Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (31 page)

If the president could have Air Force One, then Rickover would have NR-11, the only mini-submarine powered by a nuclear reactor.

John Craven dreamed fantastic dreams of deep ocean exploration and a new kind of warfare. Here he stands with his wife, Dorothy, his son David, and Secretary of the Navy John H. Chafee (far right).

Even before the Navy sent a submersible to photograph the undersea wreckage of Thresher, her loss inspired the Navy to declare a new era of sub safe programs. What emerged, however, was modeled more after James Bond than Jacques Cousteau.

Halibut had a mammoth shark's mouth hatch that screamed flood to most submariners. It screamed potential to Craven.

As he pushed Westinghouse engineers to build camera-toting "fish" that could withstand punishing ocean pressures and find sunken Soviet hardware, Craven loved to announce a daily wire-brushing. One day the engineers answered in kind.

Commander C. Edward Moore brought Halibut out to sea, found a Soviet submarine buried in the deep, and returned to stand before Admiral John Hyland (left) to receive the highest award possible for any sub: the Presidential Unit Citation.

Scorpion was outside of Naples when a photographer shot what might be the last picture ever taken of her. She was lost only a few weeks later.

Craven (left), Harry Jackson and project coordinator Robert H. Gautier stood on a floating drydock, while deep below, three men on the Trieste II examined and photographed Scorpion's wreckage.

Scorpion's shattered hull offered no conclusive answers-only a lingering mystery. Now, evidence has emerged that Scorpion may have been primed for disaster before she ever left port.

Commander Whitey Mack was just arrogant enough to believe that he could drive Lapon on a mission unmatched by any other sub. He believed he could trail a Soviet Yankee missile boat throughout a patrol.

When Lapon rode home after her feat, her men pulled down their standard and rose their own flag: Snoopy had given his doghouse up for a submarine and had beaten a new red baron.

Lapon and Mack were immortalized by Tommy Cox, the spook who really wanted to be a country and western star, in his album of submarine greatest hits.

After Tautog crashed with a Soviet Echo II sub, Tautog fled from the scene, leaving her men and the U.S. government convinced that as many as ninety Soviet submariners were dead.

Commander Buele Balderston had been a rising star, but he knew the underwater crash would also crash his career.