Spy Sub: A Top Secret Mission to the Bottom of the Pacific Page 20

  "Clear the bridge! Clear the bridge!" Young called out, and the men scrambled down the long ladder into the safety of the Viperfish.

  "Dive! Dive!" the chief's voice was broadcast throughout the boat as hatches were shut and we angled down again, away from the fury on the surface. Dropping hundreds of feet, we returned to our quiet existence beneath the sea.

  For the next two days, we conducted a mini-celebration of Paul's return and toasted the safe conclusion to his experience. He wouldn't shed his blankets. Staying in his rack most of this time, he seemed to be always cold, always struggling to return his body temperature to normal. His response to our kidding-to such questions as, "How was liberty?" — was a silent gaze. We were aware of a fundamental change in him that had resulted from his experience. He told us no details about the event; he wouldn't talk with us, other than to tell us again that he had never been able to see the boat after his rail chain had broken away from the deck of the Viperfish.

  We cruised slowly at about four hundred feet for the next three days, our bow again pointing steeply down and our speed slowed by the difficulty in maintaining a stable depth because of the problem with the hydraulic mechanism. We waited for the storm to pass, and we accepted the dangers of an unstable submarine. There was no consideration of any more trips to the sur- face until the waters returned to a relative calm. When the conditions were finally right, we surfaced again and the problem was readily resolved. Soon, we were back at four hundred feet, level and steady, en route to Pearl Harbor, still six days away.

  Having a "doctor-patient" relationship with Paul Mathews, Doc Baldridge never did share much information with us about his treatment of the man. He gave his patient some bourbon from tiny medicinal flasks reserved for such times, and he kept the chief wrapped up. Doc never said much about his psychological state or the mental effects of a near-death experience. To me, Paul seemed depressed, but I also thought that Doc Baldridge was becoming depressed, as well as everybody else throughout the Viperfish.

  Because we never saw much of Paul after his rescue, I asked Doc Baldridge what the problem was.

  "Wouldn't you be a little shut down after something like that?" he asked me in return. His voice carried a little more anger than I think he intended.

  "Of course," I said. "I was just wondering-"

  "Paul's doing fine, but I don't have much time to spend with him since I have to work on the film badges, check the garbage gas measurements with our own oxygen levels, update everybody's records with-"

  Holding up my hands, I tried to stop him. "It's okay," I said, "It's okay."

  "There's not much more I can do here, on this boat out here," he said. "You know-"

  "I understand, Doc," I said. "If you want to get off submarines, just put in a 'non-vol' chit and you're on your way. Just remember they're killing-"

  "I know, I know," he said, exasperated. "They're killing four hundred men a week over there in the goddamn war, and a lot of them are corpsmen."

  Eventually, we were all depressed. Paul lay in his rack, almost noncommunicative. The captain and the men working with the Special Project were frustrated and feeling defeated. The nukes wondered why so much work was going into moving us back and forth, from one unknown place to the next, where we could fail and fail again. The entire morale of the Viperfish at this point consisted of gloom and doom, defeat and frustration. In that setting, Brian Lane started down his path of becoming internally lost at sea.

  At the time, Lane and I had been standing our watches together in the engine room. Sitting side by side at our control panels, we controlled the machinery that provided propulsion power and electricity to the Viperfish. He was as depressed as the rest of us, but he started to develop a strangeness, beyond my experience or knowledge, that seemed to eclipse what the rest of us were feeling. We were all a little strange in many ways after being at sea, mostly submerged, for two months. I couldn't concentrate on French lessons or anything else; I was continually tense and irritable, neither of which was a part of my usual character; and I felt like I was just trudging along in doing my job-standing watch and sleeping, standing watch and sleeping some more. I didn't care much about the evening movie, and I was just working with the rest of the crew to get us back to Pearl Harbor. There, we would be able to blow off steam and forget about failed missions, the capture of intelligence vessels on the high seas, and the Vietnam-inspired disruptions of our society.

