The helmsman responded at once to the captain's command, pushing his control yoke all the way to the stops. The stern of the submarine rose at once, into the path of the logs. Maine had a cruciform stern. There was a rudder both above and below the propeller shaft. To the left and right were the stern planes, which operated like the stabilizers of an aircraft. On the outer surface of each was another vertical structure that looked like an auxiliary rudder, but was in fact a fitting for sonar sensors. The chain between two of the logs fouled on that. Two logs were outboard, and one inboard. The inboard one was just long enough to reach the spinning propeller. The resulting noise was the worst anyone had ever heard. Maine’s seven-bladed screw was made of manganese-bronze alloy that had been shaped into its nearly perfect configuration over a period of seven months. It was immensely strong, but not this strong. Its scimitar-shaped blades struck the log one after another, like a slow, inefficient saw. Each impact gouged or dented the outboard edges. The officer in the maneuvering room, aft, had already decided to stop the shaft before the order to do so arrived. Outside the hull, not a hundred feet from his post, he heard the screams of abused metal as the sonar fitting was wrenched off the starboard stern plane, along with it went the additional fitting that held the submarine's towed array sonar. At that point, the logs, one of them now badly splintered, fell off into the submarine's wake, and the worst of the noise stopped.

"What the fuck was that?" Ricks nearly screamed.

"Tail's gone, sir. We just lost the tail," a sonarman said. "Right side lateral array is damaged, sir." Ricks was already out of the room. The petty officer was talking to himself.

"Conn, maneuvering room," a speaker was saying. "Something just pounded the hell out of our screw. I'm checking for damage to the shaft now."

"Stern planes are damaged, sir. Very sluggish on the controls," the helmsman said. The Chief of the Boat pulled the youngster off the seat and took his place. Slowly and carefully, the Master Chief worked the control wheel.

"Damaged hydraulics, feels like. The trim tabs" - these were electrically powered - "look okay." He worked the wheel left and right. "Rudder is okay, sir."

"Lock the stern planes in neutral. Ten degrees up on the fairwater planes." This order came from the XO.

"Aye."

"So, what was it?" Dubinin asked.

"Metallic - an enormous mechanical transient, bearing zero-five-one." The officer tapped the blazing mark on his screen. "Low frequency as you see, like a drum but this noise here, much higher pitch. I heard that on my phones, sounded like a machinegun. Wait a minute " Senior Lieutenant Rykov said, thinking rapidly. "The frequency - I mean the interval of the impulses - that was a blade-rate, that was a propeller only thing it could be "