“It's an ingenious design,” Dubinin said.
“It should be. The Americans spent ten years perfecting it for their missile submarines, then decided not to use it. The design team was crushed.”
The Captain grunted. The new American reactor designs were able to use natural convection-circulation. One more technical advantage. They were so damnably clever. As both men waited, the reactor was powering up. Control rods were being withdrawn, and free neutrons from the fuel elements were beginning to interact, starting a controlled nuclear chain-reaction. At the control panel behind the captain and the Admiral, technicians called off temperature readings in degrees Kelvin, which started at absolute zero and used Celsius measurements.
“Any time now…,” the Master Shipwright breathed.
“You've never seen it in operation?” Dubinin asked.
“No.”
Marvelous, the captain thought, looking up at the sky. What a horrible thing to see from inside a submarine. “What was that?”
“The pump just kicked in.”
“You're joking.” He looked at the massive, multi-barrel assembly. He couldn't — Dubinin walked over to the instrument panel and—
Dubinin laughed out loud.
“It works, Captain,” the chief engineer said.
“Keep running up the power,” Dubinin said.
“Ten percent now, and rising.”
Take it all the way to one-ten."
“Captain…”
“I know, we never go over a hundred.” The reactor was rated for fifty thousand horsepower, but like most such machines, the maximum power rating was conservative. It had been run at nearly fifty-eight thousand — once, on builder's trials, resulting in minor damage to the steam generator's internal plumbing — and the maximum useful power was fifty-four-point-nine-six. Dubinin had only done that once, soon after taking command. It was something a ship's commander did, just as a fighter pilot must find out at least one time how fast he can make his aircraft lance through the air.
“Very well,” the engineer agreed.
“Keep a close eye on things, Ivan Stepanovich. If you see any problems, shut down at once.” Dubinin patted him on the shoulder and walked back to the front of the compartment, hoping the welders had done their jobs properly. He shrugged at the thought. The welds had all been X-rayed for possible faults. You couldn't worry about everything, and he had a fine chief engineer to keep an eye on things.
“Twenty percent power.”
The Master Shipwright looked around. The pump had also been mounted on its own small raft structure, essentially a table with spring-loaded legs. They largely prevented transmission of whatever noise the pump generated into the hull, and from there into the water. That, he thought, had been poorly designed. Well, there were always things to be done better. Building ships was one of the last true engineering art forms.
“Twenty-five.”
“I can hear something now,” Dubinin said.
“Speed equivalent?”
“With normal hotel load”—that meant the power required to operate various ship's systems ranging from air conditioning to reading lights—“ten knots.” The Akula class required a great deal of electric power for her internal systems. That was due mainly to the primitive air-conditioning systems, which alone ate up ten percent of reactor output. “We need seventeen percent power for hotel loadings before we start turning the screw. Western systems are much more efficient.”
The Master Shipwright nodded grumpily. “They have a vast industry concerned with environmental engineering. We do not have the infrastructure to do the proper research yet.”
They have a much hotter climate. I was in Washington once, in July. Hell could scarcely be worse."
“That bad?”
“The embassy chap who took me around said it was once a malarial swamp. They've even had Yellow Fever epidemics there. Miserable climate.”
“I didn't know that.”
“Thirty percent,” the engineer called.
“When were you there?” the Admiral asked.
“Over ten years ago, for the Incidents at Sea negotiations. My first and last diplomatic adventure. Some headquarters fool thought they needed a submariner. I was drafted out of Frunze for it. Total waste of time,” Dubinin added.
“How was it?”
“Dull. The American submarine types are arrogant. Not very friendly back then.” Dubinin paused “No, that's not fair. The political climate was very different.The hospitality was cordial, but reserved. They took us to a baseball game.”
“And?” the Admiral asked.
The captain smiled “The food and beer were enjoyable. The game was incomprehensible, and their explanations just made things worse.”
“Forty percent.”
“Twelve knots,” Dubinin said. “The noise is picking up… ”
“But?”
“But it's a fraction of what the old pump put out. My men have to wear ear protection in here. At full speed the noise is terrible.”
“We'll see. Did you learn anything interesting in Washington?”
Another grunt. “Not to walk the streets alone. I went out for a stroll and saw some poor woman attacked by a street hooligan, and, you know, that was only a few blocks from the White House!”
“Really?”
“The young crook tried to run right past me with her purse. Like something from a film. It was quite amazing.”
“Tried to?”
“Did I ever tell you I was a good football player? I tackled him, a little too enthusiastically. Broke his kneecap, as a matter of fact.” Dubinin smiled, remembering the injury he'd inflicted on the worthless bastard. Concrete sidewalks were so much harder than a grassy football pitch…
“Fifty percent.”
“Then what happened?”
The embassy people went mad about it. The ambassador screamed a lot. Thought they'd send me right home. But the local police talked about giving me a medal. It was hushed up, and I was never asked to be a diplomat again.“ Dubinin laughed out loud. ”I won. Eighteen knots."
“Why did you interfere?”
“I was young and foolish,” Dubinin explained. “Never occurred to me that it might all be some CIA trick — that's what the ambassador was worried about. It wasn't, just a young criminal and a frail black woman. His kneecap shattered quite badly. I wonder how well he runs now…? And if he really were CIA, that's one less spy we have to worry about.”
“Sixty percent power, still very steady,” the engineer called. “No pressure fluctuations at all.”
“Twenty-three knots. The next forty percent power doesn't do very much for us… and the flow noise off the hull starts building up at this point. Run it up smartly, Vanya!”
“Aye, Captain!”
“What's the fastest you've ever had him?”
“Thirty-two at max-rated power. Thirty-three on overload.”
“There's talk about a new hull paint… ”
“The stuff the English invented? Intelligence says it adds more than a knot to the American hunter submarines.”
“That's right,” the Admiral confirmed. “I hear we have the formula, but actually making it is very difficult, and applying it properly is even more so.”
“Anything over twenty-five and you run the risk of stripping the anechoic tiles off the hull. Had that happen once when I was Starpom on the Sverdlovskiy Komsomolets… ” Dubinin shook his head. “Like being inside a drum, the way those damned rubber slabs pounded the hull.”