Spy Sub: A Top Secret Mission to the Bottom of the Pacific

thumping sound of the huge circuit breaker closing. The motor jumped as it came to life, blasting water out the sides of the diverter system. Water from the pool was sucked into the motor system as jets of water blew out the wooden sides of the pool. Several of the planks fell overboard, as others were swirled inside the pool and headed for the motor.

'Turn it off! Turn it off!' the captain hollered.

'Turn it off! Turn it off!' I called to the engine room. The motor ground to a halt just before one of the bigger planks was sucked into its blades.

I waited next to the demolished pool while the captain and engineers conferred about the test results and the near destruction of the motor. After considerable arm waving and debate, they finally decided that the energy consumption, the noise, and the motor's cumbersome inefficiency outweighed any potential benefit that might allow the Viperfish to make smaller turns. The electricians removed the cables, and the shipyard workers removed the planks and what was left of the swimming pool. For reasons never clear to me, they left the bow-thruster pump in place. For the next two years, we cruised around the ocean with a pump on a hump, both of them good for nothing.

We finally began loading supplies for the shakedown voyage across the Pacific Ocean to Seattle and San Francisco. Between loading more garbage weights and working on my seemingly endless qualifications, I took some time off to surf the then uncrowded waters at Ala Moana and spectacular Sunset Beach on the north shore. I used a long board and surfed as often as possible. The biggest problem was trying to protect my skin (now totally white as the result of three weeks spent under the ocean surface) from the bright tropical sunlight.

My evenings were free for steaming in Honolulu, and I took advantage of every minute. Thoughts of the upcoming submerged isolation fueled a compelling need for social adventures. Marc and I quickly recovered from our misfortunes in Waikiki. With vigorous scrubbing and the passage of a week or so, our residual submarine smell slowly faded and ladies once again enjoyed dancing with us.

Before leaving Oahu, we propelled the Viperfish across Pearl Harbor to a 'deperming' station, where we spent a full day wrapping the boat's superstructure with electrical cables. It was nasty work in the hot Hawaiian sun, but morale was extremely high. Everybody worked enthusiastically to lower the thick wires into the water and pull them up on the other side of the boat until she was fully wrapped in wire.

After the final cable was pulled out of the water and bolted to the high-voltage generating station, we were all drenched in sweat and our hands were black from the rubber insulation around the cables. We were ordered to leave the immediate area so deperming could take place. This process used current generated by massive voltage to remove any magnetic fields in the Viperfish that could trigger the detonation of underwater mines. Because most of us still had no clue about our upcoming mission, any consideration of going into mine-infested waters was something that nobody wanted even to think about.

I packed more fruit into my bunk locker, stuffed in another box of cigars, and tucked some John D. MacDonald novels among my clothes. Most of us would wear the same dungarees or the new lint-free overalls called 'faboomer suits' for a week at a time, so stocking fresh clothes was limited to one change per week. The trip to the mainland would take about a week. We each needed only three pairs of underclothing, dungaree shirts, and pants, in addition to dress blues, a black silk sailor tie, and a clean white sailor hat to wear during liberty in Seattle and San Francisco.

Just before we left Pearl Harbor, a new electrician, Brian Lane, reported on board the Viperfish. He was married and took a soft-spoken, low-key approach to the qualifications work that eventually would lead to his running the engine room's complex electrical control panel. As was the case for so many of us, this boat was Brian's first assignment after nuclear power training and submarine school. He quietly began studying the Viperfish systems under the watchful eye of Donald Svedlow and the other qualified electricians.

