Voyage of the Devilfish

Although the gas bubble was doomed, fracturing into tiny bubbles, the shock wave from the blast lived on. It traveled at sonic speed in the ocean depths, reinforced by the ice above and the ocean bottom below into a solid wall of a pressure pulse that propagated quickly from the blast zone, reaching out to the sea around it. As the shock wave moved out it crushed hundreds of icepressure ridges, some stalactites of ice vaporizing from the energy of the shock. One slender ice stalactite, roughly the size and even the shape of the Empire State Building, except that it was upside down and submerged, disintegrated instantaneously into several thousand pieces, none larger than a few feet in diameter. The shock wave travelled on in all directions, killing the few fish and animals that inhabited the area of the arctic north. It took three seconds to reach the USS Devilfish, then drifting in the current from the north some three kilometers from the polynya’s west edge. The shock wave took slightly longer to reach the Kaliningrad, almost five seconds. The shock wave was attenuated, eroded, weakened as it travelled further from its origin. With each meter it travelled it grew weaker, its destructive forces spread over more and more area as the wave front expanded, growing weaker with the square of the radius from the detonation. The Devilfish was 5000 meters from the blast, the Kaliningrad almost 7000. It would seem both would sustain equal damage, but the extra 2000 meters meant that the shock wave force was twice as cruel to the Devilfish as it was to the Kaliningrad — though to both vessels it was more than cruel enough. Hundreds of meters beneath the icecap, and several kilometers from the original polynya and the new one formed by the detonation, both submarines were in mortal danger.

NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

NORFOLK NAVAL BASE

The two officers in the F-14 looked toward the base as the cruise missile flew on, oblivious to the tail chase of the two Mongoose missiles. The first Mongoose went wild and dived for the ground, exploding as it impacted on nearby Interstate 64. The hole in the interstate was three-lanes wide. The second Mongoose flew toward the hot exhaust of the SSN-X-27 cruise missile, as it was designed to do, but 200 yards from the target the heat sensor in the Mongoose’s nosecone failed and it lost its direction. It sailed off to the north, effectively blind and with no target, until its rocket motor ran out of fuel. It glided to earth and landed on the roof of one of Norfolk Naval Base’s several administration buildings. Its fuselage was crushed and misshapen as it lay smoldering and inert. The SSN-X-27 had escaped Nikels’ and Tollson’s attack and was now approaching the northwestern edge of the base — the surface ships and submarine piers.

ARCTIC OCEAN

BENEATH THE POLAR ICECAP

FS KALININGRAD

There was no warning when the shock wave of the nuclear explosion hit the Kaliningrad. With the sonar systems out, and the torpedo seven kilometers away, it was inaudible and unexpected. Kaliningrad had slowed to approach the polynya and had turned to the north. In doing so she had exposed her fifth compartment’s portside wound, the dp from the American torpedo that had ripped open the diesel oil shield tank. The rip came halfway up her port flank and had cut through four structural frames. The shock wave smashed into the port side of the ship, a violent, instantaneous pressure-pulse, peaking at 8500 Newtons per square meter. Had the inner and outer hulls been undamaged, the ship would have rolled as the shock wave blasted over her, perhaps damaging only more of the delicate computers. But with the rip in the fifth compartment, there was no metal on the port side to hold the ship together.