Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (41 page)

Was this all coincidence? Or was there a glitch in U.S. communications security? Could there be a spy? Inman had sent Haver and another intelligence officer, William O. Studeman, to the fleet admirals, seeking their help in searching for any possible communications leaks. But the admirals would have none of it. How could their coded communications, the most sophisticated in the world, have been compromised?

All Haver could do now was keep digging. Maybe some of those answers would be uncovered by Parche, if she could manage to find and tap a Barents cable. But Haver would have to wait to find out. The Navy, with strong input from the NSA, was first sending Parche to Okhotsk to plant a second recording pod right next to the first to greatly increase capacity at the tap site. She was being sent, in part, to prove herself before anyone dared to send her to that other, far more dangerous sea.

Prove herself she did, and after a near-perfect run Parche's crew came back with more than a bit of a swagger. The 140 men assigned to this new boat taunted the crew of Seawolf, now in dry dock and in pieces. They called her the "Pier Puppy" and joked that her men were assigned to "Building 575," after Seawolf's hull number. Seawolf's crew had already struck back though. In 1977, Seawolf's divers had planted a cow's skull next to the cable tap, just to give Parche's divers a good scare.

Both submarines were stationed at Mare Island, and their crews lived as neighbors, in wood-framed barracks on the east end at the edge of an old munitions depot, away from everyone else. Neither their proximity nor their shared status, however, prevented their intense rivalry, especially now that Parche was moving ahead, going out to sea, while Seawolf's men were stuck with the most thankless duty a crew can pull: overhaul. They were working hours almost as long as those of sea duty, and they were stuck, hot and sweaty, in a shipyard handling tasks that seemed more fitted to construction labor ers than submariners. Their wives, children, and girlfriends were nearby, but there was infuriatingly little time to see them as the men toiled relentlessly at the three R's of shipyard life: "Remove, Repair, Reinstall."

The nukes had it worst of all. Wearing canary-yellow antiradiation suits, they were saddled with the task of cutting their boat in half in order to remove and replace the spent reactor core. There was so much paperwork involved that they had taken to chanting, "Cut down another tree for nuclear power."

Rickover's reactor inspectors, the men the crew called "snakes," were everywhere, their special helmets sign enough to trigger a man-to-man alert. The sign for "snakes on board" was passed with a quick flash of a two-fingered V.

There was just no glory in overhaul. Indeed, with the country's backlash against Vietnam, there was little glory in being in the military. It seemed that not even the government had respect for its armed forces. Navy pay wasn't keeping up with soaring inflation and interest rates that had skyrocketed into double digits. Longtime submariners were making about $15,000 a year in base and supplemental pay. There were news stories of Navy men on food stamps.''
It seemed there was no refuge. Even the Horse and Cow was turning into a bikers' bar.

So Seawolf's crew watched with envy in 1979 as Parche prepared to shove off a second time toward a mission shrouded in mystery, the mission that had so fascinated President Carter. This time she was headed for the Barents.

She'd travel a route that had probably never been taken before, the one path that would bypass all of the Soviet choke points, just about the most difficult and dangerous way possible. Parche was going to travel north, due north from San Francisco, past Alaska, and through the narrow and shallow Bering Strait, where the U.S. and Soviet borders almost touch and where the ice could sink a sub faster than an enemy. From there, she would travel past the North Pole and back south into the Barents Sea. All told, Parche would have to transit farther than 5,500 nautical miles, much of it treacherous. There was good reason the Soviets would never expect Parche to slip into the Barents from this route.

There was one more precaution. Parche would not leave for the Barents until late summer, well after Carter's summit with Brezhnev. The two leaders met on June 18 and signed the SALT II Treaty, in which both sides agreed to limit the number of their nuclear-missile launchers.

