Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (24 page)

His manner, as much as anything, was what separated McKee from the likes of Whitey Mack. McKee was everybody's idea of a hero. While Mack bullied his way through the system, McKee was one of those officers pegged early on for the fast track to the top. This was a man who courted his sweetheart, Betty Ann, by spinning her through a winter's night in a Jaguar convertible with the top down and then spun her about with a marriage proposal thirteen days later. On Dace, he courted the vigilance of his junior officers by promising cases of Dewar's scotch and Jack Daniels to any who helped him spot the new Soviet subs. He won over admirals with the same flair, conjuring up such amazing tales of his exploits that the men who reigned over the U.S. submarine force never thought to question the risks he took.

Mack also had other competition in the Atlantic Fleet. There was Alfred L. Kelln, the commanding officer of the USS Ray (SSN-653), who had shot the very first pictures of a Yankee. Then there was Commander Guy I-I. B. Shaffer of the USS Greenling (SSN-614), who had slipped his sub directly beneath both a Charlie and a Yankee a few months before Mack spotted one. That gave Greenling's crew a chance to record the noise levels and the harmonics that the Soviet boats created in the water and the chance to film the hull and propeller, underwater through the periscope, with a new low-light television camera. Indeed, Greenling got so close to the underside of the Yankee that had the Soviets checked their fathometer, the ocean would have seemed very shallow, perhaps not more than 12 feet deep.

The job, known as "underhulling," was enormously dangerous. At any time, one of the Soviet submarines could have moved to submerge right on top of Greenling, but the payoff was enormous as well. The United States had the first acoustic fingerprint of a Yankee submarine, and the sounds from Greenling's tapes were quickly plugged into the SOSUS computers.

Now one question remained: Would the data collected by Greenling he enough to make the Yankees stand out as they moved into the open ocean din of fishing boats, marine life, and currents? Nobody would know that until somebody accomplished the longer trail through an actual deployment.

The race was on. Mack and the other commanders took their turns, steaming again out past 50 degrees north latitude, out of U.S. waters, and out of touch with fleet leaders back home, toward the Barents Sea and the Yankees' home ports."

Mack's chance came in September 1969. As Lapon pulled out of Norfolk, she was stocked with a mountain of eggs, meat, and syrupy drink mixes known as "bug juice"-typical fare for a long mission. There was, however, one major exception: her mess held three months' worth of frozen blueberries. Mack had a voracious appetite for blueberries and blueberry muffins, and he shared his passion with his crew. On board were also ingredients enough to fuel weekly pizza nights and a one-armed bandit to stave off boredom.

There never would have been room for a slot machine on Gudgeon or any of the other diesel boats that went out on the first spec ops. That's not to say Lapon wasn't cramped, but at least each man had his own rack-no hot-bunking, no sharing. The racks were still stacked one atop another-shelves with mattresses on them-and some mattresses were still crammed in among the torpedoes, but there was some relief in having 15 square feet or so of private space that could he curtained off from the rest of the crew. The shorter guys even had room to stow a few hooks so long as they didn't mind designating the bottom square of their beds a bookshelf. And just about everyone had a single drawer, although that was all the space they had to store three months' worth of skivvies, uniforms, and anything else they believed they couldn't live without.

The diesel stench was gone with these nukes, as was the condensation that had plagued the diesel submarines. Lapon was downright comfortable, practically climate-controlled for anyone who didn't mind the constant clouds of cigarette smoke that massed despite the advanced air-filtering system. Nobody expected much more from life in their "closed sewer pipe." For most of the guys, contact with the outside would be pretty much limited to periviz and "family grams": the three- or four-line messages that wives and parents were allowed to send a few times each deployment.

Beyond that, the men's existence was charted out in a rhythm that amounted to six hours of watch, followed by twelve hours of equipment repair, endless paperwork, and qualifying exams. Nobody was handed his dolphins, the mark of an official submariner, until he had qualified on nearly every system on the boat.

