Phoenix Sub Zero

The ship’s navigation plan, worked out with the officers when the mission was first explained, had them sailing a great circle route toward the range circle around Washington, D.C. The plan had called for them to intercept that 2,900-kilometer circle centered on the American capital at a glancing angle to the northeast, the better to have a longer time enroute to assemble and install the Scorpion warheads in the Hiroshima missile airframes. That route would also keep their path heading more toward Greenland than the east coast of America, in case they were tracked or detected sporadically during the trip—making a beeline for Washington would alert the Western Coalition if they were tracked, and the West would expend all possible efforts to sink them. Sharef was convinced that the West had not yet awakened to the situation, that what they faced now were half-measures intended to find Sihoud. If the Americans had the slightest idea that the ship carried a doomsday weapon pointed at their capital, the entire combined navies of the West would hunt him down like a dog.

“Sir, the great circle path toward Greenland has been inserted into the Second Captain since the briefing, but that will not help us if the missiles are not assembled.”

Sharef nodded. The Second Captain was perfectly capable of driving the ship to within missile range of the target and launching the weapons without help from the crew, as long as the system was properly programmed. But without fully assembled and complete missiles, the Second Captain would drive them to their destination but would be useless in hitting the target. It was essential that the weapons be assembled as soon as possible. After the missiles were ready, the mission would practically be accomplished, because at that point the mission no longer needed the crew, just an intact ship and healthy Second Captain—

It was then that the American torpedo caught up with them.

* * *

The Mark 50 torpedo found the pressure hull of the target, notwithstanding the odd sonar pulses coming from its stern, the noises sounding something like echoes but not at the correct angle or frequency. The torpedo had closed the target from an angle since it began homing, and just as the onboard computer had thought, the target submarine had ended up at precisely this point in the sea at the time of interception. The iron proximity sensors set into the Mark 50’s flanks tingled as the hull of the target grew closer, until finally the Mark 50 drove directly under the giant hull of the target, the huge diameter of the hull seeming to be flat at the bottom. The shaped charge of the torpedo automatically was adjusted to blow maximum force in the direction of the hull. Within milliseconds of detecting the hull the high explosive blew.

The torpedo underwent a metamorphosis from solid object to pure-energy fireball.

The fireball erupted upward and ruptured the steel outer hull of the target, the pressure wave going further and blasting apart the exterior reinforcing hoop frames and steel plates welded onto the framing. The blast’s intrusion into the inner hull blew the interior of the compartment to wreckage and pressurized the compartment to a level approaching its design basis, the force threatening to rip a hole in the other side of the cylinder or tear the compartment from the neighboring one. But as fast as the pressure wave came, it was spent, the energy that had breached both the hulls and pulverized the interior of the compartment now expended and attenuated. The pressure level in the compartment fell, the gas by-products of the explosion leaving through the five-meter-wide hole in the inner hull, the gases replaced by the cold seawater that flooded the space except for a small gas bubble trapped in the upper cylinder of the compartment.

Thirty seconds after impact, the damage of the blast was complete.

The submarine outer hull was left with a twenty-meter-wide hole that extended into a hoop-wise rip around almost the entire circumference of the ship. The inner hull of the aftmost compartment was ruptured, the interior equipment— the diesel generator and the battery — blown to pieces. The outer hull’s aft conformal sonar array was obliterated. The interior high-voltage cables for the propulsion AC motor were severely damaged, and the SCM sonar-fooling ventriloquist electronics and sonar array were no more. However, the other inner-hull compartments were undamaged, the stern control Xplanes remained intact and functional, and except for the structural rip in the outer hull, the ship was otherwise unharmed. Propulsion had been lost from the shock of the blast, and the ship’s electrical systems were down without the DC battery, but the computer systems of the Second Captain survived, their circuits still complete, their internal power systems still supplying the current for continuing electronic consciousness.