Spy Sub: A Top Secret Mission to the Bottom of the Pacific Read online

  When PL-751 reached an area in the northern mid-Pacific Ocean, a region pinpointed at exactly 35° N, 172° E, a violent event destroyed the submarine's watertight integrity. The precise nature of this event is unknown, but it was possibly the result of an explosion from hydrogen gas during battery charging operations, an explosion during the handling of missile fuel, or human error as the fatigued crew pushed themselves and their submarine beyond the limit.

  The captain and crew immediately struggled to save their ship as she took on increasingly high-pressure water and slid deeper into the ocean toward her test depth. Within several seconds of the time when she roared past her maximum designed safe depth, the waters of the northwestern Pacific Ocean were filled with the popcorn noises of rupturing pipes and bulkheads as the PL-751 accelerated through her crush depth and delivered her entire crew to the bottom of the ocean, 19,200 feet beneath the surface.

  The Soviet Union made no announcement to the world about the sinking of the PL-751, and the United States released no information about the sounds that had found their way into the SOSUS microphones at the bottom of the Pacific. During the next several days, American intelligence forces monitoring Soviet ship and aircraft movements recorded an unprecedented number of radio message intercepts originating from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy on the Kamchatka Peninsula and Vladivostok. Also, during this time, satellite and other highly classified sensing systems recorded a dramatically increased number of Soviet naval and air search operations traversing the routes of U.S. task forces patrolling in the North Pacific.

  The explosions, carrying up and down the thermoclines, continued to vibrate the hull of the Viperfish, but we tried to ignore the noises and the implications of their presence. Occurring at irregular intervals for several weeks, they disrupted our sleep, frazzled our nerves, and made everybody feel miserable. During this time, we relentlessly pursued our search of the ocean bottom. As the weeks stretched into a full month with no sign of success, morale plummeted even more. The most ominous sign of widespread discontent was the oppressive silence that began to emerge throughout the Viperfish as the Fish found nothing, the explosions continued, and our hope for success waned. When the crew was happy, everybody groused about everything; when the crew was depressed, silence prevailed. The Viperfish's crew was becoming silent.

  As we roamed our search area, the civilians and Special Project crewmen debated the best way to scan the bottom of the ocean for our target without missing any areas. Some previous experience with towed devices, similar to the Fish, had been documented in the archives of U.S. search projects, such as that by the USS Mizar, the oceanographic research ship that had found a nuclear bomb off Spain, but there was almost no experience with a submarine towing miles of cable.

  Is it best to move in a straight line back and forth across the search area, they wondered, with the potential of losing the "lineup" during each complicated turnaround procedure? Should the submarine encircle a central point by starting with a huge circle that gradually becomes smaller and smaller? Maybe the circles should start at a central point and expand by ever- increasing diameters. Or would it be better to make equal-sized circles overlapping in a single direction that would result in a wide swath of searched ocean bottom, hopefully performing in such a manner as to rule out any missed areas.

  There were no books on the subject and little information beyond the Mizar data. Most of us were vaguely aware of the Mizar's successful operations, which included finding the USS Thresher in 1964, but the Mizar was fundamentally different from the Viperfish: she was a surface craft. Searching the bottom of the ocean in a vessel heaving around on the surface is, in some ways, more of a challenge than it is in a submarine that remains at a fixed depth below the surface.

  At least, in a submarine, depth control is usually possible to predict and maintain. Because it was essential for the Fish to remain a specific distance above the bottom of the ocean, in order to prevent its destruction by contact with terrain irregularities, precise submarine depth control was mandatory. Alternatively, if the Viperfish pulled the Fish too high above the bottom, its ability to "see" anything below it would be compromised. As long as no emergencies developed that would require sudden changes in depth, a silent submarine was clearly the vessel best suited for a secret search of the ocean's bottom.

  The speed of the vessel also dramatically affected the altitude of the Fish above the ocean floor; if the Viperfish inadvertently slowed for a few seconds, the Fish could easily sink and be destroyed against rocks or ridges. Cable length had a nearly immediate effect on the Fish's altitude, and careful control of the spool rotation was of top priority. Reactor power and turbogenerator power were essential to operation of the Special Project's computer system that analyzed information from the Fish. Finally, the Viperfish's buoyancy, depth, and direction, which were controlled by the ballast control operator, the planesmen, and the helmsmen, required close communication and teamwork.

  Success, however, continued to be elusive. As time passed, we all became increasingly frustrated. We experimented with different methods of moving the boat, and we varied circular patterns and Fish elevations. Each new trial consumed days at a time and resulted in nothing.

  After all of these failures, Robbie Teague brought a stack of stunningly clear 8x10 black-and-white photographs to the crew's dining area to show us life at twenty thousand feet below the surface, complements of the Fish. Bizarre bat-like structures stuck out from the bodies of some fish, and others had ornaments clinging to their faces. Other structures resembling slugs lay on the bottom; Robbie called them sea cucumbers. As we passed around the pictures, we expressed appropriate interest in the fauna, complimented Robbie's photography and the clarity of the images, and asked if the civilians had found the object of our search.

