Polaris (10 page)

He awoke with a start. A piece of paper, folded in half, had been placed on his chest while he slept. He opened it.

MEET ME IN SHAFT ALLEY—0600

He looked at his watch: he had ten minutes. He didn't know whom the message was from, or what it meant, but the rendezvous might provide more answers. He took a final glance at the photo of his wife, and slid out of bed. He tried not to walk in blood as he exited, but there was too much to avoid.

 

WELCOME ABOARD THE USS
POLARIS

A Legacy of Freedom

THE NUCLEAR PROPULSION PLANT

The propulsion plant of a nuclear-powered ship is based upon the use of a nuclear reactor to provide heat. The heat comes from the fissioning of nuclear fuel contained within the reactor. Since the fissioning process also produces radiation, shields are placed around the reactor so that the crew is protected.

The nuclear-propulsion plant uses a pressurized water reactor design that has two basic systems: the primary system and the secondary system. The primary system circulates ordinary water and consists of the reactor, piping loops, pumps, and steam generators. The heat produced in the reactor is transferred to the water under high pressure so it does not boil. This water is pumped through the steam generators and back into the reactor for reheating.

In the steam generators, the heat from the water in the primary system is transferred to the water in the secondary system to create steam. The secondary system is isolated from the primary system so that the water in the two systems does not intermix.

In the secondary system, steam flows from the steam generators to drive the turbine generators, which supply electricity to the ship and to the main propulsion turbines, which in turn drive the propeller through a reduction gear. After passing through the turbines, the steam is condensed into water, which is fed back to the steam generators by the feed pumps. Thus, both the primary and secondary systems are closed systems where water is recirculated and reused.

There is no step in the generation of this power that requires the presence of air or oxygen. This allows the ship to operate completely independent of the earth's atmosphere for extended periods of time.

 

CHAPTER TEN

Pete walked aft, guided by that interior autopilot that seemed to know the layout of
Polaris
. Darkness and silence were everywhere.

He passed through a watertight door into the missile compartment once again and found himself wandering in a forest of missile tubes, two rows of eighteen missiles each. Numbers were etched on each tube, and he saw the numbers decreasing as he continued aft: even numbers to port, odd numbers to starboard.

The noise level increased as he walked, which he found somewhat comforting, a sign of life in the otherwise ghostly ship. He arrived at the watertight hatch to the engine room, and opened it.

He stepped into a warm, white tunnel that was, he knew, a heavily shielded passage through the reactor compartment. Once on the other side, he was in the engine room, surrounded by the machinery that made the voyage of the
Polaris
possible. He felt the power of the place, the rumble of the deck plates starting a vibration that coursed through his whole body. He was in the middle of a symphony of machinery, an orchestra of turbines, valves, and pumps that had been exquisitely engineered to make a ship move and a crew survive:
“the lights burning and the screw turning,”
as Moody had said. It thrilled him.

He remembered some of the specifics, at a rudimentary level. He sensed that while he was comfortable with machinery in general—Hana had called him an engineer—he had never been an expert on the inner workings of the submarine. He walked past the giant evaporator, the machine that turned salt water into pure water that both they and their thirsty propulsion plant could drink, water that was now a thousand times more pure than anything available on the surface. But like the oxygen generators, this life-giving machine wasn't running. Just as with their oxygen, they were drawing their water from their reserves. Reserve feed tank number one, Pete saw, was empty. Reserve feed tank number two was down to 15 percent. As he stared at the indicator and breathed in the engine room's humid air, it dropped to 14 percent. The ship was slowly suffocating, and also dying of thirst.

He continued into the turbine room, where steam turned the giant machines that made their electricity. Their twins turned the main engines, which in turn made the screw move, and powered them through the water. He was close to his destination now.

