Phoenix Sub Zero

At least the ship-control panel’s stern plane control yoke was close. Kane, at that point thinking about Komsomolets, reached for the helmsman, who was still slumped against the wheel, his harness dangling toward the panel. The young man’s face was pressed up against the yoke, his nose broken, his eyes swelling shut. Kane grabbed the boy’s arm and pulled him away hard enough to tear muscle and break an arm — all those tall tales about fear-crazed mothers lifting thousand-pound tractors off their wounded children were absolutely true, Kane discovered, as the boy’s body sailed across the room from what felt like a gentle shove. With his other hand Kane grabbed the stern plane yoke and pulled it back hard enough to slam it back to the stops, his own muscles shooting sharp pains into his shoulders. He wondered if the hydraulics were still working, but the yoke had the solid feel of being connected to the hydraulic oil control manifold.

Two hundred feet aft the main hydraulic oil system accumulator, only half charged, pressurized the lines leading to the sternplane control ram. The accumulator would have. been recharged by the hydraulic oil screw pump, but the loss of power had shut it down. The result was a dangerously low pressure capacity in the system. The header came up in pressure and gallantly tried to move the massive stern planes, but the loss of pressure was too much. The emergency system, having waited years with nothing to show for it but an occasional use in a drill, filled the gap, its accumulator discharging as pressure plunged in the main system, operating a redundant ram on the other side of the rudder. With the power of the emergency system, the sternplane surface rose from full-dive to full-rise in the same amount of time, as if the entire system were completely healthy.

Kane looked at the half-dead ship-control panel, seeing the internal battery-supplied instruments displaying the stenrplane angle easing, then rising. He found the ship’s angle display, the “bubble,” and watched to see if the ship would respond in time. The angle began coming off the deck, the forward bulkhead that had been a floor a moment ago now rotating so that it again became a wall, the men falling off it onto the true deck. Kane held on to the control yoke and blinked as the display reeled off the depth: 1,150, 1,200, 1,250 feet and still diving. He had succeeded in taking the steep down-angle off the ship, but not in checking its downward momentum. The depth gauge spun off 1,300 feet, crush depth, and Kane couldn’t watch it anymore.

But it was not crush depth that claimed the Phoenix.

Thirty-five seconds after Kane first grabbed the control yoke, the ship slammed into the rocky bottom with the kinetic energy of a hundred-car freight train smashing into a cliff wall at eighty-five-miles-per.

Kane hit the ship-control panel, gashed his head open, slid to the deck and tasted blood as it spilled into his mouth.

Chapter 18 Sunday, 29 December

EASTERN ATLANTIC WEST MOUTH, STRAIT OF GIBRALTAR

“How close?” Sharef asked, leaning over Tawkidi’s seat at the sensor-control panel. The incoming airplane-launched torpedo had been following them for three minutes now.

Commander Tawkidi, combat-stations deck officer, looked up from the sensor-control section, his eyes widening in surprise, then showing triumph. His headphones had just transmitted a booming roar from the bearing to the Nagasaki torpedo and the American submarine some fifty kilometers distant to the west.

“What is it?” Sharef demanded.

“The Nagasaki torpedo just detonated!”

Sharef leaned closer. “Any indication of the American submarine?”

Tawkidi searched, putting off for a moment the monitoring of the incoming American torpedo.

“No hull breakup noises yet but there are no indications of its reactor or steam plant — wait a minute …” Tawkidi listened, his eyes shut. A second faint rumble came through the headphones. “I think the target just imploded or hit the bottom, Commodore. If he wasn’t dead before he is now.”

Sharef nodded solemnly. Sinking another submarine could never be a time of joy for him, the submarines of the enemy forces sharing more with him than any landlubber in his own nation, men who knew the deprivations of being at sea for weeks, the lack of companionship from family or friends, fighting the sea, existing in the Spartan environment of the ship, the deep-diving vessels built to accommodate the equipment, not the needs of the crew. He forced himself to remember that they were Americans, brothers of the brutal men who had blown his Sahand to the bottom of the gulf, killing so many of his shipmates — and then he felt nothing for them, neither pity nor hatred.