Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (26 page)

Lapon continued on, through the rest of the Yankee's patrol and then some as the Soviets took an almost straight track back home. There were no more Yankee doodles, no more Crazy Ivans. The Yankee beat a path to the GIUK gap, where Lapon left her on November 9.

Lapon had followed the Yankee for an amazing forty-seven days.

Tommy Cox again was moved to write, this time coming up with "The Ballad of Whitey Mack":

Cox's lyrics were right on target. It really was Blind Man's Bluff, a game far more dangerous than mere hide-and-spy operations. Mack's success marked the beginning of a new mission for the submarine force. From here on out, the fleet would be focused on tailing Soviet ballistic missile submarines at sea. U.S. attack submarines were sud denly elevated to critical participants in the nation's strategic nuclear defense. And they would lead the greatest sea hunt in maritime history. For now, as he drove Lapon back to Norfolk, Mack was basking in the glory that was finally his. Messages of congratulations flooded the radio channels.

Months later, Lapon would receive the highest award ever given to submarines, the Presidential Unit Citation. Whitey Mack would win a Distinguished Service Medal, the highest personal honor the Navy awarded its officers in peacetime.

But it was one of the messages sent out when Lapon was still on her way home that pleased Mack more than any other accolade. It wasn't addressed to Mack or to his crew. Instead, this message was sent out to every other submarine out on operations in the Atlantic: "Get out of the way. Whitey's coming through." The order was clear. Everyone was to make way and give the Lapon a clear track home.

When Mack heard that, he slapped his fist in his hand, shook his head and said: "Eat your heart out, suckers. Whitey's coming through."

   Whitey Mack had set the new standard, one that other commanders were itching to match-indeed, itching to beat. Trailing Soviet missile subs was fast becoming the Navy's most critical mission, though not all of the men leading these dangerous hunts were as skilled as Mack, or as lucky.

At least two subs put the United States on the verge of nuclear alert when they radioed that the Yankees they were following had opened their missile doors and seemed ready to launch. In both cases, the U.S. subs quickly radioed again to say that the Soviets were engaged in simple drills.

Within months of Lapon's feat, there were also several collisions between American subs and Soviet subs, accidents that threatened U.S.-Soviet moves toward detente. When the USS Gato (SSN-615) slammed into an old Soviet Hotel-class missile sub in November 1969, Sergei Georgievich Gorshkov, the longtime commander in chief of the Soviet Navy, sent warships into the Barents in search of the intruder. He was hoping to find proof that Gato had been sunk. Gorshkov wasn't a bloodthirsty man, but the collision came just two days before arms control talks were scheduled to begin in Helsinki, Finland. It stunned him that President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, could proffer arms negotiations as though they were simple handshakes, while letting their submarines invade Soviet waters.

Evidence of Gato's steel corpse would have given Gorshkov one knockout of a handshake to proffer back. But his forces never did find Gato, which had hightailed it out of there, weapons armed and ready. At the orders of the Atlantic Fleet commanders, Gato's captain prepared false mission reports showing that his boat had broken off her patrol two days before the accident.

Close calls, especially those that stopped short of major incident, were almost always omitted when Navy intelligence officers went to brief Nixon and his aides. Thus, there was no pressure on the submarine force to curtail its brazen operations, even after two more minor collisions in 1970, one in the Barents and one in the Mediterranean.

There was, however, a third accident that year, one that was so violent and so severe that the Navy had no choice but to immediately tell top Pentagon officials and Nixon.

It happened in late June. The USS Tautog (SSN-639) was heading for waters filled with Soviet traffic outside of Petropavlovsk, the big missile sub base on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the northern Pacific. Little rattled Tautog's thirty-nine-year-old captain, Commander Buele G. Balderston, who had already overcome childhood rheumatic fever to grow to a 6'4" all-American in swimming and track. He had studied desert scorpions at the University of Nebraska and then enlisted in the Navy during the Korean War, where he was promptly assigned responsibility for the disposal of unexploded ordnance left over from World War II. Ultimately he switched to diesel submarines because he and his wife Irene both thought the job would be safer. He had later thought of giving up the filthy, cramped life of a diesel submariner to study medicine, but before he could apply to medical school, Rickover tapped him for the nuclear sub force. Balderston decided that maybe it was a sign, that maybe he was destined to remain on submarines. He believed that, even after all of his illusions of safety were shattered with Scorpion's loss. He had been the engineer officer during her construction, and after her disappearance, accident investigators trying to unravel the mystery frequently called him away from Tautog.

On Tautog, Balderston was known as much for his idiosyncrasies as anything else. This man who could drink any of his crew under the table during port stops was also something of a health nut. He drank Sanka in lieu of the full-powered brew that kept most of the crew fueled, and he demanded that his sub be stocked with copious supplies of chopped walnuts-he ate them after every meal, save breakfast, because they were full of lecithin. He also had a peculiar dexterity: he could raise his large, gray, bushy eyebrows one at a time. Right or left, it didn't seem to matter, both could make the singular crawl up the side of his face. It was a talent he used for emphasis. When crew members scrambled answers during qualifying exams, an eyebrow would levitate. When a mistake was especially stupid, one of those great brows would leap. One young seaman was especially unnerved by the gesture and could never deliver a message to his commander without stuttering as soon as Balderston sent a brow on its ascent.

For the crew, those brows were almost as memorable as the ingenuity Balderston displayed during their first mission together in the summer of 1969-a mission that earned their sub the nickname "The Terrible T."

