Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (19 page)

Hardy found it first. There, right on Scorpion's track, was an explosion strong enough to tear through a steel hull and send a submarine, flooded, toward the ocean bottom.

There was no telling what caused the explosion. But 91 seconds later, there were a series of much louder blasts and there was no mistaking what caused those. Craven and Hardy were convinced that they had to be implosions, the agonized shouts of a submarine collapsing in on itself, compartment by compartment breaking down with the force of nearly 500 pounds of TNT.

The men on the submarine could have survived the initial explosion, if that sound was indeed from Scorpion. They might have lived long enough to see her walls begin to quaver inward, but that would have been all. Nobody could have lived through the first implosion. That shock would have sent the tail section and the bow section plowing into the center of the submarine, like a papier-mache model crushed in front and in back with a single, violent clap. The cataclysmic heat and the shock of that would have killed everyone on board in less than onehundredth of a second. The men would all be dead even as the ocean pressures continued to pummel Scorpion: a second implosion four seconds after the first, then another five seconds later, then two seconds, then three seconds, then seven seconds, then another and another and another. Three minutes and ten seconds after the first explosion, it would have been all over. Three minutes and ten seconds of destruction before the ocean went suddenly quiet.

Recorded only eighteen hours after Scorpion's crew had sent word they were heading home, the blasts meant that the sub had managed to travel less than 400 miles toward Norfolk.

It was now four days after Scorpion had been declared missing. Craven called the chief of Naval Operations to tell him that Scorpion was probably lost forever. Moorer wasn't ready to hear that. He wasn't about to tell the crewmen's families and the nation that there was no hope based on a bunch of tiny, almost indiscernible blips on paper. The fact that they occurred at a point right on Scorpion's track, at a moment when she was expected to be there, was enough to convince him only to declare the spot "an area of special interest." Then he waited to see whether any of the planes, ships, and submarines turned up anything else.

Rear Admiral Beshany, commander of the submarine force, began funneling all press inquiries to Craven. But the scientist remained under strict orders to avoid the word lost and even the suggestion of death. It wasn't until another six days had passed with no sign of Scorpion that Beshany and Moorer were forced to accept that Craven and Hardy were right. On June 5, Moorer announced that the Scorpion was "presumed lost." Hours later, the secretary of the Navy formally declared Captain Slattery and his ninety-eight other officers and crewmen legally dead.

But Scorpion was still missing. Without examining the remains of the sub, the Navy would never know what had gone wrong. Without that understanding, the nuclear submarine fleet would forever operate with the fear that a fatal flaw, somehow overlooked, could cause another catastrophe. Absent proof the crewmen were dead, their families might never be able to shake the thought, against all logic and against all available information, that the men might have been captured and were alive somewhere, perhaps in a Soviet prison.

And so began the second phase of the search. Now it was up to Craven and his team to find Scorpion and to find out what killed her. He turned his attention back to the acoustic echoes.

The site of the first explosion-now being called "Point Oscar" marked where his search would begin. But that still left him far from finding the sub. Thermal layers in the water could have distorted the sounds of Scorpion's loss as they traveled to the Canary Islands and the Argentia hydrophones. Craven calculated that there could be ten miles of error for any of the spots mapped by the triangulated data.

Also, the water at Point Oscar was 2 miles deep. The Scorpion would have stopped imploding about 7,000 feet before she hit bottom, cutting off the acoustic trail. Depending on how fast she had been traveling, and in what direction, and depending on the force of implosion and the position of her stern planes as she fell, she could have been thrown miles further.

All that meant that the submarine could be anywhere within a 20mile-wide circle, leaving a vast, unknown universe to search. And the art of deep-sea search was still in its infancy.

In starting the Scorpion search, Craven had far less data than he had when searching for the Soviet Golf in the Pacific. The Navy decided to send a surface ship to comb the area surrounding Point Oscar. There was no thought of sending Halibut on this search; Halibut was a boat designed for secrecy, and there was little need to shroud the fact that the search was going on since the Soviets could easily read about the missing submarine in American newspapers.

Instead, the ship the Navy employed was the USNS Mizar, an oceanographic survey vessel. She was a 266-foot-long former polar supply ship that had been converted to research at the start of the Navy's post-Thresher scramble to the deep. For this mission, she would be under the direction of Hardy's team at the Naval Research Laboratory, where she was based.

Mizar carried towed cameras, less-advanced versions of Halibut's fish, and with those she would start the slow, painstaking survey of the ocean bottom. The search would be led by Chester "Buck" Buchanan, a civilian oceanographer and senior NRL scientist.

As Buchanan set out, he knew he was in for a long haul. Crawling at two knots, it would take Mizar months to cover the area. But the captain was a tracker by nature, short, stocky, and good-naturedly pugnacious. He began to grow a heard the day Mizar left port, a Vandyke, declaring that he would shave only when he found his quarry.

Staying in constant contact with Hardy and Craven as they sorted through the acoustic crumbs, Buchanan began moving Mizar in circles over Point Oscar, finding little more than what seemed to be iron-rich meteorites. Following the Navy's lead, Mizar then began scouring the area west of Point Oscar. The Navy reasoned that since Scorpions had been heading west toward Norfolk, that was the best direction to search.

Meanwhile, Craven began digging for more evidence, anything that could help direct Mizar from shore. He set about trying to map each implosion in the hope that he could figure out how far Scorpion had traveled before the final sounds of her loss subsided.

He found much more.

Craven's map showed that Scorpion had not been traveling west toward Norfolk during her final moments. Instead, Craven's calculations surprisingly showed that the submarine had been moving east, back toward the Mediterranean. Perhaps a submarine could turn if it were fleeing from another boat, but intelligence officials had already told Craven that they were all but certain that the Soviets were not involved. It had to be something else.

