Phoenix Sub Zero

Inside there was no light, but there was, for the moment, air. The hull began flooding through the steam system; the steam pipes that had drawn their pressure and flow from the reactor compartment had been sheared off at the forward bulkhead, and now, instead of steam, seawater poured down the pipes, filling the turbine casings, the condensers and coming out the steam traps and cracks formed in the piping by the admission of freezing salty seawater into what moments before had been a 500-degree carbon-steel pipe. A refrigeration unit in the lower deck of the space began leaking high-pressure refrigerant gas into the hull, the R-lll toxic but nearly odorless. Bodies littered the upper deck of the hull, the men who had been evacuated from the forward hatch. Those conscious began to choke from the atmospheric contamination.

The depth of the hull was 1,260 feet, above crush depth but deep enough that the souls trapped inside could be considered to have no future.

“Four, three, two, one, full thrust, and tube release! The weapon is away!” al-Maari seemed caught up in the countdown and the launch of the Hiroshima missile.

Sharef looked at the jubilant faces around him, wondering if he were the only one who remembered that one, maybe two million deaths would come of it. The men around him, even Sihoud — or perhaps especially Sihoud — at this moment seemed like children to him, embroiled in their games and their fighting, ignorant of larger issues and realities. It was a big game to them, he thought. In a few seconds the sonar system would report the health of the missile, whether its first stage had ignited and lifted it to its trajectory—

A rushing sound suddenly could be made out, coming directly from outside the hull. At first Sharef assumed it to be the rocket motor of the Hiroshima missile igniting, but it was coming from abeam to port, sounding like it was right outside the control room. The noise grew louder, incredibly loud.

Tawkidi barely had time to say, “What the—”

The Vortex missile’s swim-time was extraordinarily brief. It had raced beneath the ice floes faster than anything else had ever gone. Its blue laser target-acquisition system activated as it searched the water ahead for signs of the manmade hull. It picked up the target, just in time for a momentary correction of its directional nozzle, pointing the nose cone of the missile directly at the midpoint of the target hull.

The hull grew from a dot to a giant in a tenth of a second.

The forward nose cone of the missile smashed into the hull midsection at 300 knots, the signal for the Plastic-Pac explosive to detonate. The ultrasecret explosive package had achieved, with molecular densities unknown outside of the lab, the compacting of a conventional explosive into a tiny space, the huge Vortex missile packed with several tons of the material. The explosive power compared to the yield of a small nuclear warhead.

The warhead detonated into a high-temperature, ultrahigh-pressure plasma, the fireball temperature momentarily reaching up to nearly the temperature of the surface of the sun.

The metal and plastic fiber optics inside the hull was vaporized in the first several milliseconds of the explosion. The blast ripped the bow from the stern, blew the hull to splinters and rained a debris field down to the bottom of the sea, only the forward ballast-tank section and the furthest aft X-tail intact, the remainder pulverized and half-melted.

The men aboard died so quickly that their eyes, seeing the white flash of light of the explosion, did not have time to pass the vision down the optic nerves to their brains. By the time the impulses were halfway down their optic nerves, their brains were vaporized by the plasma. The Second Captain, operating at much higher thought-processing speeds, registered the blast and the sequential loss of function, feeling itself die, its last processing resembling human panic, then settling into sadness, and it too succumbed.

A piece of debris mostly intact at the bottom of the sea, 3,700 meters below the icy surface, was a jewelled dagger, the scarred blade still bearing the barely legible inscription: general MOHAMMED AL-SIHOUD, KHALIB AND SWORD OF ISLAM.

There was nothing else left of him. Or of any of the other crew members.

The Hiroshima missile airframe, just clearing the tube door when the Vortex missile exploded, was blown into three pieces by the blast and shock wave of the fiery detonation. It drifted to the bottom, the Scorpion warhead mostly intact. The warhead mechanics, the ethylene gas bottle and the plutonium dispersion matrix, imploded from the pressure at a depth of some 2,000 meters, scattering the plutonium dust over the bottom, making the debris field of what had been the Combined Naval Force vessel Hegira a radioactive dustbin.

Chapter 35 Saturday, 4 January

FORT MEADE, MARYLAND, HEADQUARTERS, NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY BUILDING 427

SECURE COMMUNICATIONS ROOM