Prologue

This is the last thing they heard in their closed world: the faint scree-scree-scree of the incoming torpedo’s high-speed propeller. Then, an ear-splitting thunderclap as the torpedo warhead detonated, and its underwater fireball slammed a shock wave into the center of the submarine, ripping a hole through the outer steel plating.*

Close behind—in less than a heartbeat, not nearly long enough for a thought or a regret—the ocean thundered in, shorting out lights and plunging the confined spaces of the submarine into chaos.

The explosion penetrated the submarine amidships on the port side. It was the perfect impact point to destroy the USS Scorpion (SSN 589) and kill its ninety-nine officers and enlisted crewmen, because this was the control room—the brain of the attack submarine—where the captain and his maneuvering watch operated the Scorpion on her underwater missions.

The first casualties occurred in a millisecond—lives extinguished in less time than it takes to blink an eye. The water column swept away the two duty control planesmen from their pedestal seats at the forward end of the control compartment, where they operated the controls that moved the ship’s rudder and diving planes. It dashed the captain and the officer of the deck from the raised control station where they supervised the maneuvering watch. The torrent took out the crew manning the ballast control station, torpedo fire-control computers, electronic countermeasure sensors, and navigating gear.

Inside the cylinder, the world of U.S. Navy regulations and procedure—of hot bunks and the late-night meals called midrats, of dreams of liberty ports and loved ones at home, of bureaucratic routines and top-secret operational plans—vanished as the seawater thundered through. The lights blinked out, the instrument panels sparked a final short-circuit and went black, and the screams of the crew went unheard behind the baritone roar of the flood.

But it did not stop there.

The sea hurtled aft, drowning the men in the enclosed sonar shack and radio room. It raced two decks down to destroy the crew’s berthing compartment, mess decks, officer’s staterooms, and food storage areas. It plunged further down into the belly of the Scorpion, surging toward the battery compartment and storage areas at the keel. Aft of the control room, the water raced through the open hatchway and reactor compartment access tunnel into the relatively spacious auxiliary machinery compartment—a thirty-five-foot-long segment of the submarine—and sought out every open space at the center of the hull.

Only seconds had elapsed since the blast, but already more than a third of the Scorpion’s crew were dead, including the captain, executive officer, navigator, and members of the maneuvering watch, and most off-duty crewmen whose berthing spaces were closest to the explosion’s impact.

The immense fist of hydrostatic pressure from the surrounding ocean continued to press on the Scorpion’s inner space. It squeezed the watertight bulkheads fore and aft with a force far stronger than the steel walls were designed to survive. Within a minute of the torpedo’s impact, the circular bulkhead separating the reactor compartment from the rest of the submarine buckled under the pressure.