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

The Viperfish assumed a steep up-angle. The screaming sound of the turbine propulsion system was deafening as we tried to accelerate toward the surface. I jumped off the ladder and landed on the steel plates above the bilge as the engine room lights flickered. Finally, I ran aft down the steeply angled decking toward the main condenser. The passageway was completely dry.

Looking around the area, I tried to find the source of the flooding. On the outboard side of the passageway, a pipe with an open valve was blasting water straight down into the bilge. Several men were sitting next to the condenser, all with big grins on their faces, and ignoring the roar. Milling around the passageway were the machinist mates who had jumped down the ladder in front of me; they were also grinning. One of them, more sympathetic than the rest, told me that the ballast control panel operator was pumping the water overboard as fast as it came out of the pipe.

Bruce Rossi handed me the communications headset as a chief machinist mate reached down and cranked the valve shut.

'Tell the engineer we have isolated the flooding, Dunham,' Bruce said.

I stared at the men as I pressed down on the microphone button. 'Maneuvering, this is the lower-level engine room,' I barked into the communications microphone. 'We have found the leak, and we have isolated the flooding.'

'Very well,' someone replied. Immediately, the captain's voice broadcast over the ship's main loudspeaker system: 'Now, secure from flooding drill, secure from flooding drill.'

And, so, that is how I learned about submarine drills.

The drills, always realistic to the extreme, forced us to react intentionally and automatically, improving our response time. The concept of 'only a drill' allowed a mental dissociation from the fear that would normally accompany the ever-present possibility of a real problem. Although the initial reaction to seeing smoke billowing from the control room or hearing water roaring into the engine room might have been raw panic, the drills instilled the fastest possible response to each type of disaster without potentially fatal hesitation. Finally, the drills kept all of us from getting complacent; instead of expecting the equipment to work properly (as it usually did), we came to expect things to go wrong. In future months, when some of the Viperfish's systems did malfunction, our automatic responses learned during the drills would help to save us from disaster.

After the flooding drill, I decided that my next step should be to learn everything possible about the boat's emergency escape chamber. Before the next flooding drill or, even more important, in case of a real disaster, I should be qualified on the only system that allowed escape if we were unable to surface. The escape chamber was located in the hangar compartment, where the civilians were-the compartment with the biggest hole. Ironically, the huge hangar was the only compartment that could take on so much water (in the event of a flooding disaster) that the submarine would become too heavy to surface. If it flooded and com- pletely filled with water, there would be no way for any of us to escape.

I caught Chief Mathews as he came off watch in the control room.

'Chief, would you run me through the emergency escape chamber?' I asked.

'That flooding drill get to you, Dunham?'

'No problem,' I lied. 'Just thought this would be a good time to learn — it's the next system on my quals list.'

He looked at my list. 'It's one of the next systems. All right, let's look it over.'

When we were inside the hangar, we stood below the escape chamber. It was a large, juglike steel structure attached to the overhead escape hatch that connected to the outside of the boat. A ladder extended from the passageway to an opening at the base of the chamber. Paul and I climbed up the ladder and into the chamber while he explained its operation. The interior of the chamber was crammed with valves and pipes, and it took him about fifteen minutes to explain the proper sequence of opening valves to attain pressure equal to that of the surrounding ocean. When the pressures matched, the chamber hatch could then be opened and one could escape from the Viperfish.

'Remember your free-ascent training in submarine school, Dunham?' he asked.

'Fifty feet, blow and go,' I said. 'I remember it well.'

Successful ascent up the top half of a hundred-foot tower of water was a requirement for graduation from submarine school. Placed in the middle of the tower (through a special entry chamber that allowed access) without pressurized oxygen or other breathing equipment, the students were told to blow out the air from their lungs as they floated upward toward a tiny circle of light fifty feet above their heads. Being so deep underwater with-out air tended to focus attention on the immediate matter of survival. If anyone panicked and did not exhale air as he floated toward the circle above, a diving bell holding a bubble of air was dropped down to enclose the man's head. An instructor then blasted the student with one final minute of intense lecturing. If he panicked again, the hapless student was promptly flunked out of submarine school.

'Correct, fifty feet for the sub school students, one hundred feet for the divers. Blow and go! Excellent training for doing exactly the same thing from the Viperfish, if the opportunity ever arises.' The chief pointed to an opening at the top of the escape chamber that allowed an exit from the boat. 'If the boat sinks, do the right things with the valves, climb right through that hole, and you're on your way to the surface.'

After we reviewed the sequence of valve operations again and discussed potential problems, the chief said that there was nothing else to learn about escaping and I was now ready to have the system checked off by one of the other crew members.

'By the way,' I called out to him after leaving the chamber, 'how far down would we descend, if there was flooding?'

He turned around and smiled. 'If we sank to the bottom?'

'If we had a leak and sank to the bottom during our trip to Seattle.'

After considering the question, he said slowly, 'I just talked to the navigator. About an hour ago, we passed well south of the Mendelssohn Seamount and moved into the mid-Pacific. It's a little more shallow back there, but-'

'How shallow is the top of the Mendelssohn Seamount?'

'Oh, somewhere close to fifteen thousand feet.'

I stared at the chief.

'A little less,' he said, without expression. 'It gets deeper during the next couple of days, dropping down to about twenty thousand feet before we finally reach the Juan de Fuca Ridge.'

'Chief, our crush depth is-'

'I know all about our crush depth, Dunham. Best thing to do is not spend too much time thinking about the escape chamber'

For the first time since reporting on board the submarine, I fully realized that we could never escape the pressures waiting for us below if we became disabled and sank anywhere in the Pacific Ocean. Our craft could not survive any accidents that destroyed the lifesaving buoyancy of our submarine. There could be no safe landings, no settling on terrain spanning the harsh ocean bottom, no escape for any of us if flooding took us down. During the remainder of the trip, the Viperfish seemed to become more confining and our claustrophobia intensified as we each worked to conquer our own fears inside the steel machine that we called our home.

5. The Sea Bat and other creatures

In the northeast corner of the Sea of Japan, the city of Vladivostok stands like an amphitheater, with its center stage of Peter the Great Bay (zaliv Petra Velikogo) near the Sino-Soviet border. During the 1920s, V. I. Lenin had acknowledged the city's enormous distance from the center of the emerging Soviet Union, but he supported its obvious strategic importance as its population increased, finally exceeding 400,000 by 1965.

Although the city was an industrial center in its own right, proximity to the sea provided for its growth and sustenance and led to the building of deep-water moorings, construction of new freight warehouses during the early 1960s, and, finally, development of nuclear weapons storage and support facilities. Further, the seaport's