  Starting the mid-watch that night, I took details from Richard Daniels about the condition of the nuclear reactor, logged the initial data on my reactor log sheet, and finally sat in the chair in front of the control panel. All routine, this watch was the same as all the others. Next to me, Lane took his watch from Svedlow, performed a similar function with the electrical equipment, logged his data, and watched his panel that controlled circuit breakers and other electrical systems. Behind me, Lieutenant Pintard and Chief Linaweaver paced back and forth as they watched over us and the engine room.

  "Hey, bruddah, how's it going?" I hollered over the noise to Lane. I just wanted to open the door to any thoughts he might have about the nuclear system, our mission, or life in general. The four-hour watch ahead seemed like a very long time.

  When he turned to me, he looked strange. I was about ready to tell him to knock it off, that he was giving me the creeps, when I noticed his hands were shaking. He said, "You can't get to me."

  There it was again. Wrong comment, wrong context, simply the wrong thing to say.

  "Nobody's trying to get to you, Brian," I said, watching the meters that monitored our nuclear reactor. "I just asked what's happening. Looking forward to seeing the wife and kids?"

  He smiled and another strange look, an almost spacey look, came my way. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck beginning to rise.

  "You guys can't get to me," Lane said.

  I decided that the man was becoming too stressed out, so I turned my attention back to the reactor panel. Watching the meters and logging the data, I occasionally thought about how good it would be to see Keiko again.

  Speaking to nobody in general, Lane began to babble in long sentences that didn't connect well. As he talked, I watched my panel, thought some more about Keiko, and wondered how soon channel fever would set in as we moved closer to the Islands.

  Lane kept talking for another hour, until both Pintard and I implored him to be quiet. He was getting on our nerves, we said, and he wasn't saying anything all that profound anyway. Each time we said anything to him, he got that strange look in his eyes again and told us, "You can't get to me."

  Finally, Chief Linaweaver had had enough.

  "Lane, I'm ordering you to be quiet," he said tersely.

  The strange look followed, the small smile of knowing a tiny secret appeared, and again he said, "You can't get to me."

  At that moment, my friend, Sandy Gallivan, standing watch in the control center, squeaked a call through on the engine-room telephone to tell me about overhearing that there would be a flooding drill within the next five minutes. Of all the drills we hated the most, the flooding drill headed the list.

  We were always aware that the Viperfish cruised above a defined crush depth, that our lives depended on preventing any inadvertent movement to that depth, and that flooding was the one event that could quickly take us to the crush depth. Because of that fear, we worked very hard not to think about it. Flooding drills, even on the rare occasions when we knew they were only drills, brought this awareness to the surface of our thinking and triggered the collection of fears that was part of the psychological territory of the Submarine Service.

  Lane began to talk again, and the shaking of his hands became intense.

  "Lane, for Christ's sake," I began with exasperation, "will you stop-"

  At that instant, the roaring of incoming water drowned out all other noises.

  Lieutenant Pintard jumped to his feet and grabbed his microphone as the loudspeaker above our head began blasting Billy Elstner's voice from the
lower-level engine room into the maneuvering room.

  "Flooding! Flooding! Lower-level engine room!"

  Pintard hollered orders to isolate the leak. I stood up to concentrate on my reactor panel and watch for anything that could shut us down.

  "Losing vacuum in the starboard condenser!" Elstner hollered, followed immediately by half the lights in the engine room shutting off and more alarms going off. The men in the control center instantly announced, "Surface, surface, surface!" and the Viperfish angled steeply upward. I glanced down the passageway and, with a shock that hit me like a physical blow, saw Lane running from the maneuvering area. His empty chair was swinging back and forth in front of the electrical control panel.

  Immediately, without orders from Lieutenant Pintard and without comment from anyone in the area, one of our electricians, a big red-haired man named Tom Braniff, who was stand- ing watch at the steam plant control panel, bolted from his watch station at the throttles and took over the electrical control panel.

