And with that there was nothing that could be done.
The starboard gear assembly was on the downside of the rotation, meaning the propeller shaft was spinning over its top to starboard. As the gear slice came free, its teeth still enmeshed with those on the shaft, it was pulled under the shaft. But there was not enough room for the foot-diameter slab of metal to make it. With only a four inch clearance between the shaft and the polymer-coated deck, the gear was pulled into the inadequate space like a wedge, the power of thirty thousand horses ensuring an uneven match between force and matter. The sound of the event, louder than the fractured nut ricocheting through the engine room, was transmitted throughout the sub, causing brains to register the fact that something was very wrong. Before any heads could turn, though, another, more horrifying sound radiated from the back of the boat.
The propeller shaft, continuing to turn, had nowhere else to go but upward as the gear was driven between it and the deck. A four-inch clearance expanded instantly to more than twelve as the ten-ton shaft broke free of the bearing rings that held it in place. Its forwardmost end, where the gear assemblies were attached, sprang up like the vaulted end of a fulcrum, lifting the eight-ton electric drive motor upward with it. At the top of the motor were stabilizer bars, looking much like extended shock absorbers, that helped dampen any motion of the machinery and held the unit in place. These bars had three inches of play, which was not enough to absorb the extra eight inches the unit was being forced to move. Their top ends transferred the force of the event, now exceeding a million-and-a-quarter foot-pounds of energy, to the number-eight structural ring, to which they were connected. Seventy-eight of these rings, over which an inch-and-a-half-thick skin of HY-80 steel was welded, formed the structure of the pressure hull. The number-eight ring, like all the others, was designed to withstand tremendous pressures squeezing it from all sides, but not a point impact of the magnitude being delivered. It was as if a mighty scissor jack had thrust upward against the ring. The result was a complete failure of the structural member, which cracked outward, separating the steel skin as it pressed toward the sea. The directional force continued for a millisecond more, expanding the rupture in the pressure hull, tearing the inner and outer skin of the Pennsylvania for a hundred feet along the starboard side of its topdeck as if a can opener had sliced through it.
No emergency drills could have saved the sub or its crew. The seawater, under tremendous pressure at six hundred feet, sprayed through the ruptured hull, flooding all compartments from the missile room aft. The huge electric drive motor, lifted more than a foot off its base, came back down with a violence the deck and supports had never been intended to sustain. They failed completely, sending the unit crashing through to the bulkhead supports below. In the process the propeller shaft, free of any moorings, smashed around the engine room, impacting the steam turbine a few feet to port, knocking it off its supports and separating the steam pipes from their welded flanges that mated them to the reactor room. High pressure steam at 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit shot into the flooding compartment. Those who had survived the initial venting of the hull were burned to death without as much as a spark of flame.
One compartment forward, in the reactor room, automatic controls registered the event and began to SCRAM — or rapidly shut down — the nuclear pile, but radiation was not what was to doom the Pennsylvania. The emptied steam pipes that fed the turbines one compartment back quickly overheated. Though they did not enter the reactor vessel, they passed side by side through the heat exchanger with the pipes that transferred the high-temperature coolant from the reactor. When the empty turbine pipes were doused with the ice-cold seawater flooding the reactor room, a vast quantity of steam was instantly generated, more than the confined space could handle. What engineers called an explosive overpressure event occurred. This ripped through the aft part of the sub, buckling the hull more than it already was and punching bulkheads fore and aft. The resultant overpressure blew watertight doors all the way forward through the control room just as the captain ordered the emergency buoy released.
The command was never carried out. A tremendous pop shook everyone in the forward section of the sub, then a strange white wall of fluid poured through the doors facing aft and slammed into every living thing. Men were thrown forward as the water raced toward the nose of the sub.
The entire process, from catastrophic failure to destruction, had taken under ten seconds. The Pennsylvania continued on course another two hundred yards before the weight of the water filling her hull overcame her momentum and stopped the big sub. As most of her weight was closer to the stern, she slid backward and down at an angle that grew ever steeper. She impacted the sea floor at a depth of 15,030 feet, her stern pointed almost straight down. Traveling at forty knots, the mass of the Pennsylvania drove the crumpled hull into the soft ocean bottom and collapsed the sub, bow upon stem, like an accordion.
With that, the USS Pennsylvania had disappeared into the watery depths of the Atlantic for the last time, and the United States of America, which had counted itself lucky for more than three decades, had lost its first fleet ballistic-missile submarine in an accident at sea.
CHAPTER TWO
LIBERTAD
There were ten of them, all dressed in the dirty blue coveralls that they wore each and every day in the execution of their duties at the Cuban Revolutionary Air Force Base near Santa Clara in the central part of the island nation. On evenings such as this they would routinely spend the six hours of their first duty shift cleaning and preparing the base’s twelve operative MiG-23 fighters for use the following morning. The likelihood that any would be taken skyward was rare these days, so the limits of their efforts were largely directed at keeping the aircraft clean and rust free. A pretty picture they would make, but the squadron — which had boasted sixteen functioning MiGs just a month previously — was supposed to be more than a showpiece in its intended role, something these ground crewman were, in a grand switch of motives, going to prevent from ever coming to fruition.
In pairs they went to each aircraft, working as normal, cleaning debris from the landing gear and strut assemblies. The officer overseeing their work sat idly a hundred meters away in a straight-backed wooden chair that he leaned against a hangar’s outer wall. His attention was focused on one of the “unauthorized” publications so readily available in Santa Clara, particularly upon a pretty young woman whom the caption said was a frequent visitor to the sands of Playa la Panchita. From the absence of tan lines he was certain it was an accurate statement.
But while the risqué pictures held his attention, the crews under his watch were able to spend just a short amount of time longer than normal at the front wheelwell of each MiG. In less than four hours their work was done, freeing the crews, half of whom were unofficial “replacements” for those who were not inclined to cooperate in the somewhat historic venture soon to begin, to spend some much needed additional time on the four Hind helicopter gunships based at Santa Clara. There they focused on the tail rotor assemblies, lubricating the exposed fasteners and checking for the required torquing on the bolts. When the desired tightness was achieved, they moved on to the repair shop to clean and secure their tools, most of which were specialized and irreplaceable, as was much of the machinery in the building.