Prologue, continued

Only in the rear of the submarine, the place of the reactor, main engines, and maneuvering room where the duty engineers operated the propulsion system, did enough men survive to fight back against the inevitable. They sent the Scorpion to high speed. The propeller churned against the water outside, and its control vanes—responding to orders from an emergency control station at the aft end of the engine room—pointed the submarine up to the ocean surface.

But nothing was possible anymore.

The entire center of the 252-foot-long hull filled with water as the Scorpion struggled upward. The weight overcame the submarine’s residual buoyancy as well as the forward motion directed by the reactor, drive train, and control planes. The nose of the submarine briefly leveled out but then plunged down in a deepening arc that soon reached sixty degrees.

Only ninety-one seconds after the torpedo struck, the Scorpion plunged through an invisible barrier 1,300 feet below the surface. submariners call it “crush depth,” a point where the hydrostatic pressure outside simply overpowers the tensile strength of the steel hull. The small group of survivors in the aft end of the submarine had mere seconds to live.

In the large torpedo compartment at the forward end of the ship, about a dozen members of the torpedo gang and a handful of off-duty crewman had been protected from the original blast by the closed, oval watertight hatch that connected the forward compartments with the rest of the submarine. Some might have had time to don survival gear in the hopes of escaping the submarine via the forward escape trunk. But they too were powerless to save themselves.

At the ninety-one-second mark, the bulkhead at Frame 26—the circular steel wall that defined the after end of the torpedo compartment—gave way, and the seawater that had invaded the submarine slammed into the compartment so furiously that the closed and locked circular access hatch leading out of the torpedo compartment to the curved deck plates on the forward hull blew open to the sea.

Four seconds later, in the final assault, the same force crushed the Scorpion’s stern. Here, the tapering cylindrical section of the hull gave way and the eighty-foot-long section containing the engine room rammed violently forward into the auxiliary machinery and reactor compartments just forward of the breaking point. The aft third of the submarine in effect became a plunger that eviscerated the two compartments immediately forward of the breaking point as the giant ram collapsed the auxiliary machinery compartment and reactor compartment.

If any of the crewmen were still alive, they would have died at that instant.

The violence of the final implosion ripped the sail superstructure away from the submarine, leaving the Scorpion’s hull in two sections barely dangling together by a slender piece of hull plating. It blew the ninety-foot-long propeller shaft and screw off of their mounts and spat them out into the void.

The final sounds from the Scorpion were a muted staccato drumbeat as various tanks, pressurized containers, torpedo tubes, and other devices ruptured and imploded as the dead hulk continued its last dive down 11,100 feet to the floor of the Atlantic abyssal plain.

It was Wednesday, May 22, 1968. The U.S. Navy had just suffered a major Cold War disaster: A nuclear submarine and its crew of ninety-nine had just perished in the eastern Atlantic Ocean.