Down a ladder, where it got darker, quieter, and cooler, away from the throbbing power of the turbines, he saw where the main engines connected to a giant set of gears, which in turn connected to the screw. Suddenly, it was there, the enormous shaft that penetrated the back of the submarine. It turned slowly, steadily, and silently, the most primal expression of the engine room's immense power. He was as far as he could go from his watchers in control. He realized that's why this location had been selected.

No one was there.

He looked around, increasingly apprehensive. He felt the gun in his pocket and felt some comfort in that. He looked at his watch: 0610. He wondered how long he should wait around.

While it was quieter in shaft alley than it was near the turbines, it still took Pete a while to recognize the electric crackling that was periodically sounding near his head. It was regular and rhythmic, as if a signal. It was also a contrast to the mechanical noises of the engine room. He followed the noise to an alcove along the bulkhead, and reached in. He pulled out a small handheld radio.

A red light was blinking on it. He pushed the button and spoke. “Hello?”

“Pete! Jesus! Where have you been?” It was a female voice, unfamiliar to him, with a slight accent he could not place. The voice was electronically scrambled and delayed in reaching him. He had an inkling that it was being sent from outside the boat.

“Who is this?” he said.

“Carlson,” she said. “Commander Jennifer Carlson.”

“Where are you?”

Even through the electronic noise of the radio, he could make out an exasperated sigh.

“I'm about two miles directly behind you,” she said.

Pete almost dropped the radio as he realized what she meant. She was communicating with him from the shadow submarine.

“Report,” said the radio.

“Who are you?”

There was a pause. “What do you mean?”

“Are you with the Alliance? Or are you the enemy?”

“We're not your enemy,” she said. “Now, make your report. What's going on in there?”

“I'm not telling you anything,” he said angrily.

“What's wrong with you?” she said. “We've only got about five minutes on this link, and you need to tell me what's going on. We heard the noise, heard the torpedo tube cycling a few hours ago. We almost fired at you then until we realized there wasn't a weapon in the water. Who is in control of the ship?”

“I am an officer on an Alliance submarine,” said Pete, his face getting hot. “I'm not telling you a thing. I
will
help them blow you out of the water.”

“Pete, I don't know what's gotten into you. But you need to get your head on straight. We're running out of time. You were supposed to disable the boat completely after the degaussing. We kept waiting for your signal, but then you disappeared.”

“Why would I help you?” said Pete.

“Why?” She was getting angry. “Because it's your sworn duty. Because it's the plan we worked on together for months.”

“Bullshit…”

“Because of Pamela,” she said, stopping him cold. “To avenge Pamela.”

“Avenge her?” he said. “I thought she died in the epidemic.…”

“Bullshit,” said Carlson. “The disease killed her because the Alliance won't release the cure. They're saving it for military purposes, sacrificing millions of lives in the process, including your wife's.”

“I don't…”

“It's bad out there,” she said. Despite the distortion of the radio, Pete could hear real fear in her voice. “Every day we get new reports of whole cities that are quarantined. Whole boats have been wiped out after one person gets infected—no one has been off my boat in over a year. If one person gets sick—”

The radio made a beeping sound, and the red light began to blink rapidly.

“We're almost out of time. Do your duty, Pete. Do what you know is right. We'll be waiting for you, we'll know when you've disabled
Polaris
. But don't wait much longer or it will be too late. We can, and will, proceed without you.”

The radio clicked off, and the light turned dim. Pete glanced around, and then placed the radio back in the alcove where he'd found it.

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

McCallister awoke from a quick, shallow sleep, never deep enough to escape his small prison even in a dream.

He looked over the small egg-shaped cell in which he found himself, and once again saw no possibility of escape. Ironic, inside a system that had been expressly designed to give the crew a chance to escape a doomed submarine.

The escape trunk consisted of three hatches. One below his feet, which was now covered by a steel grate and represented his only window into the ship he once commanded. The second was directly over his head, and was designed to mate up with a rescue vehicle. The third was at his knees, and represented the “swim out” hatch that would be used to escape the submarine with no rescue vehicle present. For either of the escape hatches to work, the trunk had to be flooded with seawater, until the pressure inside the cylinder was equal to the surrounding sea pressure. At that point, the outer hatches could swing open easily and allow egress. That's why the trunk made such an ideal prison—if it could withstand thousands of pounds of sea pressure, it could withstand the worst that a recalcitrant prisoner could throw at it.

