He was pretty disenchanted with Washington.
Unruh thought about calling Hampstead, but figured the man could calculate flight times on his own and would know that the Sea Lion was charging into the fray.
Charging.
It seemed as if everything moved in slow motion. A state-of-the-art rocket that moved at twenty-five times the speed of sound had triggered the movement of ships that raced along at thirty miles per hour.
He moved to the center of the room and examined the electronic display. The U. S. military ships had been identified with blue blips. The U.S. civilian ship of importance, the Orion, was painted yellow. Someone from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had suggested the color for some reason.
The Japanese ship was coded in green, and the CIS ships were, naturally, red. The projected course of the Winter Storm — the submarine identified by the sonar of the SLBN submarine Michigan — and her current expected position suggested that she would be the first major search vessel to reach the target zone.
Not that there were not other vessels already in the area. A confusion of violet dots was spread over fifty square miles of simulated ocean. Overflights by Navy reconnaissance aircraft had picked out fishing trawlers, freighters, a dozen pleasure craft, sampans, junks and maybe even a canoe. Communications around the world being what they were, almost instantaneous, the word had quickly spread to marine craft, and the gawkers and curiosity seekers had responded. They had converged on the area from Midway, from planned Pacific transit routes, and probably from clandestine smuggling lanes. The Navy frigate Bronstein and the patrol boat Antelope were cruising in the region, but would not make much of a difference, other than advertising an American presence.
The President had vetoed a suggestion to move in some big U.S. cruisers and an aircraft carrier. He did not want the Russians thinking that he was attempting to meet the Kirov and the Kynda with massive firepower. This was not to be a confrontation.
As far as the Navy could determine, not one of the civilian vessels would be helpful in a search of the sea bottom. More than likely, they would impede the search. Adm. Ben Delecourt did not see any course of action for clearing them out of the region short of a few shots across a few bows, and that would not be good public relations for the Navy.
For the life of him, Unruh could not figure out what they were doing there. What was the attraction of impending catastrophe?
He did not want to be there.
He did not want to be here, either.
He thought he would like to be in Vienna.
Orville ʻBullʼ Kontas, captain of the Mighty Moose, had lost track of the times he had circumnavigated the world in one classification of vessel or another. He was not really certain how old he was, either. He had been born in Shanghai of a Greek father and a Chinese mother and, somewhere along the way, had purchased a birth certificate and passport for himself, but the data used at the time had been best guesses.
He was at least seventy years old, Brande thought. The lines on his weathered face had deepened into canyons. The rusty-edged white hair was only a fringe around his bald pate, taking a hop over ears that were big and blistered and shaped like conch shells.
He was strong, undeterred by any weather, and loyal to whichever master he served at the time. He had been with MVU almost since the start, seven years before.
Kontas was at the helm of the Moose when North Island appeared off the port bow. Brande was in the pilot house with him, finishing a plate of refried beans, egg rolls zapped in a microwave oven, a turkey leg and green beans. There was pink lemonade for washing it all down.
Either Kontas had no control over the seaman who also doubled as cook or it was just time to clean out the refrigerator. Or perhaps there was a subtle message being sent, that the operating budgets of the three workboats needed a boost.
Brande would pass the unstated message to Rae Thomas, President and CEO of Marine Visions.
He did, in fact, enjoy that thought. He was not going to miss dealing with some of the more mundane details.
Kontas, not normally an outgoing personality, spoke for perhaps the fourth time in five hours. “Is it gonna be as bad as they say on the radio, Chief?”
Brande got up from his chair, put the empty plate on it, and went to stand beside the captain. The tugboat rose and fell with the heavy swells running.
“I don’t know how it might turn out, Bull. If it does reach meltdown, I guess it could be bad.”
“Won’t happen all at once, will it?”
“No. That is, there would be an explosion, probably not even noticed at the surface, but then everything would take place slowly after that.”
“I don’t understand this atomic shit,” Bull Kontas said.
“I never much wanted to understand it myself,” Brande told him. “The Navy gave me a cram course, but I suspect I missed most of the relevant detail.”
“What’d they tell you?” Kontas eased the helm slightly to port. North Island moved to the right, then centered itself directly over the bow.
“The commander who briefed us said, ‘Picture this: youʼve got two pit bulls who live in neighboring backyards, and they don’t like each other. Every time they see each other, they start growling and snarling and barking, straining to get at each other. Their tempers are rising, generating a lot of heat. So you put a chain link fence between them, maybe they bark a little less. Make it a picket fence, so they can’t see each other clearly, they bark a little less. Make it a solid fence, so they can’t see each other at all, and they quit barking and cool down.’”
“What the fuck’s two dogs got to do with it?”
“A nuclear reactor works the same way, Bull. In the core of a reactor is a fissionable fuel, normally Uranium-235, a nonfissionable moderator, and control structures. One fission reaction produces one more fission in a chain reaction. A steady output of energy in the form of heat is released.” Each uranium atom kicked out 2.5 neutrons, on average, during fission, and one went on to create another reaction. Brande remembered that from some physics class he had taken.
“Heat?”
“That’s right. When the atom in the fissionable material splits, a neutron is absorbed in another fissionable atom to create another fission. That produces heat, and the heat is transformed into electrical energy.” Twenty-three million megawatt hours of heat energy for each kilogram of U-235, Brande had been told.
“And this whole thing don’t go hog-goddamned-wild?” Kontas asked.
“For two reasons. One is the moderator. To slow down the reaction, the core contains a moderator. In the United States, water is generally used. In an accident situation, such as occurred at Three Mile Island, the water tends to serve as a coolant and helps to restore stability. In Russia, Bull, the core cylinders are made of blocks of graphite which is used as the moderator. When Chernobyl Four got out of hand, the graphite moderator burned and didn’t help to cool it down.
“Beyond the moderator, water is normally used as the coolant, and it transmits the heat to the boilers or turbines that are used to generate electricity. The old boys at Los Alamos think the Russian reactor aboard the rocket uses freon as the coolant.”
Bull Kontas was not interested in moderators or coolants. “What about the goddamn dogs?”
“That’s the second reason. In the reactor core are a series of control rods. When they’re raised, the reaction begins. When they’re lowered, like that fence between the dogs, the atoms can’t see each other, and the fission process cools off. The experts tell us that, when the rocket launched, the control rods were probably most of the way down, with almost no energy output. That’s what they call subcritical. When the rods are raised enough to allow one fission reaction to produce one more fission reaction, they call it critical. When the A2e crashed, the experts think that automatic controls were probably damaged, and the control rods may have been raised. That allows the reactor to go supercritical.”