Free America by Stephen Coonts

of the berthing area was the pressure bulkhead and, beyond that, the vertical launch tubes. The missiles were inside their tubes, which were sealed units. There was no provision for reloading tubes at sea—the thirty-four-foot diameter of the pressure hull meant that there just wasn’t enough room, which was why the tubes were outside the pressure hull. Forward of the tubes was the bow sonar dome with its huge array. Beneath that array was another, a conformal array.
    When he had seen all there was to see, Kolnikov closed the hatch and went back through the tunnel. Part of the ballast tank space, he knew, was utilized by the winch and cable for the towed array, but access to that compartment was on the first deck. On the second deck he went through the control room—Turchak was poring over a computer—to the hatch opening into the tunnel that led through the reactor compartment. The shielded tunnel was designed to prevent crewmen from absorbing any unnecessary radiation.
    He exited the tunnel into the reactor compartment. There was really little to see. Everything was spotlessly clean. The control panel was in the engine room.
    Kolnikov reentered the tunnel and went on aft to the engine room.
    Gordin and two others were there. A normal engine room watch team was three men aboard this class of sub, one fewer than the Seawolf - or Los Angeles–class.
    On a Russian sub, one man would be enough, but American boats were not as highly automated. The Russian Navy could never get or keep enough qualified men, so they had to automate. For safety reasons, the Americans had never taken automation as far. America was more automated than any past boat, but still, a normal engine room team was three men, who spent their watch checking gauges and turning valves. Kolnikov had Gordin, Steeckt, and Brovkin, none of whom knew much about the reactor but had been taught to rush from station to station, checking this, adjusting that to keep everything within normal limits.
    They were impressed. “This is a beautiful ship, Captain,” they gushed and expounded loudly as they touched and pointed.
    The ship was beautiful, Kolnikov admitted ruefully. Everything reeked of quality. Everything the eye beheld was a wonder of design and manufacture. Nothing shoddy, quickly made, quickly finished.
    It feels as if we are inside a giant watch, Kolnikov thought. He recognized the major assemblies, but that was all. He studied the control panel that Callahan had manned. According to him, the only SCRAM button still wired up was the one on this panel. SCRAM—there was an acronym! It stood for safety control reactor ax man, a title given to the man responsible for cutting the rope holding the control rods in the first nuclear core under the stadium at the University of Chicago should anything go wrong.
    He would not attempt to rewire the SCRAM controls, he decided. One stray volt during the rewiring would drop the rods into the pile, killing the fission reaction. The reactor could be restarted, of course, if they knew what they were doing and had plenty of time and electrical power, but why take that risk?
    â€œThe electrical complexity is beyond my experience, Captain,” Brovkin said as he explained the intricacies of one of the major circuit-breaker panels. He led Kolnikov from panel to panel, showed him the fiber-optic wire bundles that carried information to the computers and actuators located throughout the ship. “I have never seen anything like this. Without diagrams one would be hopelessly lost.” The electrical diagrams, several thousand of them, were in the computer, of course. Finding the right diagram was the biggest problem.
    If anything went wrong, anything …
    Brovkin grinned at him. The fool!
    Kolnikov knew that he was on a tightrope without a net. If the reactor had a problem, he couldn’t kill it from the control room. If he accidentally SCRAMed it, he probably couldn’t restart it.