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

  In the northeast corner of the Sea of Japan, the city of Vladivostok stands like an amphitheater, with its center stage of Peter the Great Bay (zaliv Petra Velikogo) near the Sino-Soviet border. During the 1920s, V. I. Lenin had acknowledged the city's enormous distance from the center of the emerging Soviet Union, but he supported its obvious strategic importance as its population increased, finally exceeding 400,000 by 1965.

  Although the city was an industrial center in its own right, proximity to the sea provided for its growth and sustenance and led to the building of deep-water moorings, construction of new freight warehouses during the early 1960s, and, finally, development of nuclear weapons storage and support facilities. Further, the seaport's geographic location offered the Soviet Union a gateway to the Pacific and increased the military significance of Vladivostok, as ships and submarines of the Soviet Navy traversed the Sea of Japan. The pride of the Soviet Navy by 1965, the seaport was a thriving east coast military facility because of its year-round accessibility through the Kuril Island choke points to the northeast and the Strait of Korea to the south. Connected by air and rail links directly to Moscow, Vladivostok allowed the Soviet Navy to expand its extensive Eastern Fleet and to prepare nuclear missile-carrying submarines for their journeys across the far waters of the Pacific Ocean in the direction of the United States.

  Protests against U.S. military involvement in Vietnam expanded in January 1967 when government authorities revealed that, to date, nearly six hundred U.S. aircraft had been destroyed during the course of the war. On 31 January, thousands of people representing the New York-based Committee of Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam conducted a protest march before the White House in Washington, D.C., and demanded a de-escalation of the war. Approximately two hundred members of a fundamentalist Protestant group simultaneously staged a counterdemonstration in support of the war.

  The intensity of protests increased as religious representatives and students across the country, from San Francisco to Harvard University in Massachusetts, staged demonstrations and made speeches against the war. During this time, the United States began launching artillery attacks on targets in North Vietnam, while simultaneously mining rivers north of the DMZ.

  On 16 March 1967, President Johnson signed a bill authorizing $4.5 billion in supplemental funds for the war. Soon thereafter, Director of Selective Service Lt. Gen. Lewis B. Hershey and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara announced a new lottery draft system for calling up men into military service, abolished the previously established deferments of graduate students, and changed the rules so as to draft nineteen-year-olds first.

  U.S. government sources announced on 30 March that a record 274 Americans had been killed in Vietnam during the week of 19 March. This raised total combat fatalities to more than 8,560.

  On 10 May, the United States and the Soviet Union sent vigorous protests and counterprotests to each other after a "brush-by" (near-collision) incident between the Soviet destroyer Besslednyi and the U.S. destroyer Walker during antisubmarine maneuvers in the Sea of Japan, 375 miles east of the Soviet port of Vladivostok. Accusing the USSR of harassment, the U.S. Defense Department charged that the Soviet destroyer had engaged in a "dangerous performance" in violation of the international rules of the sea.

  By the time the Viperfish reached the mid-Pacific, we had managed to survive fires, floodings, reactor shutdowns, loss of electrical power, and every other condition that Captain Gillon could create to test our response capabilities. Within a kaleidoscope of activity, our lives cycled from quiet sleep in the stillness of our strange, peaceful world of seemingly motionless suspension to sudden jumping and running as loudspeakers blasted out the next disaster. What we rookies did not know, we learned through repetition and painful experience, mixed with a continuous barrage of instructions from the qualified men telling us what to do if flooding or fires should threaten our underwater existence.

  The process of creating drills required considerable ingenuity by the veteran chiefs. A proper drill had to carry maximum mental impact and demand the most rapid action in the shortest period of time. This was usually accomplished by generating a mind-numbing pattern of flooding water, billowing smoke, or destructive noises. Other effects, such as men hollering, lights going out, turbines screeching to a halt, and loudspeakers blaring calls for emergency surfacing, all added to the perceived success of the drill.

