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

hell is a viperfish?'

We looked up the creature in the dictionary and found nothing. An encyclopedia also did not consider the animal worth mentioning, so we finally turned to a dusty fish book with faded color photographs of sea life.

'Here it is!' Jim said, pointing at a picture of a thick black fish with a huge mouth. 'It's a deep-ocean fish with a hinged jaw and photophores that create a beacon of light…'

'It eats dead fish, grabbing them whole as they sink to the depths below,' I added, studying the picture showing a single blue eye located above a glowing red streak.

'Viperfish. Couldn't they come up with a better name?'

'Ugly fish, ugly submarine, eats dead debris.'

'With a huge glowing mouth. What are we getting ourselves into?'

No matter how we tried to embellish the Viperfish, it did not look like a submarine that would ever do anything impressive. She was slow and ugly, and she had a strange name. We trudged back to our barracks and listened in silence to the other men talking excitedly about their assignments on board such vessels as the Dragonfish, Nautilus, and Scorpion.

A couple of days later, McGinn and I left New London to spend time with our families before the final trip to Hawaii. When my friends in California asked about my submarine assignment, I could not avoid telling them. 'Although the details are currently top secret,' I said, with the secretive air of someone having insider classified information, 'the Viperfish is one of those SSN fast-attack nuclear submarines equipped with state-of-the-art firing power. Furthermore, it is jammed with unique experimental military firepower, the only one of her class in the world.

'No further information can be revealed at this time,' I added in the hushed voice of somebody describing a CIA operation and left the rest to each person's imagination. In other words: 'Don't ask any more questions, because nothing more can be revealed-it is all secret.'

The conversations always ended with just the right amount of admiration and respect. For a twenty-one- year-old man ready to travel around the world in a submarine that was already an enigma, I could not have asked for more.

I flew to Hawaii on a civilian airliner contracted to the military at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California. The aircraft was packed with soldiers en route to Vietnam, and the atmosphere was filled with their gloom. The conflict in Southeast Asia was undergoing a rapid escalation at that time, and the depressed mood of the soldiers left little doubt about the fate they perceived at the end of their flight. The burly master sergeant sitting next to me looked miserable and said almost nothing throughout the entire trip.

When the plane landed at Honolulu, the sergeant just stared out the window at the clusters of vacationing tourists disembarking from nearby aircraft. As the plane doors opened, the sound of Hawaiian music entered the cabin, the fragrance of Plumeria blossoms floated through the air, and the lucky few of us assigned to Hawaii could not get off the plane fast enough. Jim arrived in Hawaii on a different day, but his flight carried a similar sad group of men. The memory of the unfortunate soldiers on that flight stayed with me during the tough times of the Viperfish's submerged operations and somehow made my work seem easier by comparison.

I called Pearl Harbor from the airport and was quickly connected to the Viperfish.

'USS Viperfish, Petty Officer Kanen speaking,' the young voice fired out. 'May I help you, sir?'

Thirty minutes later, a chief petty officer from the Viperfish jumped out of a car, asked my name, and firmly pumped my hand.

'Welcome to Hawaii, Dunham, I'm Paul Mathews, from the Viperfish-you're one of the new nukes, aren't you?' He was in his middle thirties, I guessed, a strong-looking man of average height and weight, and full of enthusiasm when I told him that I was a reactor operator ready to report on board.

'Throw your seabag in the back of the car,' he said with a smile, 'and we're on our way to Pearl. I'll give you a ride even though you are a goddamn nuke.'

As we drove down Kamehameha Highway under the blue sky and brilliant tropical sunlight, Chief Mathews told me more about the Viperfish. He confirmed that the submarine had been designed to launch Regulus missiles, each equipped with a large nuclear warhead and fired from a rail launching system on the topside deck of the Viperfish. He told me that, during the past few years, the Viperfish had made several deployments to the western Pacific Ocean with nuclear missiles stored inside the cavernous hangar compartment in the front half of the submarine. During this time, she was the front line nuclear deterrent force for the United States.

The Viperfish had made a total of thirty-two test firings of Regulus missiles at sea. Each shot required the crew to surface, open a large door (christened the 'bat cave' by the crew), roll a Regulus missile out of the hangar and onto its track, establish radio contact with the guiding system of a nearby American jet, and then finally fire the thing into the sky. The entire operation took about twenty minutes. Immediately afterward, the crew rapidly closed the bat cave and rigged the boat to dive so that, as quickly as possible, the Viperfish could disappear beneath the sur- face. The Regulus system provided nuclear protection prior to development of the Polaris missile program and construction of the first Polaris submarine, the USS George Washington (SSBN 598).

'With the Polaris missile system now going ahead full steam, the Viperfish isn't involved with Regulus missiles, right?' I asked Chief Mathews the obvious as we entered Pearl Harbor's main gate.

'Right,' he answered. 'They unloaded the missiles and changed her back to SSN.' There was a period of silence, and I waited for him to continue.

Finally, feeling stupid, I blurted out, 'Okay, what does the Viperfish do now, Chief?'

He hesitated, then began speaking in slow, measured tones. 'Although her mission is secret, she has been redesigned to perform activities that you will find extraordinary. Because of these changes, there are now three crews on board the boat. There is the nuclear crew, composed of goddamn nukes like yourself, and the others who keep the reactor on the line and the steam in the engine room.'

After turning left past the main gate, we were moving in the opposite direction from the arrows pointing to the submarine base.

'And then there is the forward crew, the men who really run the boat,' he said. 'They are occasionally called the forward pukes by the nukes-our shipmates to the rear. The non-nukes run the ballast control systems, the diving station, navigation, sonar, fire control-'

'I understand all that, Chief,' I interrupted. 'And the third crew?' He took a deep breath, stared straight ahead, and softly said,

'The third crew is for the Special Project.'

We turned right, drove down Avenue D and into the naval shipyard. 'What kind of special project, Chief?' I asked, sensing that I was going to learn little.

'You'll find out all about that from your security briefing, Dunham. All you need to know for now is that we are developing a combined civilian and military project, a cooperative effort, so to speak, that expands the capabilities of the Viperfish.'

Although the prospect of civilians being assigned to a nuclear warship seemed unusual and even a little unsettling, it was apparent that the chief was not going to say anything more on the subject. We made a right turn off South Avenue to 7th Street, where a cluster of towering shipyard cranes came into sight. Mathews began talking about cranes as we approached the dry dock area. He said that the largest cranes were of the 'hammer-head' style, as unique to Pearl Harbor as the Arizona Memorial.

The Viperfish was not moored at the Southeast Loch submarine base with the other submarines. The Viperfish wasn't even in the water. Mathews parked the car, and we walked in the direction of the biggest dry dock, looming like a gigantic rectangular hole ahead of us. I stopped at the edge of the massive concrete chamber and stared down at the submarine that was to be my new home for the next three years.