  As a couple of machinist mates chased Lane across the engine room, another jumped into the throttleman's position and answered the bell driving us up to the surface. Braniff began flipping switches across the complex panel, cross-connecting electrical circuits, and bringing life to our electrical system as the machinist mates shut down the leak. My reactor never twitched once throughout the entire process.

  The machinist mates caught up with Lane near the watertight door at the forward section of the engine room just as Chief O'Dell announced on the loudspeakers, "Secure from flooding drill." Lane was shaking badly. He was trying to talk, telling them that nothing could get to him, nothing would be too much for him to tolerate. They took him to Captain Harris's stateroom and called for Doc Baldridge. Lane was relieved of his duties, and the corpsman started him on mild sedatives to calm him down for the remainder of the trip to Pearl Harbor.

  The stress of our mission, compounded by the negative presures from our fractured society, must have pushed Lane to the edge, I guessed. He must have known that he was becoming impaired long before the rest of his shipmates, who knew little about such things, could help him to seek treatment. Following a pattern that any of us might have pursued, he continued to try to perform his duties. He stood his watches even when the pressured speech pattern of the impending breakdown gave testimony to the problems lying below the surface. When the paranoia generated his wall of defense, preventing anything around him from "getting" to him, he was able to stretch himself to continue his work a little longer until he could return home to his wife and children and find comfort for his tortured soul. Brian Lane gave it his best shot. He tried with every coping mechanism that he had available not to allow his inner turmoil to stop him from fulfilling his assignment before the electrical control panel.

  The final days of our run to Pearl Harbor pushed us further to the point of becoming intolerant of anything and everything. With Chief Mathews still recovering from his near tragedy and Brian Lane walking back and forth with a half-smile and glassy eyes, we were all beginning to trudge to our watch stations. News bulletins told of more disciplinary actions against the men of the nuclear Navy by Admiral Rickover, more riots by students against our military, and expanding, drug use throughout society. The world seemed to be falling apart.

  The last news bulletin that I read before deciding to read them no more included an order "from the top" that no longer would qualified submariners be thrown overboard. This tradition had been determined to be too dangerous.

  So, when Baby Bobbie's body odor finally "got" to everybody on the Viperfish, several men took corrective action by thoroughly saturating his sheets with talcum powder. The next time the man swung himself into his rack, a huge cloud of powder puffed into the air. This led to an instant fury that carried all the way to the chief petty officers' desks. Soon thereafter, we received a new directive-a direct order not to coat sheets with talcum powder, no matter how bad anyone might smell.

  The attack of channel fever was especially intense. Most of us stayed awake for two days before arriving at Pearl. We finally surfaced several miles off Oahu and stationed the maneuvering watch. Leaving the nightmare of the Soviet sector behind us, we glided up the warm channel waters toward the submarine base. The traditional flowered lei was placed around our sail, and a boat delivered an admiral and a team of hospital corpsmen and doctors to our boat. As the admiral inspected the Viperfish, the medical personnel examined Mathews and Davidson. They took Lane into protective custody for ambulance transportation to Tripler Army Hospital, the first step in the process of ending his career in the Submarine Service. He would eventually receive a medical discharge from the Navy.

  Our mission failure was symbolized by the absence of the broom tied to the top of our periscope. The broom represented a "clean sweep of the enemy to the bottom of the ocean"-a symbolic message of a successful mission, a declaration of victory that had been used since the days of U-boats and conventional submarines. Without the broom, the approaching Navy brass would know of the Viperfish's failure before we even tied up to the pier.

  Keiko was finishing her master's degree and preparing for our wedding in Los Angeles, so Marc Birken and I again faced the row of colorful and beautiful people with nobody waiting for us. I walked toward the brow to leave the boat and was stopped by an enlisted man in charge of distributing mail.

  "You are Petty Officer Dunham, right?" the man, a pimply-faced, short fellow with a whining voice, asked.

  "That's right," I answered tersely.

  "Good," the man said. "I'm supposed to hand deliver this to you from the Honolulu Police Department, and I need you to sign here." He handed me an envelope covered with official police markings, and I signed the receipt for the delivery. "And, this brick is for you, too," he said, tossing me a stack of sixty-two letters from Keiko, one for every day I was gone.