  One of the most frightening drills, besides those that made us think we were going to sink or blow up, was the steam-leak drill. Steam was necessary to drive the turbines, which, in turn, generated electricity and propulsion power. Extremely hot, high-pressure steam was called "live steam," widely considered to be unbelievably nasty stuff if it ever came into contact with human skin.

  Our first steam-leak drill was, of course, impressively realistic, complete with loudspeakers announcing, "Steam leak! Steam leak in the engine room!" and lights going out as various turbines suddenly shut down. I had been studying our ship's SINS (ship's inertial navigation system) in the midships section when the "leak" started. By the time I had raced through the tunnel into the engine room, everybody was hollering directions and the air was filled with steam. More lights went out and then rapidly flashed on again, as the electricians tried to maintain electrical power with falling steam pressure. Our hospital corpsman, a tall black man named Baldridge, whom we called "Doc," stood in the middle of the misty surrealistic scene with a steam suit in hand.

  Since reporting on board, I had worried about Doc Baldridge. We all trusted him, but we were concerned about the potential for serious medical problems, such as a surgical emergency, and what he might do to us while waiting for backup. He had placed a big operating room light over one of our dining room tables in readiness for cutting, and I had thanked God a thousand times that my appendix had been removed when I was a child. Theoretically, if any major surgical problems did occur, we would surface and a helicopter or surface craft would provide quick access to medical doctors and a more comprehensive health care system than we had on the Viperfish. We all knew, however, that we probably would be unable to surface during the operation of our secret mission.

  "This is the steam suit, Dunham," Doc Baldridge hollered. "Put it on, and you can find the leak."

  The thing looked like thermal underwear, several inches thick, with a reflective aluminum-type exterior coating and a tiny plastic viewing port. I struggled my way into the suit and tried to see out the viewing port, but it was opaque from the steam of my body. Although I heard the whooshing sound of air being pumped into the suit from somewhere, I felt like I would probably have a heat stroke before I could find any steam leak. With the hood of the suit pulled down tightly over my head, I could hear the faraway muffled voice of Doc Baldridge yelling, "Find the steam leak!"

  A gigantic "Michelin-Man," with my thick arms sticking out at thirty-degree angles, I grunted and hobbled down the upper-level engine-room corridor. Feeling like I was suffocating, I slowly rotated my body to the left and right. I looked for the source of steam but could see nothing more than the clouded inside of the visor.

  "I can't see anything!" I hollered. My voice, trapped within the suit, echoed off the layers of insulation surrounding me.

  "I can't see anything!" I shrieked again and wondered what would happen to my face if I took off the hood in an area of live steam. I turned and looked back up the passageway for Doc Baldridge. As I tried to hold my breath to minimize the fogging, I felt a rising sensation of claustrophobia and suffocation.

  Cursing the steam, I finally ripped the hood from my head. I fully expected my face to fry in a blast of searing live steam. Instead, I saw a peaceful, business-as-usual engine room, everything humming along, with no steam or other unnatural disasters.

  The loudspeaker blared, "Now, secure from steam-leak drill." I climbed out of the steam suit and tracked down Doc Baldridge.

  "Any questions about the steam suit?" he asked, grinning his delight at the sight of my hair matted with s
weat and steam moisture.

  "How am I supposed to save anybody when I can't see anything?" I asked.

  His grin faded. "You couldn't see through the viewing port?"

  "Fogged over."

  "But we were pumping compressed air into the suit."

  "It didn't work, Doc. I couldn't have saved myself, much less anybody else. Do you want to try it?"

  A half hour later, Doc had replaced the broken connector at the back of the suit. Our ability to save lives in the event of a real steam leak was now considerably enhanced. Of more practical significance for that moment, however, was that another signature appeared on my qualifications card and I had moved another increment closer to receiving my dolphins.

  The drills finally diminished in frequency, and I began to settle into the routine of being at sea. Every twelve hours, I climbed through the tunnel and stood my engine-room watch in front of the large propulsion throttle wheels. After each watch, I was busy with further sessions of studying schematics or reviewing systems with qualified crew members. A couple of times each day, I attempted to take a quick nap before another drill dropped on us. It was physically impossible to sleep for more than three or four hours at a time. During those days, I learned the true value of strong, black Navy coffee.

