Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (15 page)

Back on Halibut, all started out well. She made it back to the transponder grid without incident. This time the fish swam without a snag. Grainy sonar images played continuously on the screens of the Bat Cave, a fuzzy reproduction of a far-off planet 17,000 feet below.

The submarine and her crew searched for nearly two months, but there was still no sight of a Soviet missile. Then the cable system broke down again, and the electronics that communicated with the fish shorted out. All this was nothing new. The crew had long ago figured out how to jury-rig a quick fix at sea. The entire operation should have taken less than an hour. The problem was that it had to be engineered on the surface. The men would have to brave Halibut's deck, in the 3:00 A.M. dark.

Up until now, day had blurred into night for these men 300 feet below sunlight. Drifting deep in the quiet of their underwater universe, they had felt little of the big ocean swells above. But now, Commander Moore had no choice. His men would have to face the rough waters of the surface.

As he gave the order to blow ballast, a three-man repair crew began to squeeze into their uncomfortable wet suits. Among them was machinist's mate chief Charlie Hammonds. He waited until Moore gave the order. The captain had been watching the swells, waiting for a time when the deck wasn't taking on water. After a while he gave the nod.

"Flip on your light," said senior chief Skeaton Norton as Hammonds readied to climb out the hatch onto Halibut's hull. Over their wet suits, the repair crew wore life jackets decorated with small, canister-shaped, battery-powered strobe lights. They had been designed for the Air Force, part of jet-fighter pilots' rescue packs.

"I'll turn it on in time," Hammonds answered in his typical hardnosed fashion. The mechanic was gruff, 5'8" tall, balding, and muscular. He was a loner but had been dubbed "Uncle Charlie" on hoard.

"You'll turn it on before you step out that door," Norton answered in his toughest chief-of-the-boat voice.

Hammonds knew an order when he heard one. He answered with a simple flip of a switch.

In the night black and fog, the tiny jet-fighter light barely illuminated Hammond's face as he stepped out and hooked a safety line through an open notch on the safety track that ran almost flush with the deck the length of the sub. He made his way down the wet, narrow black deck, then over to the front of the sail where he grabbed hold of a rail. He was in as good a position as any submariner could be, considering that he was standing outside at night, on a submarine, in the middle of the rolling ocean.

Then the ocean reached out, as if it were trying to pull the entire submarine back down into the depths where she belonged. A rogue wave rose higher than sixty feet, reaching over the conning tower, crashing gallons through the open control room hatch, washing over the deck and grabbing Hammonds along with it. He was pulled toward the front of the submarine, his safety line running the length of the track. The line should have been enough to hold him on board, and it would have been enough had the wave been less powerful, had he been pulled less far. Only Hammonds was pulled all the way forward, near the torpedo room hatch, to another notch in the safety track, there by design to allow men to hook their lines on and secure themselves. Only now, as Hammonds zipped past, that tiny notch became his exit from the track. Suddenly unlatched, he was washed into the rough waters.

Inside the conning tower, that same wave caught a young lieutenant who sprained both arms as he desperately held on. By the time he emerged sputtering, he could see Charlie Hammonds was gone. Men on deck began shouting: "Man overboard!"

Now a lot of people were shouting that. They began to search according to drill, what would have been normal routine on a surface ship. But this was a nuclear submarine. And submarine crews had come to spend most of their time below decks and underwater. Back in the diesel clays, the days of Cochino and Tusk, this kind of casualty was a constant threat. But now, few if any men serving in the nuclear Navy had ever experienced this, and the recovery drill for a man overboard was seldom practiced.

"Who's lost?"

"What happened?"

"It's Charlie. We lost Charlie."

The chorus went on as men raced to their battle stations. One of the officers jumped up to the periscope. Halibut continued to rock back and forth, creating a dizzying view of the waters outside.

"I see a light out there," the officer shouted.

"Stay on it," someone, probably the captain, shouted back.

Hammonds was seventy-five yards away, off the starboard beam. Halibut had been moving slowly forward and away from him.

"Back emergency, back emergency," Moore shouted to the engine room, fully aware that if they lost sight of Hammond's light, he might never be found.

The engine room poured on power, kicking Halibut into reverse. The sub vibrated, then bucked, as her screws churned against her forward momentum. Someone shouted into the loudspeaker from the engine room that the sub's engines were overheating.

"Keep your bell on!" Moore yelled back. He knew backing at too high a speed for too long could overheat the turbines, but he was convinced Halibut could take it. She had been designed for emergency maneuvers. Besides, there was no choice but to take the risk. They had to get to Hammonds.

By now there were men on both periscopes, probably the executive officer and the lead quartermaster. They stared out into the black desperately trying to hang on to the distant glow of Hammonds's tiny light as other men set up a far more powerful search light.

Four divers scrambled into their wet suits and raced to the control room. Two went out on deck and into the water. Another man stood beneath the bridge hatch, sweltering in his wet suit, ready to jump into the ocean if the other divers got into trouble.

Cook scrambled toward the Bat Cave shouting that he was going to reel in the fish.

"Fuck the fish," Moore shouted after him.

Cook went on anyway.

Captain Moore climbed out and onto the sail with a pair of binoculars, and began tracking Hammonds's light himself.

Storm and ocean in his eyes and ears, Hammonds couldn't see Halibut bearing down on him. He was swimming frantically without any direction. Then he heard a voice in the distance, a voice saying, "Hold on chief, we're going to get you." Hammonds relaxed. It was the most important thing he could have done. In his wet suit, hypothermia wasn't going to be the problem, but panic kills. He held onto that voice, the voice of his captain, even as his tiny light blinked out. Moments later Halibut was alongside him. Divers leapt into the water, and tied a line under his arms. Then he was pulled aboard. He had been in the icy water fifteen minutes, and Moore knew it was only luck that the chief hadn't been lost for good. The moment he was lowered through the hatch, Hugh "Doc" Wheat, the crew's corpsman, began treating him with brandy, the most effective medicine on board.