  Robbie's smile faded. "Not yet, but we're still looking."

  "Are we still circling, or have we started a new pattern? If we can't find it here, why can't we look somewhere else?" Richard Daniels asked, his voice sounding tense.

  "Because this is where it's supposed to be," Robbie said, almost inaudibly.

  "Tell us what it is, and we'll become more enthusiastic. Is it a UFO?" Daniels asked.

  "They don't have me in the loop. Can you understand that?"

  "A nuclear warhead?"

  "It's secret, guys, secret."

  "Nobody on the Viperfish knows what we're looking for?"

  "Nope, nobody I know around here. I just develop the pictures, and-"

  "Why is this thing so important?"

  "It's classified, it-"

  "Right, right, but if we can't find it, then where it's supposed to be doesn't mean much."

  "Okay," Robbie said softly, "you're right. However, if we keep looking, we do have a chance. And they tell me it's important."

  Robbie gathered his pictures in the silence that followed and, without another word, returned to the hangar compartment — his diplomatic mission of fostering Special Project enthusiasm a notable failure.

  As we cruised around and around and back and forth and as morale continued to slide, a shocking event occurred one morning in the crew's dining area. We were all eating freshly cooked oatmeal, when one of the forward crew machinists violently spit the cereal all over the dining area table and jolted the men around him.

  "Goddamn it all, where's the cook?" the man hollered as everybody began to examine their own cereal.

  "Right here," Marty Belmont said, looking concerned as he walked up to the table. "What's the problem?"

  Marty was a chubby, pleasant little fellow who worked as hard as anybody on the boat and did a good job. His work was especially important because the meals were almost the only variability in our day-to-day lives, and good food meant a happy, or at least a happier, crew. The budget for food on submarines exceeds that of any other branch of the Navy. Regularly taking advantage of that fact, Marty tried to make the food as tasty as possible.

  "Marty, there's goddamn worms in the goddamn cereal!"
the machinist hollered, spitting out more food. Immediately, every-body in the dining room, including myself, simultaneously blasted food from our mouths. The tables were covered with a layer of partially chewed cereal.

  "Jesus Christ, Marty, don't you check for bugs in the food?" another man yelled.

  "Did Robbie give you these animals from the bottom of the ocean?"

  I spit out some more food and carefully examined the bowl cereal in front of me. Thousands of tiny white worms, crawling among the grains of warm cereal, exactly matched the color of oatmeal-a perfect camouflage, unnoticed by the rest of us. It occurred to several of us, as we groused and grumbled and generally felt miserable, that the cereal had actually tasted pretty good, a little meatier than usual perhaps, but the flavor was definitely unique.

  Marty gathered up the bowls, his face distressed, as he reflected on the ruins of the morning meal. "I'm sorry, fellas. They must have broken into the grain. I cooked the cereal but I guess I didn't get it hot enough. Damn little buggers shoulda died."

  We all stared at the man, speechless.

  Finally, one of the men stood up and handed Marty his bowl.

  "Even dead worms don't belong in the cereal."

  "I'm doing the best I can," Marty said, wiping down the tables, as a couple of the other galley crewmen joined him to clean up the mess covering most of the tables.

  From that day on, the phrase, "I'm doing the best I can," became synonymous with the ever-increasing numbers of important things going wrong in spite of the best intentions.

  The search continued for another two weeks, until even the normally enthusiastic civilians in the hangar became discouraged. Robbie didn't bring any more pictures to us, and the men throughout the Viperfish stopped speculating about the object of our search. A feeling of profound frustration and gloom descended on everybody. The explosions outside our hull were similar to Chinese water-drop torture; each one wasn't that loud but added together, day after day, the noise created a mental state of continuous uneasiness.

  As our second month under water began, I found myself slowly feeling more and more claustrophobic. None of us had seen any sunlight or sky since the day we left Pearl Harbor. After each four-hour watch, the dilemma of nowhere to go and nothing to do became a problem. I had passed the time by completing French lessons and reading a couple of books during the first month at sea, but now I found myself becoming restless after reading just one or two pages-it was getting increasingly difficult to concentrate. My French lessons were becoming much more of a challenge, and it took all the effort I had just to sit down and concentrate on trying to understand bits and parts of the language.

  The final blow came shortly after I started working on the last paragraph of a full page of carefully typed French. The typing of my correspondence course work had taken most of my free time during the preceding several days. Moving from one word to the next, I struggled to avoid mistakes, looked up each incomprehensible French idiom, penned in the proper accent marks, and corrected the inevitable errors that slipped through in spite of it all As I endeavored to clarify the spelling of a particularly strange French word in the last part of the final paragraph, a large hydraulic valve above me abruptly cycled with a loud whoosh. A thick glob of grease dropped from the valve directly onto the part of my typewritten page sticking out of the typewriter.