Two weeks after the superpower summit, Parche's CO, John H. Maurer Jr., held a summit of his own-with the wives of his crew. The captain provided baby-sitters, light refreshments, and a description of the men's "extended deployment" that pretty much began and ended with dates of departure and return. He gave the women "FamilyGram" forms, so that they could wire quick messages to their hushands a few times over the three months Parche would be gone, and a two-page list of emergency numbers, starting with that of his wife Carol and going down through a litany of Mare Island doctors, dentists, firemen, and police. He also gave the women a checklist of all the tasks the Navy imagined would fall to them. Know when to tune up the car. Find the telephone numbers of the plumber and the electrician. Make sure your husband leaves a will. In return, the women were asked to give up their husbands for the duration.

There were the usual tears dockside as Parche shoved off that August. The magnetic white hull numbers denoting her as submarine number 683 had been taken down, leaving her anonymous as she passed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and dove.

The crew was now in the hands of the man they called "Captain Jack." He was built thick and strong, and his crew thought him a bulldog, at once determined and playful. There was something about this captain who could walk into the torpedo room and wrestle with his men. There were some, among the torpedo crew especially, who were just crazy enough to beat the captain regularly. The wrestling matches fast became ritual-"the Tag Team Follies."

Maurer was to the Navy horn, his father an admiral. In fact, John H. Maurer Sr. had been commander of submarines in the Pacific in the late 1960s when Halibut was sent looking for missile pieces and before she set out after fantasy cables. Now his son was leading a crew top-heavy with senior chiefs, senior enlisted, and spooks on the most dangerous special projects mission yet.

Secrecy had been tight on Seawolf, far tighter than it had ever been on Halibut. But on Parche, the secrecy was nearly paranoiac. The crew itself had little idea of where they were going. The men were told only that they were being sent to see whether Parche could find her way beneath the frozen expanse and back, perhaps detecting a few Soviet subs along the way.

As Parche neared Alaska, Maurer began preparing to move through the narrow Bering Strait submerged. Here, the waters were only 150 feet deep and the going was hazardous. Indeed, in a few months the passage would be impossible without the help of an icebreaker. Navigators and the captain were shrouded by curtains as they tensely plotted Parche's 2-3-knot crawl.

Once through the strait, Parche had to navigate farther north through the Chukchi Sea. Here the water was just as shallow, and the ice didn't melt even in summer. From outer space, this and other seas surrounding the pole look like a kaleidoscope as temperature and salinity patterns alter the very color of the water mile by mile. Parche's sonar bounced off the layers much as it bounced off solid objects, leaving Maurer and his crew nearly blind, much like a plane flying through thick cloud cover.

The crew maneuvered Parche forward slowly, cursing as they tried to decipher sonar echoes, never entirely certain whether something that sounded as if it were directly ahead was at their depth or some feet above. There was no way to really tell, not until they passed closer, close enough to risk collision. But Parche wasn't totally helpless. The Navy had been sending at least one submarine a year up under the ice since the 1950s. A special lab had been created to study sea ice to try to make it easier to operate in the strange and difficult environment. And the entire Sturgeon class of subs had been made "ice-capable": given upward- and forward-looking sonar that could help avoid ramming into the ice, special buoyancy controls, and hull modifications that allowed the subs to break through thin ice for emergency surfacings.

During these early Arctic operations, the Navy discovered that sonar pings sounded an awful lot like the mating call of the area's ring-necked seals. When the seals heard the submarine ping-a sweet tone that sounded like a singer moving across octaves-they answered: one seal calling back to the submarine, the next seal answering that seal, and another seal answering the one before. Blasting the sea, the seals inspired walruses to join in with their bell-like barks. On the early transits, the din went on for hours, seals answering subs and other seals, walruses answering seals, and walruses answering one another. Now Parche was using sonar designed to avoid courtship with the local mammals.

