Trusov was physically stunning. She was short with a curvy feminine figure. She had shining platinum blonde hair and big, bright blue eyes, but her hair was pulled back in a tight bun and she wore no makeup. Someone meeting her for the first time might arrive at the conclusion that her own beauty annoyed her, and that she wanted to downplay it. But her reclusiveness seemed odd, almost alarming to Alexeyev. He’d meant to ask Kovalev his thoughts, but had never gotten to it.
She had something in common with Alexeyev, he thought. Both had been rescued by the Americans who sank them, in separate incidents, his in the South Atlantic, hers in the Arabian Sea. They’d both been interviewed by the same American officer, a young lieutenant named Pacino, who Alexeyev had later learned was the son of the vice president. Alexeyev had been impressed with the young man, who had shown him a deep respect even in the face of Alexeyev’s defeat. And according to Kovalov, the same lieutenant had seemingly changed Trusov from a rabid anti-American to someone almost sympathetic to them. Alexeyev wondered if that might have something to do with her self-imposed exile on this operation. Could it be that she was a conscientious objector to the Status-6 mission?
“Go ahead, Madam Systems Officer,” Alexeyev said to Trusov.
“Captain, I’m by education a mechanical engineer. I believe the noises we’ve heard from Hostile One are possibly catastrophic for them.” Her voice was smooth, with an almost lilting east-of-the-Urals accent, which was odd for a woman who spent her life on the Kola Peninsula but for education in Moscow. Perhaps the accent came from her mother’s side. Her file had indicated she was the daughter of Volodya Trusov, the storied captain of Alexeyev’s first submarine Tambov. Alexeyev searched his memory of meeting her almost two decades before, when as a junior officer, he’d been invited to the captain’s house for dinner, but he came up blank. Perhaps on those occasions, she’d stayed with relatives.
“The noises are catastrophic for them — why?” Alexeyev asked.
“Sir, when we spun around to face east to launch the Gigantskiy torpedo at the ice target, the American — Hostile One — was behind us, but he had been following us headed west when we launched, which means he was stern-on to the shock wave. And if he were facing away from the shock wave, it would have slammed his propulsor shaft into his engineroom. I believe the noise he’s been making is from his thrust bearing. And I would predict that it is on the verge of failure. Which means the American will lose propulsion.”
“Officer of the Deck,” Lieutenant Anthony Pacino said into the 1JV phone circuit after it buzzed from maneuvering back aft.
“This is the engineer,” Lieutenant Commander Alyssa Kelly said. “We have a serious problem. I want you to send the captain and XO to the aft compartment at the main motor.”
“Captain will want to know why. What’s up?”
“The thrust bearing just shit the bed. Now get the captain and XO.”
“Right away.” Pacino hung up. “Captain, XO, Eng wants you both back aft at the main motor. Eng reports we have a serious problem with the thrust bearing.”
Captain Seagraves and XO Quinnivan left the room in a half run. Pacino looked over at Navigator Lewinsky.
“What do you think is going on back there?” Pacino asked.
“If there’s trouble with the thrust bearing, this mission is over,” Lewinsky said.
“Officer of the Deck, we’re making a bad screeching sound every revolution,” Sonar Senior Chief Albanese said, breaking into the conversation. “And it got worse with every rev. Fairly well screaming that we’re out here. The BUFF has to know we’re here.”
“On the bottom, right underneath him while he’s surfaced at the open water,” Pacino said.
In the aft compartment, Seagraves and Quinnivan found Engineer Kelly at the thrust bearing, a cube of metal a meter on a side. It was glowing dark red and smoking. The chief mechanic, Chief Sammy “Sam-I-Am” MacHinery, supervised as two mechanics held firehoses on the thrust bearing to keep it from melting or setting the nearby equipment on fire.
“What do we have?” Seagraves asked.
“It’s bad, Captain,” Kelly said. “It’s seized. It’s not coming back.”
“Forgive me, Eng,” Quinnivan said. “But I came up through the tactical ranks, not the engineering side. What the hell is a thrust bearing and how does it work?”
Kelly looked at him and said solemnly, “The main motor turns the shaft, which rotates the turbine blades of the propulsor, XO, which generates thrust, a pushing force on the ship. This unit here, the thrust bearing, absorbs that thrust and transfers it to the hull to push the boat forward, and it’s no small task, because the shaft is rotating and the hull isn’t. So the forward part of the thrust bearing, the stationary part mounted to the boat’s frame, is just a flat plate of soft metal held in place by a foundation of hard steel. The aft part on the shaft, the part that rotates, has segments of soft metal — also mounted on a hard steel baseplate — that are tilted. Those soft metal tilted segments — just imagine a pizza with each slice at an angle so as the shaft spins, the leading edge of the moving pizza slice is angled away relative to the stationary flat plate and the trailing edge comes closer to the flat plate. The whole thing is filled with oil, and as the pizza slices rotate, they are actually gliding on a thin film of oil. Pizza slices push on the oil, oil pushes on the forward flat plate, flat plate pushes on the boat. Now, all that makes the oil hot, and the soft metal — over time — slowly disintegrates, putting metal particles into the oil. So we pull the oil out, send it to a purifier, which is just a big centrifuge where we pull the pure oil off the center of the centrifuge and shitcan the metal particles on the outside rim. Then we put the oil into a cooler and send it back to the thrust bearing. This thing will work for years if maintained.
“But when we took that shock wave from the nuke? It slammed the shaft into the forward bearing plate. It essentially flattened out the pizza slices. So instead of gliding on a few molecules of oil? We got metal-to-metal contact, and eventually the soft metals wore off from the friction, and only the harder metals of the retaining plates were left. The heat of the friction welded the rotating plate and the stationary plate together. And then the oil got hot enough to catch fire.” Kelly looked from Seagraves to Quinnivan. “It’s gone, sir. We don’t have propulsion on the main motor any longer.”
Seagraves nodded. “We’ll have to unclutch from the main motor and shift propulsion to the emergency propulsion motor.”
Kelly nodded. “I’ll have the engineering officer of the watch request to control that we shift propulsion to the EPM. But we’ll barely make three knots, Captain. Maybe less.”
“We may not be able to keep up with the Belgorod at that speed,” Seagraves said to Quinnivan.
“Maybe only under the ice, Skipper,” Quinnivan said.
“All that assumes the EPM holds up and that its thrust bearing is okay,” Kelly said.
“Once he reaches open water,” Quinnivan said, “we’ll need another submarine to take over this mission.”
“To get someone to take over?” Seagraves mused. “That’s not easy with no radios.”