The scientist went straight to Beshany's submarine command. He had one question. "What could make a submarine go in the wrong direction?"

Craven asked the same question of several captains and admirals. Each time he got the same answer.

A submarine turns around 180 degrees when a torpedo activates while it is still on board, an event submariners call a "hot run." The boat turns because that triggers fail-safe devices on a torpedo, shutting it down. The same safety devices keep the weapons from turning and blowing up the submarines they are fired from.

Scorpion carried a load of torpedoes, armed and ready for the worst, as did all cold war attack submarines. There were fourteen Mark 37 torpedoes, seven Mark 14s, and two nuclear-tipped Mark 45 Astor torpedoes. Hot runs were particularly common with the Mark 37s, and if there had been a hot run, Slattery would have called "right full rudder," ordering a 180-degree turn the moment the torpedo room reported the problem. Any captain would have-the maneuver is one of those things that are drilled into submariners until the reaction becomes simple reflex. In fact, Scorpion had recovered from a hot run in December 1967, six months before she was lost, precisely because Slattery had followed the standard procedure.

That had to be it, Craven reasoned. Scorpion was traveling west, and that had to mean that something had gone wrong with one of the sub's torpedoes. Somehow it had activated. And somehow it had exploded.

Craven began to dig around. He learned that there was a flaw in the onboard testing equipment that could easily have triggered a hot run. And he learned that torpedoes, along with almost every other piece of equipment on board, are routinely tested as submarines make way for home.

One of Craven's favorite maxims was, "If something can be installed backward, it will be." And in this case, it was true. Several submarines had reported hot runs as a result of electric leads on the test equipment being installed backward. The problem had become common enough that the commander of the Atlantic Fleet issued warnings.

With that known flaw and the acoustic data, it seemed to Craven that Scorpion's fate had been determined. Scorpion had been battling a hot-running torpedo, probably created when somebody mistakenly reversed the leads during a test. Only her turn to the east had been too late. The logic, the evidence-it all fit. Craven was convinced.

There was only one problem: almost nobody else agreed with him. The sonic experts, the torpedo experts, the submarine commanders, all listened as Craven held forth with his theories, his evidence, and his logic, his voice rising and falling as if offering a Shakespearean soliloquy, albeit one punctuated with his own trademark maxims of the deep sea. But nobody of any rank, from the chief of Naval Operations on down, thought Craven could be right.

Hardy, the acoustic expert at the Naval Research Lab, was convinced that Craven was reading way too much into the acoustic data and was chasing ghosts. The only thing that turned east toward the Med, Hardy believed, was Craven's phantom trail. His arguments instilled some doubts within Craven. Besides, it was Hardy's lab that was guiding the Mizar, and Craven needed his support if the ship was going to turn around and start searching to the east. Craven's own relationship with the lab was shaky. As director of the Deep-Submergence Systems Project, he had basically stolen one of the lab's prize possessions, the bathyscaphe Trieste 11, to assist in working out features for Rickover's NR-1 mini-sub.

The officers in charge of torpedo safety at the Ordnance Systems Command soon joined the group of naysayers. They insisted that it was impossible for a hot-running torpedo to detonate inside a submarine. For detonation to occur, the command insisted, a warhead would have to run into an object at top speed and stop moving only as it hit. Then and only then would it go off. The Ordnance Systems commanders were backed up by the Bureau of Ships. Walter N. "Buck" Dietzen Jr., a top submarine official, was also firmly in doubt. As the debate raged on, none of the men forgot that they were looking for their own dead.

Still at one point, in an effort to lighten things up a bit, Dietzen wagered Craven a bottle of Chivas Regal scotch whiskey that he would turn out to be wrong. Operational commanders were betting with Dietzen. Mizar had already dug up some tantalizing clues on the Norfolk side of Point Oscar. There were three items found that could have fallen from Scorpion: a piece of elbow pipe, what seemed to he a woman's umbrella, and a rope tied in a "monkey's fist," the ballshaped knot that sailors tie at the hitter end of a mooring line to make it easier to catch when it is tossed onto a pier.

There was some argument within the Navy about whether the monkey's fist Mizar found was tied in the U.S. style or in the style favored by the Italian Navy, but the umbrella, the operations officers believed, had to have come from Scorpion's crew. They had made port stops, hadn't they? This could have been someone's souvenir or gift for a woman back home. Months would pass before Navy biologists declared that what looked like an umbrella was actually alive, one of the many odd creatures that live on the ocean floor.

Still, given the Mizar evidence and the strong opinions around him, even Craven began to wonder whether he was wrong, just "smoking opium," as he liked to say. But then again, maybe he was the only one who was right. Craven had no trouble believing either possibility, so he kept digging. He arranged to have a ship drop small explosive charges at Point Oscar. By comparing the acoustic signatures taken at the site with the signals that reached Norfolk, he would be able to figure out once and for all whether an explosion in the area would create echoes-sonic ghosts-as others had contended.

Gordon Hamilton flew into Norfolk from the Canary Islands for the occasion. The two men camped out in a bare cinder-block room in a Norfolk communications station. There they would wait, all day and all night and all the next day, until the calibration charges rang through to shore.

On the first and second tries, the charges were too weak, and none of the acoustic signals made it back to Norfolk at all. By now, Hamilton and Craven were tired of eating cold sandwiches, tired of the bare walls and bare room, tired of sleeping on the blockhouse floor, and more tired of one another. They had exhausted their repertoire of shop talk. Craven had even run out of maxims of the sea.

Craven began doing push-ups. He had already taken to filling in the time left over from his two submarine searches, the design of NR-1, and his running of the SeaLab program by putting himself through the Royal Canadian Air Force exercise program. By now, he could do eighty push-ups at a set. He proved that several times over before the explosives finally signaled through to Norfolk.