The passage was noisy, nonetheless. Around the sub were chunks of ice that had broken off from large bergs farther north. Those chunks had a disturbing tendency to pack themselves against one another or against land, creating heavy pressure ridges that reached down deep into the sea. Parche could easily encounter an area with less than five feet of clearance from bottom. It was almost impossible to move through without scraping some ice, sending a screech through the hull, nails across the chalkboard amplified. The ice chunks were heavy enough to snap a submarine's screws and leave a boat helpless.

The crew also had to be on the lookout for larger bergs that often floated south, creating huge obstacles between Greenland and Canada as well as on the other side of the pole, between Greenland and Iceland. It was an iceberg that had stopped USS Nautilus on an attempt to cross under the North Pole in June 1958. (Nautilus made the Pole, and history, a few months later.)

When Parche finally hit deep water, she could move ahead without obstacles. This 1,500-mile swim beneath the North Pole itself would be easy-depths of 1,000 to 12,000 feet left plenty of room to maneuver beneath the most massive icebergs. After that, Parche again had to maneuver through a tapestry of marginal ice before finally breaking through to the Barents.

Now it was time for the crew to begin readying the fish to drag along the sea bottom in search of communications cables. Given the surrounding terrain and the location of Soviet bases, it made sense that any underwater telephone cable would run from Murmansk and along the coast of the Kola Peninsula, which pointed down from the Arctic, form ing the thumb of the glove-shaped piece of land that marked Sweden and Finland as its fingers. The cable would probably stretch about 250 miles east to the tip, before it took a 40-mile hop across what the Soviets called the throat of the White Sea and looped into the Severodvinsk shipyard.

It made little sense to lay a tap in that bit of the White Sea where boats moved continuously from the shipyard out to the Barents. Instead, Parche would look for the cable in an area where it might be a little easier for her to hover for a while and not be discovered, such as along the granite cliffs on the northernmost coast of the Kola in that 250-mile run after Murmansk. The search inevitably would bring Parche within the Soviets' 12-mile territorial limit, and probably even inside the 3-mile limit recognized by the United States.

As Parche searched, men monitored the video images captured by the fish, looking for that vague line in the sand that could be a communications cable. They found it just about where operation planners had suspected it would be, farther out than 12 miles at some points, but a lot closer in at others. It was clear that this cable had to run from Severodvinsk to the major bases of the Northern Fleet, and on into fleet headquarters near Murmansk.

Finally, Maurer picked a spot for the tap. In Okhotsk, the cable stretched across an entire sea, and Halibut had been able to plant that tap about 40 miles offshore. It is not clear exactly how far from the coast this tap site was, but it clearly was a lot closer in than the Okhotsk tap had been.

Nobody had to be told that the closer Parche moved in, the more she risked discovery. Sonar crews monitored the constant traffic above as Parche's divers began their work. Nothing but luck could keep the crew safe from a direct hit by a Soviet sonar ping. If that happened, there were 150 pounds of HBX explosives on hoard, just as there had been on Halibut and on Seawolf.

The spooks were crammed into Parche's now-locked torpedo room, their eavesdropping equipment sitting on racks designed to hold weapons. While Halibut had the Bat Cave, Parche had no more space than any other late-generation Sturgeon sub. In fact, to make room for the spooks, most of Parche's torpedoes had been ditched. Now she carried just four live warshots, the minimum number any attack sub was allowed to carry on a mission.

It would take the spooks at least two weeks to sift electronically through the hundreds of lines running through the cable and choose which lines to record-and at what times-over the next year. The process relied on educated guesses and luck. Certain channels would probably he best in the summer months when the ice cleared from the Barents and the Soviets conducted naval exercises. Missile tests tended to be seasonal as well. But lines connected directly to headquarters could be active and profitably tapped year-round.

Some of the lines were unencoded, but many of them were encrypted to some degree. The spooks hoped to choose lines that the NSA would have a decent chance of decoding later. It also helped that the tap had evolved over the years. It weighed several tons, but miniaturization of the electronics and advances in recording technology now provided a greater recording capacity and some room for error.''`