Voyage of the Devilfish

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.

FS KALININGRAD

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.