On a brilliantly sunny day, we steamed down the Pearl Harbor channel, rendered honors to the USS Arizona as we passed the general area of the sunken vessel, and departed Oahu. The crew shut and dogged the hatches on the topside deck, and the Viperfish moved out of the channel, past the Pearl Harbor ('Papa Hotel') demarcation point that marks the end of the channel, and into the deeper waters of the Pacific Ocean. With the announcement, 'Dive! Dive!' the captain cleared the bridge; the lookouts raced down the ladder from the top of the sail and slammed the control room hatch shut as the chief of the watch hit the levers to open the ballast tank valves. Our white-foam wake lingered behind us like a long feathery trail that abruptly ended in a final swarm of bubbles as the ballast tanks filled with water and we angled down to a depth of three hundred feet below the surface. We pushed through the waters off Diamond Head on the east end of Oahu and aligned our navigation system for the Strait of Juan de Fuca at the U.S.-Canadian border-nine days and 2,500 miles away.

Feeling suspended in our submerged world hundreds of feet below the surface, which seemed much like floating to the far reaches of outer space, we were unaware of any movement to suggest that the Viperfish was, in fact, pushing her way through the ocean toward Seattle. In the engine room, we couldn't even tell if it was day or night because the bright white lights remained on continuously. All sense of direction and time became distorted as the days passed slowly and we had no sensory contact with the world around us.

For me, existence was a surrealistic process of waiting until the clock said it was quarter to twelve, at which time I assumed my watch at the steam throttles. It didn't matter if it was fifteen minutes before noon or fifteen minutes before midnight, so long as I was sitting in front of the throttles at quarter to twelve. Twice each day, I repeated the process — climbing through the tunnel, walking down the upper-level engine-room passageway, and sitting down to begin my four-hour watch. Four hours later, I left the throttles for eight hours off watch. During this time, I wandered around and worked on qualifications or climbed into my rack and went to sleep.

If a movie was showing in the crew's dining area before I went on watch, I knew it was nighttime; otherwise, it was daytime. The crew's sleeping area was darkened twenty-four hours a day, so no matter when a crewman awakened it seemed like night. To resolve any lingering uncertainties between day and night, if I really wanted to know, I could climb up to the control center and see what lights were on. White lights indicated daytime and dim red lights meant that the sun had gone down and the world above us was dark. The red lights allowed the crew's pupils to dilate so that they could see better if the boat suddenly had to surface or move up to periscope depth. For the first few days, I tried to keep track of day and night, but I finally gave up because it was of no significance.

In the middle of the first week, I was tracking down some obscure system in the engine room when the sudden thunderous roar of flooding water drowned out the whining of the turbogenerators. I was in the upper-level area of the compartment at the time. Wedged between a heat exchanger and a bank of reactor control electronics, I was trying to read the number on a valve to identify its position on my schematic. I was tightly trapped between the solid steel of heavy equipment. For the next ten seconds, I fought furiously to free myself, while my mind screamed total terror and the loudspeakers announced the obvious.

'Now, flooding, flooding, flooding! We have flooding in the engine room! Lower level, starboard!' the engineering officer hollered. The lower-level engine room, similar to a basement, was below the main engine room and accessed by ladders connecting the two levels.

'Jesus Christ!' I hollered to nobody in particular as I finally popped free from the equipment and jumped into the central engine-room passageway. A herd of running machinist mates almost knocked me over, but I joined them in an all-out sprint down the passageway. As they disappeared down a ladder toward the bilge, I ran to the compartment's watertight door and began spinning the bar that dogged the door shut to isolate the engine room from the rest of the boat.

'Main seawater system, starboard condenser!' the engineering officer announced as the roaring noise became louder. 'Lower-level engine room, isolate the starboard condenser!'

'Now, all hands, we have flooding in the engine room!' the captain's voice announced from the control center. 'Surface, surface, surface!'

I began climbing down the ladder into the dark areas of the lower-level engine room. My hands shook violently as I tried to grip the ladder's steel sides. The roaring intensified as several other men and I moved closer into the area of the bilge; I knew there was little time before all the valves would be underwater and the engine room would be lost.

Suddenly, half the lights throughout the submarine went out, and I could hear the distant sound of high- voltage circuit breakers popping open. The lower-level engine room became darker, and the engineer announced, 'Now, we have lost the starboard turbogenerator! Lower-level engine room, report the status of the flooding!'