Terminal Run

Nothing was happening, Pacino thought, telling himself to keep the TESA actuators down.

“Blow… forward…”

The steam generators of the reactor should have been blowing to the emergency steam headers along the ship’s skin, blowing steam through the rubbery anechoic coating of the ship, trying to create a vapor bubble at the skin. Forward, the high-pressure air system should have been pressurizing the emergency TESA headers at the skin of the ship and forcing out air bubbles that should be collecting around the hull and forming the bubble that would grow to become a supercavitating ship-length vapor sheath as the emergency engines started.

“Aye …” The diving officer’s voice had slowed to a barely recognizable baritone slowed-down growl. Pacino glanced between the extended TESA actuators at the diving officer, seeing his hands reach slowly, slowly into the overhead console for the emergency blow levers, and it seemed his hands would never reach the levers.

Vermeers’s mouth was open, his lips quivering slowly, looking like curtains billowing gently in the wind. ““Caaaptaaain, ” he shouted in slow motion. Pacino’s mind was far away, aft of the reactor, aft of the ship service turbines, aft of the propulsion turbine generators, aft of the maneuvering cubicle, aft of the hydraulic plant, aft of the skin of the ship, aft of the number three ballast tank with its oil-enclosed main motor, aft of the number four ballast tank where the TESA rocket motors were mounted, and further aft, outside the envelope of the hull and aft of the rudder and stern planes and propulsor shroud and further aft into the sea, looking ahead at the ship, at the rocket motors of the TESA system with the explosive charges blowing off the seawater protection cowlings and the bottom and top rocket motors igniting into white-hot incandescence, then the port and starboard motors igniting, then the pair at one o’clock and seven o’clock, lighting off in pairs around the ship, until all the rocket motors were at full thrust, the rocket exhaust melting away the thick steel of the rudder and the stern planes and the structural bulkheads of the number four ballast tank, and the bubble of air and steam over the ship grew and the ship accelerated and formed its own self-perpetuating supercavitating bubble over the surface of the ship until the ship was going fifty knots, then a hundred, the ship’s speed climbing to two hundred knots.

His mind shifted back to the control room, where the sound of rocket motors grew to an earsplitting shriek and there was suddenly no more sound, because either Pacino’s time sense had slowed the world to a stop, or because he had grown deaf, and still he wasn’t sure if it had worked, until he felt himself go quickly horizontal, his body hanging by his hands on the TESA actuators, hanging straight down, but the deck was parallel to his body, and he suddenly weighed a thousand pounds and his hands could no longer hold his weight and he let go and the control room deck moved beneath his feet and he didn’t know whether he was flying through the air of the control room or if the control room had suddenly decided to fly forward and he hit the aft bulkhead of the control room so hard that his body collapsed and his head hit the inertial navigation binnacle and the control room dissolved into a gigantic hurricane of sparks and the world became slowly black.

The rear hull of the USS Devilfish erupted in a roar of flames as the two dozen solid rocket engines of the large bore Vortex Mod Alpha missiles ignited in pairs, until all twenty-four had lit up at full thrust. The rudder and stern planes and propulsor of the ship vaporized in the high-temperature blast.

When the torpedo evasion system actuated, the ship was at her test depth with a quarter-degree rise on the bow planes and an emergency blow in the forward ballast tanks. What had before been a nuclear submarine hovering at thirteen hundred feet suddenly became a huge underwater rocket. The air and steam bubbling at her skin grew until a vapor bubble enclosed the hull from her nose cone to the Vortex engines, and the ship accelerated at ten g’s through 50 knots, through 100, blowing through the seas until, at the moment the engines ran out of fuel and cut off, the ship was going 205 knots, with an up angle of two degrees. The ship rocketed away from the Tiger shark rocket-propelled torpedo pursuing her and roared upward toward the thermal layer. The periscope and BRA-44 radio antenna mast had broken off in the slipstream, and as the submarine flew through the sea, the sail and the sonar dome became crushed in the force of the flow. Before the ship rushed above the layer, the acceleration forces had ripped the starboard steam piping off the number one turbine generator, and the steam system leaked rapidly into the engine room with enough energy to cook every soul aft like a boiled lobster.