They were sent to monitor a test of a new Soviet cruise missile from start to finish. Unlike the Yankees' ballistic missiles, cruise missiles posed little threat to U.S. shores. But these smaller weapons could destroy a massive U.S. aircraft carrier from as far as 250 nautical miles away, and carriers were still one of the primary platforms being used for U.S. bombing missions over Vietnam. Indeed, Echo II submarines-each toting eight cruise missiles that could hold either nuclear or conventional warheads-had been spotted trailing U.S. aircraft carriers near Southeast Asia. If the Soviets got directly involved in the war there, Naval Intelligence would need to know as much as possible about the missiles and the subs that carried them. And it was Balderston's job to learn how many missiles the Soviets could fire in rapid succession, to capture electronic pulses that might indicate trajectories, and to grab communications that might help to assess weaknesses. He would also try to snap photographs of the launches so analysts back home could measure the flames as the missile shot skyward and maybe figure out what type of propellant the Soviets were using.

Brazenly, Balderston led his sub through the Soviets' sonar net and right beneath a group of Soviet ships and a submarine, keeping Tautog hidden, hovering at just 70 feet below the surface. Most of the time, the tips of Tautog's intercept antennas and periscope barely broached the waves. The scope's small, cup-shaped eye was so low in the water that every third wave washed over. Balderston took to counting, "One, two, under; one, two, under; one, two, under....

Perhaps the most critical trick to all of this was keeping the 4,800ton Tautog level despite the fact that she was constantly taking on water and getting heavier. Subs take on water in part to cool their reactors, and pumps usually recycle it back to the ocean, but the pumps were too loud to use this mechanism close to the Soviets. Michael J. Coy, one of the diving officers on watch, somehow had to keep Tautog's scope at just the right height without the pumps.

It was nerve-racking business. Coy had been on Tautog for only three months, and he knew he was not one of Balderston's favorites. It irked the captain that Coy had enlisted in the sub force only as an honorable alternative to fighting in Vietnam, just as it irked Coy that Balderston kept talking up the advantages of military life. But now the two of them worked together as Balderston employed a solution that was ingenious and amazingly low-tech. He called upon an old submariner's trick and ordered all off-duty men out of their bunks, out of the crew's mess, and on a march: first to the forward half of the boat, next to the engine room in the stern. Back and forth they went for hours, living counterweights, keeping Tautog's nose up and the submarine buoyant. There were no breaks for Coy, not even to go to the head. Instead, when it came time to adjust Coy's buoyancy, Balderston sent for an empty coffee can.

In the end, Tautog watched the Soviets for two days-capturing the entire missile test from start to finish. Balderston brought home so much data that the Navy awarded him one of its highest personal honors, the Legion of Merit. Now, in the summer of 1970, as Balderston drove Tautog toward Petropavlovsk, captain and crew were convinced they could do just about anything. One thing high on their list was trailing an Echo II sub. This sort of trail might prove crucial to safeguarding the U.S. carriers off Vietnam, and it was one of the most important roles a sub could play in the war effort.

As luck would have it, it was an Echo II that registered on Tautog's sonar almost as soon as she reached Soviet waters. There was no mistaking it-sonar showed the Echo's trademark pair of four-bladed propellers. The sub was moving south from Petropavlovsk, and Tautog's crew had visions of following the sub through an entire patrol.

The Echo was noisy and seemed as though she would be an easy target, but no trail was ever really easy. Relying on passive sonar, Tautog's men essentially had little more to interpret than textured static (the muffled whir buried within that static was their only "view" of the Soviet sub), and the flickering oscilloscope that transformed some of that static into a light display.

It helped that the Soviet commander seemed to be taking no precautions against a hunter. Instead, as Tautog followed behind, he motored noisily, spending five hours maneuvering through an odd undersea dance that submariners call "angles and dangles." It was almost an undersea "cossack." Submariners on both sides do this awkward dance, a series of random figure eights, sharp turns, and changes in depth meant to shake things out, to see what kind of noise a submarine is making, and to find out whether anything is stowed where it shouldn't be. The dance has little of the offensive fury of a Crazy Ivan, but the steps are tempestuous. And it is impossible to outguess a commander who might order his submarine up or down, right or left, simply as the mood strikes him.

The trick to trailing a submarine tripping through angles and dangles is to back off. But aboard Tautog, the order to back off never came. In fact, as the hours passed, the Soviet sub's angles and dangles had begun to seem routine, and Balderston and others left their stations to their seconds-in-command. The captain went down to his quarters to get some sleep, a marked departure from the past year's missile-test mission when he had stood awake at the helm for nearly forty-eight hours.

On this mission, Tautog had an unusual complement of two sonar chiefs instead of one. But, as it turned out, neither of those chiefs was in the sonar shack while the captain was in his bunk. One of them had been assigned as chief of the watch and was overseeing the enlisted men in the control room. The other was off duty. That left the sonar operations supervised by a more junior man, Sonarman first-class David T. Lindsay.

Before this mission, Lindsay's biggest claim to fame was accidentally being photographed with Pat Nixon. The first lady had been visiting wounded Vietnam veterans at a Honolulu military hospital. Lindsay was there because of an accident on his motorcycle, a super-souped-up machine that he lovingly called "Betsy." When the first lady came to the submariner, no one had the courage to tell her how he had been hurt. It was a photograph of the two of them that made the local papers.