousness remaining in the weapon’s dying brain — in an imitation of a human reflex — to order the detonation of the high explosives. The torpedo’s computer intelligence blacked out, but not before the relay in the detonation circuit clicked home and the trickle of current found the fuse, igniting it into incandescence and detonating the high explosive.

* * *

At the time the torpedo was 125 meters astern of and twenty meters below the target submarine’s screw, tantalizingly close but too far to guarantee a kill. The fireball from the six-ton explosive blew outward, the shock wave reaching far out for the hull of its intended kill.

The disruption of the ocean region where the torpedo had once been was momentary, and within seconds the violence of the explosion was replaced by bubbles of combustion gases and a shock wave expanding outward in a forceful pressure pulse, its power smashing into the aft hull of the submarine target. Although the pressure pulse was cruel, the sub’s hull was not cut in two, not ruptured, not even cracked, the high-tensile HY-80 steel holding against the stress of the pressure wave as its hammer slammed into the vessel. Had that been the end of the explosion’s effect, the submarine would have sailed on.

But hull integrity was not sufficient by itself to allow survival in an underwater six-ton plastique explosion … the pressure pulse did three things to the sub that made her survival doubtful, perhaps impossible.

The first was to blow the horizontal stabilizer surfaces upward from the blast angle, coming as it had from below. The stern plane surfaces’ hydraulics were overcome by the force of the shock wave, the force of it rotating the surfaces up on their massive hinges, the ship lucky that the stern planes were not completely torn off.

The second was to shake the ship in such a violent acceleration that the electrical breakers all opened, from the smaller scram breakers providing power to the reactor’s control rods to the main grid turbine breakers and motor generator output breakers supplying the vital loads, even the battery output breaker. As the circuit breakers were jostled open the ship’s electricity was completely lost, the reactor one of the biggest consumers of its own electrical output, the system eating thousands of horsepower in the coolant recirc pumps and the two dozen other pumps that circulated the power plant’s various fluids. It was, in effect, the vessel’s heart failure at the same time as a central nervous system shutdown, brain death.