Uncooled, that power would soon melt the reactor, possibly find its way out the bottom of the pressure vessel and then eat through the hull itself.
The ship’s designers had planned for such an emergency; the emergency cooling system, XC as it was abbreviated, was a brilliant set of pipes, valves and a seawater tank that could cool the core using the trick that hot water rises and cold sinks — natural circulation. No moving parts. Had it been lined up, Schramford would have had no worries, but it had been locked out in its configuration for at-sea operation, the procedure designed to prevent an inadvertent XC initiation when at power, since an unintended cold-water injection into a critical reactor could cause a core runaway.
But now, with no flow and no XC, the reactor vessel would be stewing, its temperature rising, certainly boiling the coolant. Once the water was driven from the core and replaced with steam, the fuel would melt and the ship would die.
Schramford’s mind, groggy and full of pain, filled with three words — Three Mile Island.
Schramford slowly climbed to his feet and searched the darkened space for an emergency air-breathing mask, finally retrieving one from an overhead cubbyhole. He strapped it on, the black rubber straps a spider across his face until his chubby features poked into the Plexiglas face mask. He reached up to plug in the hose, clipped the regulator to his belt and breathed in. Almost immediately his head cleared, and his first thought was that this was a bad sign. The atmosphere was contaminated, the scrubbers and burners and oxygen bleed gone since they had hit bottom. It could be worse … the battery might be dumping toxic clouds of chlorine gas into the ship or one of the weapons might be leaking fuel. A Javelin cruise missile rocket motor burning would fill the boat with hydrogen cyanide, in which case Schramford and the crew would already be dead.
As engineer, Schramford was responsible for acting in this miserable situation. He heard in the background the damage-control code he had drummed into his junior officers and chiefs since his first day aboard: Save the ship, save the plant, then save the men … Surrounded by men struggling to breathe the ship’s poor air, he knew his duty was to the ship first. He pulled a battle lantern from the bulkhead, disconnected his mask hose and hurried forward to the ladder and down one level, juggling the lantern in one hand while descending and trying not to get tangled in his air hose. A large man, he had little enough wind as it was without dashing down a ladder holding his breath. He plugged in at a middle level manifold and puffed for a few seconds, then unplugged and ran into the portside hatch to the reactor-compartment tunnel, unlatching the heavy door as he went and plugging in his hose as soon as he arrived.
There in the tunnel was the primary-valve station for the valve-op system and several XC valves. Schramford opened a toolbox and took out a large wrench and tugged off the large antileakage cover from a XC-9, then put a special ratchet wrench on the valve stem and pulled on it with all his strength until the valve finally moved. He kept cranking until the valve opened completely, dumping the pressure off the top of another valve deep in the radioactive reactor compartment. When that valve came open the hot-leg water could flow up to the seawater exchanger and the cold leg could flow down. Schramford found the seawater valves to the tank, opened all four and sagged against the bulkhead to regain his strength. Through the thick shielded bulkhead he could hear the forceful flowing noises in the XC piping, and then the boiling of seawater in the heat-exchanger tank as the core gave up its heat. The core protected, Schramford could now equip his crew with air masks, then head forward to see to the captain. Once the ship’s force were outfitted in masks he could restart the reactor and the skipper, he hoped, could get them the hell out of there.
The sun dipped beneath the line of maintenance buildings and warehouses lining the dock. The drydock floodlights had been lit for a half-hour, only now noticed as the daylight faded. Captain Michael Pacino stood at the lip of the dock leaning on the rusted handrails and looked down on his ship. The dock was finally empty of equipment other than a few manlifts, the Seawolf now mostly intact and looking like an ungainly whale in a huge dry bathtub. The blue light of welders’ arcs flashed in his eyes on the ship’s starboard flank, the flickering reflected against the sheer side of the dock as the six men welded along the seam of the Vortex-missile hull cut. The work replacing the curving piece of steel plating to cover what was earlier the gaping hole of the hull cut was only in its first hour; the HY-100 steel of the hull was almost two inches thick. Even with the half dozen men welding, it would be dawn on the next day, Monday, before the weld would be completed, and another several hours before the X-rays were taken and evaluated.
The X-rays of the weld would probably show several imperfections that would call for grinding out and rewelding.
The repairs could take till midafternoon Monday. The confirmation X-rays would take them to Monday night, and only then would the men be out of the dock. And only then could the ship be painted.
The ship looked almost foolish in the dock with the bright green paint of the inorganic zinc primer coat turning the sub into a cartoon character. There were always the inevitable chants of the crew about “we all live in a green submarine” until the yard got its paint gear loaded in the dock and could paint on the intermediate and final coats. The ship would gleam a menacing black on the upper surface, a dull red anti-barnacle coating on the bottom, the line between black and red ruler-sharp as if detailed out by the best body shop in town. Without paint, the ship would be so covered with rust that seawater valves and torpedo-tube doors would start to hang up. The salty seawater would literally begin eating the hull. The paint job would take another full day, delaying Seawolf until Wednesday morning.
There was just not enough time. Pacino needed to be underway sooner. He pulled a walkie-talkie radio from his belt and called the ship. The duty officer came up almost immediately. Pacino ordered him to call for the shipyard commander to come to the dock. Maybe there was still a way, Pacino thought.
The welding continued, the blue flickering light of it forming dancing spots in Pacino’s vision. The sun had vanished by the time Emmitt Stevens’s shipyard pickup truck drove up and he got out, his hollow face set.
“Captain,” Stevens said. “Ship supe says we’ll be painting by this time tomorrow. We should be able to flood the dock Wednesday.”
“No.”
“Look, Patch, I know you want out, but”
“Emmitt, the weld will be done by dawn. As the last bead is in place I want the dock flood valves opened. Seawolf will be at sea by sunrise.”
“You can’t do that! What about X-rays and repairs?”
“How good are the welders?”
“Come on. Patch, that’s HY-100. It doesn’t weld like mild steel. Even with the best welders on the coast we’ll have two dozen flaws, that’s if we’re lucky. The repairs will take half a day, the retests another half day and the paint job most of Wednesday”
“Skip the X-rays and the repairs. There won’t be any paint job. We’ll go to sea green.”
“Mike, listen to me. You’re making a big mistake. I can’t guarantee a weld like that without tests. You could spring a leak the first time at test depth — a bad one — and we’d never hear from you again. And that’s not all — the weld could be fine for the first ten excursions to test depth, but the eleventh could be fatal. Or it could be fine in warm water, but diving into colder temperatures could make a flaw brittle-fracture. It could go with no warning, no chance to emergency blow. You’re risking your neck, your crew’s necks.”