  Among the crew, I discovered numerous subsets of men scattered throughout the boat. Depending on qualification status; time on board; type of work performed; and whether officer, enlisted man, or civilian, each man, of course, was unique. The Viperfish contained a menagerie of men with a pecking order defined by military protocol — Captain Gillon at the top and the rookies (non-qual pukes) at the bottom. The civilian scientists, always busy with their project in the hangar compartment, were located somewhere in the middle, I guessed at the time, possibly closer to the top than the bottom.

  Although I was a rookie, a green nonqualified enlisted man with nothing to contribute as I learned the ways of the Viperfish, I was never made to feel inconsequential. As an emerging nuclear reactor operator, I was acknowledged to be an essential part of the upcoming mission. Reactor operator Randy Nicholson would finish his six-year service in the Navy within a few months, and he seemed driven to show me everything he knew about the Viperfish's reactor system before he left. Like the other men of the crew, he repeatedly emphasized the importance of teamwork to the success of any mission that lay ahead. From the cook in the galley to the nuclear engineering officer in the engine room, from the scientist in the hangar compartment to the seaman blowing the head, every member of the team was essential to the mission, and Nicholson never let me forget it.

  Occasionally, light moments broke the tension of drills and the grind of qualifications. About two-thirds of the way across the Pacific Ocean, for instance, we were deeply submerged and gliding nearly twenty thousand feet above the Pioneer Fracture Zone when the voice of Paul Mathews emerged from the loudspeakers. I had just climbed into my rack for a couple of hours' sleep when my eyes popped open at his announcement.

  "Now, attention all hands!" he said authoritatively over the loudspeakers. "A full-grown sea bat has just been isolated from the number two torpedo tube. It is contained, and it is now on display in the hangar compartment."

  Jerking the curtain away from the front of my rack, I looked down the dark passageway in the general direction of the hangar. I had heard of fish caught in different sections of our superstructure during previous runs, but a sea bat was something entirely new-and caught in the torpedo tube?

  I tried to recall the structure of the Viperfish's torpedo tubes. The forward bulkheads at the front end of the hangar compartment contained a total of four torpedo tubes, each twenty-one inches in diameter. I thought it amazing that the bat-thing from the sea, whatever the creature might look like, had somehow become sucked into one of the tubes and even more amazing that the torpedomen were able to capture it. Almost everything I had seen on the Viperfish so far was relatively amazing, however, and this event didn't seem that much different. As such, I decided, it must be important enough to investigate.

  As I hiked up to the hangar compartment, I wondered why the other men on the boat seemed to be showing remarkably little interest in this creature of the sea. I climbed through the watertight door into the hangar and passed the civilians and Lieutenant Dobkin, all apparently oblivious to the extraordinary event just a few feet away.

  Near the forward segment of the Viperfish, where the torpedo tubes filled the bulkhead, Spike Norstrum, one of the larger torpedomen, stood next to a black plastic bucket. Water had splashed on the deck around the bucket. Norstrum closely watched the bucket; he was obviously guarding the creature in it.

  "Hello, Spike," I said, trying not to divert his attention from his hostage. "I just heard the announcement from Chief Mathews. Is the thing still in the bucket?" I peered into the dark water.

  Norstrum grimaced and said, "Can you believe it? I've been on boats for fifteen years, and I have never seen one until today.' He frowned and added, "The thing is still in there, but its kinda hard to see since the light is so dim up here. I'm just waiting for Mr. Vogel to tell us what to do with it." He was referring to Peter Vogel, our fire-control officer.

  The surface of the water vibrated some, partly because the hull was shaking from the propulsion action of the screws and partly, I was sure, from the movements of the creature.

  "Is it still alive?" I asked.

  "I think so, although the water hasn't moved much lately." Norstrum narrowed his eyes and studied the bucket.

