Voyage of the Devilfish

It was then that their Magnum turned back to the east, executing its default turn-back, now approaching them. The officers did not hear or detect the Magnum as it turned around. Because at that same moment, the Kaliningrad drove into the search-cone of an American torpedo. The Hullcrusher torpedo, circling five miles from the firing ship, the Devilfish, “heard” a sound, a loud one, bearing 130, a submerged submarine sound. The unit searched the program codes for instructions. The first line instructed the torpedo to turn toward the sound and wiggle slightly; the unit obediently undulated its rudder and wiggled. The sound changed position from right to left, had a valid left-to-right tag reversal — signifying the target was dead ahead. The second program line told the weapon to put a signal into its guidance wire, telling the mother ship that it had a detect on the enemy. The third line told it to speed up to 50 knots. The propulsor wound up, and the weapon surged forward. The target was just ahead. The unit executed its final arming sequence and strained to feel the magnetic hull-detection-proximity sensor shift from DISTANT to CLOSE. Not long now. Not much longer, and its mission would be fulfilled. Just ahead, the target was coming closer, but then the target zoomed by so fast that it disappeared. The torpedo put its rudder over hard and turned right, the g forces pushing the fuel in the fuel cell to the port side, almost starving the fuel pump. But then, up ahead, the torpedo received the rapidly retreating sound of the target’s propulsor. It was fast, but it was slowing. Slowing, range decreasing. Closer, catching up. Closer. Soon the target’s propulsor passed by overhead, and the torpedo was under the midsection of the hull. The torpedo “watched” its magnetic-hull-proximity sensor, which sensed iron, followed by a cascade of electrical tickles. The feel of iron was like a reward. In a rush, a compelling sequence of events overcame the weapon, all reflex. The detonators lit off in its belly, a tingling flash. The detonators caused the 1500 pounds of high explosives to go up in one final, colossal fireball. The torpedo exploded, vaporizing into fifty thousand fragments, and its awareness stopped, ending in a fulfilled blackness. The explosion was focused in the exact direction of the maximum magnetic flux of the hull-sensor, putting 90 percent of the explosive force toward the enemy hull. Short of a nuclear weapon, it was the best, perhaps the only way to kill a doublehulled submarine. The force of the torpedo’s blast melted through the outer steel hull of the fifth compartment of the OMEGA, exactly amidships, vaporizing a hole fourteen feet in diameter. The annular tank space was the location of the external battery canisters, and the blast, though somewhat attenuated by the energy expended in breaking through the outer hull, blew the battery canisters into flat plates and scattered the remainder to the bottom of the sea. The force of the blast was lessened by the canisters absorbing the energy of the expanding hot gases. The burst next sought out the titanium inner hull, initially finding the external heavy frames bent into hoops, with the sheet titanium stretching between each frame. Four frames were forced inward, breaking them apart. The titanium skin welded onto the hoop-shaped frames was blown inward, creating a gaping eight-foot-diameter oblong hole. The rest of the explosive force was, as designed, concentrated inward, ready to unleash its deadly force on the interior of the hull.

The blast shouldered aside the titanium and came rushing into the interior of the submarine, to find that it was inside a storage tank of fuel oil for the emergency diesel generator.

Since the fifth compartment was aft of and adjacent to the reactor compartment, the fourth compartment, the oil served as a liquid-shield for the sixth compartment, the turbine room. From the outside, the physical result of the Mark 50 torpedo’s explosion, the pride of COMSUBLANT and DynaCorp International Underwater Systems Division, was little more than a dead battery and a small oil spill. The story was inside.

FS KALININGRAD

The blast of the American torpedo they had stumbled into caused the deck of the control compartment to jump, though slightly.

“What was that?” Ivanov asked.

“I heard an explosion,” Chekechev said.

“What’s sonar indicate?” Novskoyy demanded.

Ivanov: “Sonar is out, so is firecontrol. The communications and navigation consoles are still up. We must have had a computer casualty in the fifth compartment. All the computers located there are dead. Without sonar and firecontrol we can’t shoot any more weapons.” Novskoyy reset the computer power-breaker. No use. The sonar and firecontrol computers were lifeless.