Still, sanity finds a way, and on this sub Mack was determined to help it. Mack organized nightly sing-alongs, having managed to dig up about a dozen guitar players among his handpicked crew. Tommy Cox was among them, back on board, carrying his guitar and a threemonth supply of strings and picks. Cox, who had become one of the first spook to bother with all of the standard submariners' qualifying exams and earn his dolphins, now entertained his true crewmates with performances of "Torpedo in the Water" and a new song about Scorpion, as well as standard covers of Johnny Cash, Ricky Nelson, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley tunes.

It was no accident that Cox was back on Lapon. While most spooks were assigned to subs by the Naval Security Group and almost never rode the same boat twice, Mack had managed to handpick his spook team just like he had the rest of his crew. He fought to keep his favorites, his core team, together. Along with Cox, there was Lieutenant Donald R. Fallon, the spook team leader. Mack decided Fallon would be a permanent member of the crew about ten seconds after the spook first boarded Lapon. He had spent his first nine seconds staring Mack down. The tenth second was the kicker. That's when he came up with a description of Mack that was never topped. Borrowing from the sub force's love of acronyms, he dubbed Mack "NOM- FWIC," or, in non-naval parlance, "Number One Mother Fucker What's In Charge."

Mack liked men who were bright, inventive, just odd enough to appreciate his own eccentricities, and as willing as he was to bend the rules. One of Mack's favorite acquisitions was a chief machinist's mate with the unlikely name of Donald Duck. He was a self-proclaimed hillbilly, raised in a log house in Shelby County, Alabama. Mechanics was the family business. Duck's dad worked on buses, Duck on submarines. He never finished grade school. In fact, he had enlisted in the Navy under an illiteracy program, but he could fix anything on Lapon, and he was an even better scrounger than Mack. That, in particular, was an especially useful art now that the Vietnam War made materials scarce. Duck would find or steal whatever Lapon needed, keeping his cache of spare parts in a place only he believed to he secret.

Duck's lack of formal schooling didn't matter on Lapon, where most of the enlisted men had little more than a high school education anyway. This was a blue-collar crowd, but they were, as a whole, a bit brighter, a bit more inventive, and a lot more willing to put up with long months of confinement than just about anyone in the regular Navy. The officers mostly came out of the Naval Academy. In the end, the differences blurred. Rank, station, pedigree-on the best subs none of that mattered much. Maybe it was the confinement; maybe there was no other good way to run a submarine. After all, one of the first lessons any college-educated lieutenant learned was that he wasn't going to get very far without the help of his grizzled chiefs and a bunch of enlisted guys willing to engineer imaginative fixes to all of the unimaginable problems that were likely to crop up month after month at sea.

Now the crew that Mack built was about to be put to the test. One week into the trip, Lapon got a message, the one Mack had been hoping for: on September 16, SOSUS had detected a Yankee north of Norway. It was heading out of the Barents Sea toward the GIUK gap. A second SOSUS array then picked up the Yankee as it passed just north of Norway's Jan Mayen Island at the mouth of the Denmark Strait, which separates Greenland and Iceland. If Mack could intercept the Yankee before it made it past the gap into the open ocean, where she would he far more difficult to find, Lapon would be able to attempt a trail.

As Mack raced Lapon toward the Denmark Strait, an Allied P-3 Orion airborne submarine hunter confirmed the Yankee's heading. Lapon arrived the next day and began a patrol moving slowly back and forth at the southernmost tip of the Denmark Strait, just southwest of Iceland.

Donnie Ray Bolling, the chief of the boat, hung a map in the crew's mess. From now on, the quartermaster would go below periodically to give the crew a look at Lapan's position. If they caught up to the Yankee, he'd chart her position as well. Sharing such details with the crew was against regulation. But Mack wanted his men enthusiastic. He believed that knowing what they were attempting would make up for the lack of sleep that was about to become the rule on the boat.

Mack called for modified battle stations. Around him the control room was packed with men crammed in between charting tables, computer equipment, and weapon controls, with all their corresponding oscilloscopes, dials, gauges, and plotting gear. The pipes that hung from nearly every inch overhead and all around made the compartment seem all the more crowded. In the center of it all was the periscope stand. Two scopes sprouted out of the foot-high pedestal. Just in front of the stand, the diving officer and two planesmen sat tightly tiered in a pyramid, staring at depth gauges. From here on out, the fire control party, the sonar crews, the navigators, and the diving watch would have two imperatives: finding the Yankee and keeping the Yankee from finding the Lapon.