Even with sea pressure equalized, escape from a crippled submarine was fraught. In a locker below the trunk, in the same locker that held the wrench that had bolted him in, were exposure suits and hoods that filled with air and helped pull submariners to the top. As they ascended, the air in their lungs would expand with the decrease in pressure, requiring that they exhale forcefully the entire way. Generations of submariners had learned to shout
HO! HO! HO!
on the way up. In an earlier era, the skyline of every submarine base was dominated by a cylindrical dive tower in which submarine crews practiced the procedure to escape a submarine, which was usually the capstone of training, a rite of passage, the ultimate skill of a submariner. Doctrine stated that the procedure could work at depths up to six hundred feet. In the nuclear age, new submariners were often shocked to learn that they nearly always operated in water much, much deeper than that.

McCallister stared at the flood valve and contemplated opening it. Water would pour into the trunk, then into the ship through the grate at his feet. He'd be discovered immediately, of course, the roar of flooding at this depth would sound like a freight train. And sinking or crippling the ship wasn't his goal anyway. He'd been accused of being a saboteur; he wasn't about to become one. He assumed that's why Frank had left the valve unlocked when he put him in there: he knew it wouldn't do McCallister much good to open it up. Or, more likely, he just didn't understand the ship well enough to worry about it. When McCallister had qualified on the
Alabama,
all those years ago, he had to draw every system on the ship from memory, know the location of every valve, breaker, and fire hose. Every man with dolphins on his chest, from the captain down to the cooks in the galley, was an expert on his boat. Gradually, as the technology on submarines became more complex, they required less and less of that, block diagrams and black boxes becoming acceptable substitutes for real physical knowledge. The introduction of nuclear missiles sealed it. The goal was to launch missiles, not to repair them. If a part was broken, swap it out. No one considered it possible, or desirable, for a sailor to know how to build or repair a nuclear weapon.

His first boat had a crew of 125 men. The Navy, understandably, had staffed submarines like ships, making them self-sufficient cities that could make their own air, water, and repairs to every system, keeping them at sea for as long as the food and spare parts held out. It was the dream of nuclear power: a “true” submarine that never needed to rise to the surface to take a breath. Steadily, however, automation took over, and crews got smaller. The Navy, in its wisdom, made them more like the crew of an airplane now than the crew of a battleship, a few specially trained men and women riding on a mass of high-priced technology. The
Polaris
required a crew of thirty men in the initial design phase, a crew that seemed revolutionarily small at the time for the United States, although the Soviets had for decades been sending out similarly sized crews in their small, rickety submarines. They pared this down to eighteen, which was what he first went to sea with. With attrition, however, and the losses the Alliance was taking, the number kept getting smaller and smaller. There was a joke in the fleet, before things got so serious, that the Navy was using the
Polaris
as part of an experiment to see how small a submarine crew could get before things fell apart. They seemed to have found the limit.

He sighed and looked at the green bucket sitting on the small bench across from him; Frank had thrown it in there with him when he locked him up, it was his toilet. He'd actually watched the asshole check it off the procedure that he held in his hands and studied with furrowed brow. There was a thin layer of urine in the bottom, which did nothing to improve the smell in the escape trunk. But there was more, too. McCallister had been on submarines a long time, long enough to recognize when the air was going bad. Almost all the things that could poison a sub's atmosphere were odorless and tasteless: hydrogen from the battery, carbon monoxide from combustion, carbon dioxide from their own lungs. But while odorless, the combination of those things, along with the depletion of oxygen, created a palpable staleness that McCallister was familiar with, a burning in the throat, a headache right behind the eyes, an overpowering sense of fatigue.