  I opened the Honolulu Police Department envelope and discovered a warrant for my arrest. I had failed to answer their directions to fix my defective front windshield, the warrant said, and if I did not turn myself in they would come and get me.

  Shortly after Chief O'Dell announced that Paul Mathews was "non-volunteering" from submarine duty, I discovered that somebody had stolen the speed-shifting gearbox from my '55 Chevy while we were at sea. Feeling a mind-numbing anger begin to emerge, I wandered into the submarine barracks and tried to figure out how to get a couple of drinks in Waikiki without a car and without the risk of being arrested.

  Marc, sitting on his rack, was waiting for me. He looked serious.

  "Hey, Rog, did you see the news?" he asked.

  "No. And I'm not sure I want to see the news, Marc. Who's rioting about what, now?"

  "They just showed it on TV. Robert Kennedy was assassinated last night by some slimy character known as Sirhan something-or-other."

  I looked at him in silence. Then, I turned and picked up my seabag. Slamming it against my rack, I started cursing the entire civilized world with genuine passion. I cursed the Honolulu Police Department, the thieves in the night, the banana-smoking druggies, the assassins, the student activists, and I cursed the nonexistent targets at the bottom of the ocean.

  When I was finished, Marc congratulated me for my eloquence and mentioned that he wouldn't be around for the next Viperfish patrol. He was finishing his tour in the Navy, he said, and going back to Ohio, a place with fewer disruptions, to sail on Lake Erie where waves did not exceed six inches. Also, he planned to go back to school-to a peaceful institute of higher learning called Kent State University, whose students knew how to behave themselves. He was going to be a civilian, and he hoped that the Viperfish and her crew would have better luck on the next mission.

  We both knew that the depleted uranium core of the Viperfish would allow for only one more mission to the distant waters of the Golden Dragon. Soon, she would be taken out of active service to undergo nuclear reactor refueling operations at Mare Island, California. I would have just enough time for my wedding in Los Angel
es and a honeymoon in Canada before our final voyage to the North Pacific to continue our search for the mysterious target at twenty thousand feet below the surface of the sea.

  12. The final search

  No sunlight illuminates the impenetrable black water concealing the secrets at the bottom of the North Pacific Ocean. At a latitude of 35° N, light rarely penetrates the surface of the sea for more than a hundred feet on the clearest days, and it never reaches through the three miles of water separating surface craft from the mud below. At twenty thousand feet below the surface, there is only a somber dark peace far removed from the turmoil of the world above.

  Entering the silence with the noise of her own destruction, the submarine PL-751 fell like a freight train to seventeen thousand feet below her crush depth. Breaking up from the forces of the high-pressure water, she spilled her lifeblood of men and equipment as she accelerated to the bottom of the ocean. The larger parts of the submarine crashed into the ocean floor with such force that their retrieval by any surface craft, struggling over the pieces in years to come, might be technically impossible. As the larger central section rolled on its side in a final agonal movement beyond the control of any human being, the sediment stirred by the impact slowly began to settle across the lifeless remnants. The once-powerful Soviet instrument of destruction had been transformed into a collection of broken and silent objects.

  In the silence of the months that followed, nothing disturbed the remaining bodies of the. Soviet sailors contained within the hull of the destroyed vessel. More than four tons of pressure compressed every square inch of skin on reaching the bodies through openings in ruptured pipes and destroyed bulkheads that had buckled and caved under such extremes of pressure.

  Outside the broken ruins of the PL-751, the outstretched bones of a skeleton, lying on the mud, could not touch a large steel Fish that came from more distant waters and slowly glided past the area. As the Fish moved closer, controlled by men working in another world five miles from the scene of destruction, her brilliant flashing strobe pierced the black shroud covering the ocean floor. With a subtle change in direction, the Fish turned and directly approached the remains of the disaster. Methodically, it searched for the evidence that had been awaiting its arrival with the infinite patience of the dead.