In the drydock floodlights Pacino’s eyes focused on a sight far from the dock below.
“Wrap the welds and flood the dock. My crew will be ready to go by 5:00 a.m.”
Stevens sighed. “You got it, Patch. Jesus, though, good luck.”
Pacino didn’t answer.
Commodore Sharef didn’t need to see the updated displays to know that the Hegira was about to take a torpedo hit. The torpedo that had been ahead of them to the west had started out too close. Its intercept speed, combined with the ship’s initial closing velocity, had caught them. The computer initially predicted impact at four point five minutes after initial detection. The update was tracking.
Sharef turned away from the displays and stepped to the forward bulkhead of the room to where Rakish Ahmed and Sihoud were standing. Ahmed had borrowed a crewman’s jumpsuit. Sihoud had reclaimed the silk shesh he had been wearing when they had picked him up, the rip in the garment’s hem now sewn up. Sharef idly wondered who had done the sewing. Hard to imagine the Khalib himself doing a seamstress’s job. Sihoud’s dagger gleamed on his belt. In spite of the general’s inspiring size and presence, Sharef felt it was a charade. His instincts told him the general was frightened. Not that fear was dishonorable, because if there was a time to feel it, this was it. Had he not been nearly killed on the Sahand, it might have been different, but he had seen the deaths the enemy missiles had brought, and the idea that the same could happen to these men now filled him with a resolve that precluded fear.
“General. Colonel. In less than a minute the first torpedo will hit us. We have done everything possible to avoid it, but with three weapons coming in from all around we were not likely to evade them all. I wanted you to be prepared for the impact.”
“Is there nothing else you can do. Commodore?” Sihoud asked.
“There is one option, to surface and count on the torpedoes having a ceiling setting to avoid surface-ship traffic, but that will slow us down and the weapons will easily catch up. Our own Nagasaki torpedoes were designed to find a surfacing sub that much easier from the clouds of bubbles put out by the surfacing systems. It is not a good gamble, General. We have a better chance of the attacking torpedoes running out of fuel than we do of evading by surfacing. Other than that, all we can do is run.”
“You said less than a minute,” Ahmed said. “How long now?”
“Twenty seconds,” Tawkidi said.
The SCM system began groaning out false sonar signals even before the incoming sonars could be heard through the hull. Sharef moved to Lieutenant Ishak’s master console. He dropped to one knee, hearing the seconds ticking off in his mind, but tried to keep his voice level.
“Lieutenant, have you told the Second Captain our intended route to the North Atlantic?”
The ship’s navigation plan, worked out with the officers when the mission was first explained, had them sailing a great circle route toward the range circle around Washington, D.C. The plan had called for them to intercept that 2,900-kilometer circle centered on the American capital at a glancing angle to the northeast, the better to have a longer time enroute to assemble and install the Scorpion warheads in the Hiroshima missile airframes. That route would also keep their path heading more toward Greenland than the east coast of America, in case they were tracked or detected sporadically during the trip — making a beeline for Washington would alert the Western Coalition if they were tracked, and the West would expend all possible efforts to sink them. Sharef was convinced that the West had not yet awakened to the situation, that what they faced now were half-measures intended to find Sihoud. If the Americans had the slightest idea that the ship carried a doomsday weapon pointed at their capital, the entire combined navies of the West would hunt him down like a dog.
“Sir, the great circle path toward Greenland has been inserted into the Second Captain since the briefing, but that will not help us if the missiles are not assembled.”
Sharef nodded. The Second Captain was perfectly capable of driving the ship to within missile range of the target and launching the weapons without help from the crew, as long as the system was properly programmed. But without fully assembled and complete missiles, the Second Captain would drive them to their destination but would be useless in hitting the target. It was essential that the weapons be assembled as soon as possible. After the missiles were ready, the mission would practically be accomplished, because at that point the mission no longer needed the crew, just an intact ship and healthy Second Captain—
It was then that the American torpedo caught up with them.
The Mark 50 torpedo found the pressure hull of the target, notwithstanding the odd sonar pulses coming from its stern, the noises sounding something like echoes but not at the correct angle or frequency. The torpedo had closed the target from an angle since it began homing, and just as the onboard computer had thought, the target submarine had ended up at precisely this point in the sea at the time of interception. The iron proximity sensors set into the Mark 50’s flanks tingled as the hull of the target grew closer, until finally the Mark 50 drove directly under the giant hull of the target, the huge diameter of the hull seeming to be flat at the bottom. The shaped charge of the torpedo automatically was adjusted to blow maximum force in the direction of the hull. Within milliseconds of detecting the hull the high explosive blew.
The torpedo underwent a metamorphosis from solid object to pure-energy fireball.
The fireball erupted upward and ruptured the steel outer hull of the target, the pressure wave going further and blasting apart the exterior reinforcing hoop frames and steel plates welded onto the framing. The blast’s intrusion into the inner hull blew the interior of the compartment to wreckage and pressurized the compartment to a level approaching its design basis, the force threatening to rip a hole in the other side of the cylinder or tear the compartment from the neighboring one. But as fast as the pressure wave came, it was spent, the energy that had breached both the hulls and pulverized the interior of the compartment now expended and attenuated. The pressure level in the compartment fell, the gas by-products of the explosion leaving through the five-meter-wide hole in the inner hull, the gases replaced by the cold seawater that flooded the space except for a small gas bubble trapped in the upper cylinder of the compartment.
Thirty seconds after impact, the damage of the blast was complete.
The submarine outer hull was left with a twenty-meter-wide hole that extended into a hoop-wise rip around almost the entire circumference of the ship. The inner hull of the aftmost compartment was ruptured, the interior equipment— the diesel generator and the battery — blown to pieces. The outer hull’s aft conformal sonar array was obliterated. The interior high-voltage cables for the propulsion AC motor were severely damaged, and the SCM sonar-fooling ventriloquist electronics and sonar array were no more. However, the other inner-hull compartments were undamaged, the stern control X-planes remained intact and functional, and except for the structural rip in the outer hull, the ship was otherwise unharmed. Propulsion had been lost from the shock of the blast, and the ship’s electrical systems were down without the DC battery, but the computer systems of the Second Captain survived, their circuits still complete, their internal power systems still supplying the current for continuing electronic consciousness.