  "Do you have a flashlight, Spike?" I asked, straining to see down into the bucket. I wondered whether the bat would jump out at me if I shined light into its new home. The forward end of the compartment near the torpedo tubes was nearly dark, the light blocked by the torpedoes stacked everywhere around us.

  "Here's a light," Norstrum said, producing a tiny penlight with a dim yellow light. "It's not real bright, but it should give you a good feel for the thing." I thought I saw a trace of a smile flash across Spike's face.

  I turned on the light and pointed the beam down into the bucket's dark interior. Most of the light reflected off the surface of the vibrating water; I stepped closer to the bucket and leaned over to gain a closer look. Down in the depths of the water, I thought I saw something dark at the bottom, something that was still alive. I leaned closer and strained to see if the dark shape was making any movement.

  The plastic baseball bat bounced off my hind end with a loud whack at exactly the moment I realized the bucket contained only water. I emitted a surprised holler as the flashlight flew from my hand and crashed against one of the torpedo tubes. Six or seven men immediately emerged from dark hiding places around us, all of them laughing and joining with Spike Norstrum as they hollered together, "The sea bat gotcha, you non-qual puke!"

  As I rubbed my hind end and acknowledged that I was now qualified in Sea Bats 101A, one of the civilians at the other end of the hangar hollered, "Here comes another one!" As the watertight door slammed shut, everybody in the compartment disappeared as quickly as they had appeared, leaving Spike Norstrum and me standing alone next to the bucket. The plastic bat disappeared behind one of the panels near Spike just before we heard the voice of the next victim.

  "Where's this sea bat thing?" Richard Daniels's voice boomed across the compartment. "Is it still alive?"

  I picked up the flashlight from the deck and headed aft.

  "Helluva thing, Richard," I said, shaking my head and pointing my thumb back in the direction of the bucket. "I've never seen anything like it. Here, this flashlight will help give you a better look. It's amazing-"

  "Thanks, Rog," he said with so much sincerity that I felt a brief flash of guilt. The last thing I heard before I quickly exited the compartment was Daniels asking Spike curious questions about the nature of this remarkable creature called a sea bat.

  For the next several days, I studied the Viperfish torpedo tubes, the firing control system, and everything I could find about torpedoes. I read b
ooks on the subject, studied the fire-control panels, and listened to officers and enlisted men describe details of the complex system. I learned about inner doors and outer doors and the improbability of anything from the sea ever getting into the tubes. Finally, Norstrum quizzed me and signed my qualifications card, which indicated that I was now qualified on the Viperfish torpedo fire control system-including everything there was to know about sea bats.

  At the end of our submerged cruise we broke through the surface of the frigid, glassy-smooth ocean off the forested coast of Washington and quietly glided up the Strait of Juan de Fuca toward the Navy port at Bremerton. Several of us scrambled up the ladder to take advantage of the view from the large flat deck. The morning air was crisp and cold; the skies were a clear blue. Even though we had been submerged for less than two weeks, the fresh air was invigorating and refreshing, in sharp contrast to the steamy, oil-laden atmosphere within the confines of our boat, especially in the engine room.

  As Captain Gillon, the lookouts, and the officer of the deck watched from the top of our sail, the Viperfish progressed up the strait. Those of us topside wandered around the deck in our heavy foul-weather coats and took in the scenery on either side of the boat. Peering into the forests, we searched for bears, waving girls, or anything else of interest.

  The skyline of Seattle loomed in the distance, a memory passed through my mind of my father's telling me about my great-grandfather when he had entered Seattle from the east one hundred years ago. His covered wagon had passed through freezing snow-clogged passes near Mount Rainier. He had been a man filled with hope, my father said, as he challenged the forces of nature and planned for the future during his long trip to Seattle.

  I would tell my father, in a quiet moment long after my years on the Viperfish were finished, about that pioneer's great-grandson approaching Seattle from the opposite direction exactly one hundred years later. The man of the newer generation was only twenty-one years of age. He was riding over the cold ocean waters on a nuclear submarine with a top secret project, and he also was filled with hope as he challenged other forces of nature and prepared for the future.