Hammonds just kept repeating, "I couldn't see anything, I couldn't see anything." He was shivering violently. Doc Wheat prescribed more brandy. Chief Gary L. Patterson asked for brandy as well, but Doc wasn't going for it. He was brought to the showers to be warmed, then put to bed. Still, it would take hours for the shock to wear off, hours the crew spent decorating Halibut with signs declaring, "Welcome back, Charlie. How was liberty?"

The humor may have been lost on Hammonds. His crewmates would tell and re-tell the tale of his harrowing swim at every Halibut reunion for years, but Hammonds would never show up to listen. Still, while they were at sea, Hammonds amazed everyone by going back out onto the deck, almost daring the ocean to try again. Nobody expected it of him. Just about any other man might have stayed below, might have been too terrified to face the rolling waves. But as long as Hammonds was on the boat-and he would be for another monthhe would refuse to give in to fear.

In early April, Moore turned his boat for home. He was coming back empty-handed. He and his men never did find a missile. But he was also coming home with every single one of his men, and he didn't mind the trade-off, not one bit. Besides, he was about to get the chance of a lifetime to redeem himself and his submarine.

Halibut pulled into Pearl Harbor on April 11, 1968, the sixtyeighth anniversary of the day the Navy purchased its first submarine. The enlisted men attended the "Submarine Birthday Ball," and the officers gathered at what the locals called the "Pink Lady," the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki Beach. There, they made their way through three or four cases of champagne that one of them had stacked under their table, as well as a case of liquor that had been swiped from an admiral's suite.

As they celebrated, an amazing detective story was unfolding. A dozen Soviet ships had poured out into the Pacific, moving slowly, hanging away at the ocean with active sonar. They were obviously looking for something. Soon it became clear that the Soviets were looking for one of their own. They had lost a submarine.

The USS Barb (SSN-596) had been sitting off the Soviet port at Vladivostok when the frantic search began. Barb's CO Bernard M. "Bud" Kauderer had never seen anything like it. Four or five Soviet submarines rushed out to sea and began beating the ocean with active sonar. The submarines would dive, come back to periscope depth, then dive again.

The Soviets made no effort to avoid detection, no effort to hide. Their cries filled airwaves, shattering the air around Vladivostok with unencoded desperation.

"Charlie, Victor, Red Star, come in."

"Red Star, come in."

"Red Star, come in, come in, come in."

Back on shore, U.S. intelligence agents gathered around electronic intercept monitors and listened in. Barb watched, keeping radio silence. A message flashed in from shore command: "Stay on station." Kauderer felt a flash of frustration. He had planned on turning for home, planned on arriving in time to attend his only son's bar mitzvah. But now his boy would become a man without him. Kauderer was legally forbidden from telling his son why.

As Barb and other U.S. surveillance craft listened, it was clear that the Soviets had no idea where to find their submarine. Back in Washington, Bradley thought that he might know better.

For some time, Bradley's Office of Undersea Warfare had been keeping a long and frustrating vigil over an obscure set of Soviet submarine communications that U.S. intelligence had never figured out how to decode. The Soviets were using sophisticated transmitters that compressed the communications into microsecond bursts. Bradley thought the key to finding the missing sub lay in these indecipherable bursts of static.

Intelligence officers had figured out that the transmissions were coming from Soviet missile submarines on their way to and from patrols within firing range of U.S. shores. The United States had been monitoring and recording them using a series of reception stations that were built upon German technology-dozens of antennas were strategically placed along the Pacific Coast and in Alaska.

After a while, it didn't matter much that the bursts couldn't be decoded. There was a wealth of information to be found just within the pops and hisses. Slight variations in frequency distinguished one Soviet submarine from another, and the Soviets were so regimented that their submarines created a running itinerary for U.S. intelligence to follow as they ran, tag-team style, through the 4,000 miles from Kamchatka to one of their main patrol stations 750 to 1,000 miles northwest of Hawaii. A burst typically was sent when the submarines hit the deepsea marker just outside Kamchatka. Another was sent as they crossed the international dateline, about 2,000 miles away from the Soviet Union at 180 degrees longitude. A third marked their arrival on station.

It was as if they were saying "We are leaving.... We have hit 180 degrees longitude.... We are on station." The progress reports continued as the subs headed back to Kamchatka, and Bradley's men believed they could almost hear within the static the Soviet requests for fresh milk, fresh vegetables, vodka, women.

Now Bradley's team searched the communications records and found what they were looking for almost immediately. A Golf II submarine-one of a class of diesel subs that filled in between the first Zulu subs converted to carry missiles and the coming of the first Soviet nuclear-powered missile subs-had left port on February 24, 1968. The sub had been transmitting as usual until it hit midcourse. Then the transmissions stopped. There was no message when it crossed 180 degrees longitude; none saying it had left deep water; nothing that could be construed as a request for milk or fruit or anything else that would mark a safe return.

Bradley rushed the news to the Navy's top admirals: the Soviets had indeed lost a submarine, one that carried three ballistic missiles. He believed that the sub had to have gone down between the last burst transmission and the next expected one that never came, but the Soviets weren't looking anywhere near the area Bradley had pinpointed.

What if the United States could find the sub first? There in one place would be Soviet missiles, codehooks, a wealth of technological information-and Bradley thought he had the means to find it. Halibut might not have been able to find a relatively small missile fragment, but a submarine was a much bigger and better target.