Only one day went by before the Yankee passed to the east of Lapon. The sound of the submarine was so faint that the sonarmen almost failed to pick it up over the clamor of nearby fishing trawlers and teeming marine life. But there it was, a slight flicker on the oscilloscope, the electronic image of the Soviet submarine. This wasn't going to he easy. In the noisy waters off of Greenland, the submarine was audible in the din only when it ventured within 1,400 yards of Lapon.

Mack ordered Lapon southeast. He was going to try a "sprint and drift." The plan was to race Lapon at 20 knots for half an hour or so to a point where the Yankee would soon pass if she maintained her track. Then Lapon would slow down to 3-5 knots, drift back and forth, and listen.

The Yankee showed up, but then disappeared again. Mack was worried. The Soviets weren't keeping to their expected course. Each time the sounds from the Yankee came through, they were lost almost immediately, drowned out by the living Atlantic made even louder now by violent currents caused by a raging storm above. Mack paced about the control room, frustrated at having to crawl blindly around the ocean knowing that the Yankee was so close.

Lapon found and lost the Yankee several times over the next few days. 'Then, on the fourth day, the Yankee showed up again. This time Lapon followed, first for an hour, then for two, then for three. The Yankee's propellers spun a steady rhythm through the sonar team's headsets. Six hours, twelve hours, the Yankee was still on a steady course in front of Lapon. But at eighteen hours, the Yankee disappeared from the sonar screens, lost again. Mack's burgeoning underwater drama had fallen flat.

By ❑ow, most of the officers and some of the crew had gone several days with little sleep. Mack had only dozed, minutes at a time, mostly while still standing in the control room. And now, for these men, grave disappointment replaced the adrenaline rush that had already sustained itself far too long.

No one spoke the obvious. No one wanted to say that maybe it was impossible to keep track of this new, quieter generation of Soviet submarine as it rode through the cacophonous ocean. No one wanted to give up.

Sharing Mack's disappointment back in Norfolk and in Washington, D.C., were Captain Bradley; Vice Admiral Arnold Schade, who was still commander of submarines in the Atlantic; and Admiral Moorer, the CNO. They had been in constant touch as Mack flashed UHF progress messages to U.S. aircraft flying overhead. The Navy, in turn, kept aides to the president up to date. Nixon was following the trail in real time.

The admirals ordered all SOSUS installations in the area to listen for the Yankee. P-3 Orions also were on the lookout. But in both instances, the efforts were futile.

Mack decided to take a huge gamble. Calling his navigators and officers into the wardroom, he announced that they were going to give up trying to pick up the Yankee near the Denmark Strait. Instead, Mack was going to try to guess where the Yankee was headed next, and he wanted to try to beat her to her destination. Now Mack, his XO Charles H. Brickell Jr., the engineer officer Ralph L. Tindal, and others bent over charts and began an intense game of "what if," putting themselves in the place of the Yankee's commander. Desperation weighed in as much as logic when they finally decided to attempt to pick up the Yankee's track several hundred miles south, near Portugal's Azores Islands.

Lapon hurried down there and then trolled about the appointed spot for three days. Too much time, Mack fretted. He made another guess and moved the sub west. Almost as soon as Lapon settled into her new patrol, her hull began to reverberate with the grinding of metal on metal. Mack came running into the control room. The diving officer reported that Lapon was losing depth.

The 4,800-ton Lapon had been caught in the net of a deep-sea fishing trawler, tangled in the net's metal weights and thick metal cable. The Yankee could pass by at any moment, and Lapon was dangling along with Sunday brunch.

It didn't take long for the fishermen to give up, or maybe they cut their net. Either way, they left the area with the greatest one-that-gotaway story of their lives. But a piece of the trawler's cable had worked its way around a sonar device on the front of the submarine. There was no way Lapon could effect a silent trail with the dangling cable clicking across her bow.