  I stared at the oil as it slithered down the single-spaced sentences. Watching the typewriter ink smear as the oil diluted the letters, I felt my head begin to pound. I ripped the page from the typewriter, shredded the paper into the tiniest pieces I could manage, and cursed France and everybody in Europe. Then, I steamed down to the crew's dining area to watch another half hour of Regulus missiles crashing down runways on a deserted atoll in the middle of nowhere.

  After almost seven weeks of fruitless searching with the background noises of sonobuoy explosions echoing up and down Soviet thermocline tunnels, Captain Harris finally decided to bring in the Fish and head back to Hawaii. We began the prolonged process of reeling several miles of cable into the Viperfish. Cruising back and forth with our Fish out-a mother ship with her very long and delicate umbilical cord-was not an exercise that made us feel particularly useful, especially so because we had failed to find anything worthwhile. Most of us looked forward to stowing the miserable device and reconverting the boat into a more maneuverable non-Fish towing vessel. We hoped that we could now at least try to function like the military ship we were sup- posed to be.

  During the hours of reeling in the Fish, a powerful storm began to build in the waters stretching across the North Pacific. We were at a depth of three hundred feet, where surface wave activity should not affect us more than 90 percent of the time; on that day, we entered the 10 percent portion where rules didn't apply. It was a slow-roll type of movement, nothing that would make us think about hunting for Ralph O'Roark but enough to let us know that nature was stirring up the surface. The noises of sonobuoys stopped at the beginning of the storm, and everybody began to feel better as the huge spool outside our pressure hull continued to reel in the Fish. Finally, to our great relief, the civilians stowed the Fish in a corner of the hangar and the captain ordered the Viperfish to pick up speed and begin clearing out of the Soviet sector.

  I relieved Richard Daniels from his reactor watch shortly after we began to accelerate in the direction of Pearl. We had to shout to be heard above the whining of the propulsion turbines and reduction gears, which were thirty feet away from the maneuvering area. I gathered the information from Richard about the reactor, now running at full capacity, and pulled up a seat in front of the control panel. Brian Lane sat next to me, manning his complex electrical control panel. To my surprise and in contrast to his silence of the past several weeks, he now became more talkative.

  "We're running low on fuel," I said, as I gathered data from the meters filling the panel in front of me. There is no fuel gauge, per se, to pinpoint when the nuclear reactor requires a new uranium core, but data from multiple operational sources leave no doubt about the remaining fuel.

  Brian turned and smiled at me. "Enough to get back?" His smile faded. "Right?"

  Enough to get back," I reassured him. "If my calculations are correct."

  "No gas stations out here-"

  "No uranium stations," I corrected.

  "No shore-power cables to hook up to the battery."

  "Nope, gotta rely on the reactor. Lucky for the forward pukes that they have the nukes to get them back."

  "Thank God."

  Lane then turned in his chair and looked at me. His eyes seemed to stare through me, but he smiled in a way that was strangely out of sync with the general mood throughout the submarine.

  "You can't get to me," he said in a matter-of-fact tone. I watched him as he turned back to his panel and began scanning his meters.

  The phrase was a familiar submariner idiom. "You can't get to me" speaks the essence of being a submariner. It is a statement that says, even in the cramped quarters and continuous press of close human contact, even when there are worms in the cereal and detonations in the ocean, nothing is allowed to get under the skin. "You can't get to me" said it all: nothing bothers me, I am a professional, and there is no way anything that is said or done will be a problem for me.

  Lane said it at the wrong time, however. He watched his panel while I looked at mine, our ears enclosed by the plastic sound guards that shut out the screaming machinery around us. After noting more data on my log sheet, I glanced sideways at the man and wondered why my friend and shipmate had said something so far out of proper context. I finally dismissed the matter with the speculation that he must have misunderstood-the shrill noise of turbines drowning out what I had said.

  About that time, when I was feeling about as grouchy as almost everybody else, the EOOW decided to quiz me. A tall man, Lt. George Sanders was moving up through the ranks of nuclear-trained officers, but he had an officer-elitist attitude. His trace of an "I am better than you" approach contrasted
sharply with the leadership capabilities and personalities of the other submarine officers who fostered our respect by earning, rather than demanding, it. He got on my nerves as he paced back and forth behind Lane and me when we were on watch, and I was never quite sure what he was going to say next.

  On this watch, he was irritating me more than usual. So, when the quiz began, I clenched my teeth, crossed my arms across my chest, and stared at the reactor panel.

  "Okay, Dunham," he said from behind me, "you're cruising along at four hundred feet."

  Consistent with the range of appropriate responses of an enlisted man to an officer, I respectfully answered, "Yes, sir."

  "Okay. Now, the ship begins to sink."

  "Yes, sir, the ship sinks." This would not be difficult, I thought, just a matter of the ship sinking.

  "Begins to sink!" he shrieked. "You now have two choices. You can save the reactor or you can save the ship."

  "Yes, sir." I was sure I would have more choices than two.

  His voice became icy. "Well, Dunham, what are you going to do?"

  "I'll save the ship, sir," I said, not having a clue as to where his line of speculation was leading.