Phoenix Sub Zero

There were no thoughts about dying in combat or firing a missile that would kill several million people, such a thought could fill his stomach with acid. Better not to think it. Even in that shipyard entry, the ballast tank had been a horrible place, the size of it intimidating, with no platforms to stand on, only the structural framing in the space to be climbed up.

Now that the ship was submerged with the ballast tank full of rank-smelling compressed air, being in the tank was terrifying. If one of the tank vents came open, the tank would flood and kill the tank crew, although it was more likely that someone would fall from one of the tubes to the hull below or that one of the heavy loads would break a re straining chain and crush the man beneath it. Worse than the tank’s inhospitable geometry was its temperature, the air in side at zero degrees centigrade, cold enough to cause their breaths to form clouds of vapor. The alternating pattern of waiting and heavy exertion caused the men to freeze and then sweat, the next wait making the sweat a super coolant.

They all might die of exposure long before they died of falling or being crushed.

Quzwini, as he had for the last five hours, suppressed further thoughts about the lack of safety in the tank and re turned to the task at hand, the lifting of the metal patch cut from the upper half of the number-one tube. The metal of the patch had been altered with the attachment of three lifting eyes, each connected to the hooks of a high-capacity chainfall. With three lifting lugs set up high in the tank at a structural hoop of steel, the tank crew winched the heavy hatch upward. It could go only one-and-a-half meters up before it hit the bottom of tube six above. It took them an hour to lift the patch that meter and a half, the patch rising in one centimeter increments, infinitesimally slow. When the patch clunked against the bottom of tube six, the chainfalls were locked, and the heavy warhead of the Hiroshima missile readied to be withdrawn. Pulling off the nose cone was slow, agonizing work, the connecting bolts tight from the factory.

It took an hour until the conventional warhead was ready to be removed.

Colonel Ahmed screwed a lifting eye into the top of the warhead, his hands shaking from the cold. With another chainfall he cranked the warhead out, lifting it into a shadow left by one of the harsh incandescent temporary bulbs. The men moved aft to rig the old warhead back to the pressure hull so that it could be replaced with the new warhead. The transfer went slowly, with two chainfalls attached to the warhead, one pulling it aft while the forward chain was slackened, keeping the warhead level. The open part of the tank between the aft

heads of the tubes and the forward bulkhead of the command module was a problem. The free flood was only five meters long, but those five meters had no supports except for a cross of steel tubular beams, one horizontal, one vertical. The warhead was rigged all the way down to the bottom of the hull, then aft to the frame at the command module, then hoisted vertically up to the hatchway in the centerline. The maneuver through the free-flood portion of the tank took over an hour. By the time the hatch was winched open to accept the obsolete warhead, the tank work was eight hours behind schedule — it had taken ten hours to get this far, and the work had been estimated by Ahmed to take two. The men tapped on the hatch, the signal to come shallow to depressurize the tank so that they could come back into the hull after an hour at lower pressure.

Quzwini was dismayed that there would be another ten-hour session in the tank to get the new warhead in, then another ten-hour entry to weld up the tube patch and the command-module hatch. With ten hours between entries, it would take forty hours to finish the work. And even then there was no guarantee the warhead switchout would work.

Once he was back in the hull, he stayed on the deck of the forward head, his frozen hands in his crotch, rocking the pain away, hating the thought of going into that ballast tank again.

The ten-hour rest period passed all too soon. Colonel Ahmed called the

tank crew to help him pull the new Scorpion warhead from the lower level to the middle level, and from there into the ballast tank and to the forward tip of tube one, retracing the path that the old warhead had gone. The tank was much colder on this entry, the surrounding water becoming icy as the ship got farther north. Not that it mattered much, he thought, as his mind was growing as numb as his body.

USS PHOENIX

“Norfolk Navcom Center, this is Whiskey Four Bravo, over.” Kane waited for twenty endless seconds before calling again. “Norfolk Navcom, this is Whiskey Four Bravo, over.