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

The two lookouts immediately lowered their binoculars, removed the American flag, and scrambled down the ladder. Following behind them, Pintard moved his large frame down the sixty-foot ladder with the knowledge that he would not see the sunlight again for at least two months.

Inside the submarine, the captain watched the ocean ahead of us through the starboard periscope as the three men jumped off the ladder into the control room. One of the lookouts reached up to the lanyard attached to the hatch and vigorously pulled on it. With the resounding noise of steel against steel, the hatch slammed tightly against the pressure hull and closed off our last remaining opening to the outside world.

'Control room hatch shut and dogged, sir!' the lookout hollered as he spun the wheel on the underside of the hatch.

The chief of the boat, a short, sandy-haired man named Philip O'Dell, grabbed the microphone hanging near the diving station and announced, 'Now, dive! Dive!'

As the chief's voice echoed throughout the submarine, the lookouts eased into their cushioned seats and pushed forward on their airplane-like control wheels. The ballast control panel operator flipped switches across his panel to open valves and flood our external ballast tanks, thereby increasing the weight of the boat and sinking us down into the water. The Viperfish's bow dipped, and we assumed a 20-degree down- angle. The gentle rolling movement of the surface waves changed to the motionless sensation of losing contact with the rest of the world.

'Like hanging in outer space,' Svedlow commented from his seat next to me.

'Inner space,' Lieutenant Katz corrected him from his engineer's seat behind us. 'At least we ain't going to be rolling any more, and nobody's going to get sick down here.'

We moved several hundred feet below the surface, not deep enough to worry about excessively increased ocean pressure but sufficiently deep to keep us below any surface ships. If we suddenly had to surface, collision with a moving ship was not likely. We would hear their engines and screws from several miles away and adjust our course accordingly.

It was vastly more difficult to identify stationary objects on the surface, however, because we couldn't see them and we couldn't use our active sonar, which would give away our position to anybody listening. Our sonarmen, sitting in their 'sonar shack' room near the control center, monitored the noises of various cruise liners passing above us. Undoubtedly, the ships were filled with vacationing tourists, admiring the approaching island of Oahu, who did not have a clue that a submarine holding 120 men was tracking them from below.

Once we leveled out at running depth, Richard Daniels relieved me from the reactor control panel watch, and I was free to roam about the boat for the next eight hours. Because three qualified reactor operators were now on board, my life for the next two months would be composed of a seemingly endless number of twelve-hour segments, each consisting of four hours of watching the reactor control panel and eight hours of sleeping or wandering around the boat and wondering what to do next. During this entire time, we would remain submerged, as we waited for the Special Project team to gather whatever information the Fish could find and hoped that something good came of it all.

We had come to accept that the captain and other officers would not tell us in what direction we were heading, where we were going, and what we were going to do when we got there. All of us knew we were going to be searching for something that was extremely secret. Surprisingly, nobody was much bothered by the fact that we were provided with no information. The crew, especially those in the engine room, were to remain almost entirely out of any tiny information loop that might exist. We did not need to know anything about the Special Project in order to do our jobs.

Each man had his own regimen to counteract the boredom during his hours off watch. I had packed stacks of novels and correspondence courses in French and chemistry from the University of California into my bunk locker, and I planned to spend much of my free time reading or preparing lessons. The Viperfish also had about seventy-five full-length motion pictures stored in the dining area; after the evening meal, each movie was shown twice for the men off watch. Many of the movies were first-run features and were thoroughly entertaining, but many others had never reached the ticket-buying public and had subtitles accompanying strange stories that made little sense. Whether the movie was good or bad, we generated the usual continuous observations about everything, from the way an actress walked to the lines her lover whispered in tender moments of love. Nothing occurred in any movie that was too small or too trivial to deserve at least one comment from a member of the crew.

On the second day out, one of the cooks discovered an old, dusty two-hour film reel showing landings of Regulus missiles. The Viperfish had previously fired Regulus missiles as her main purpose in life, and there was considerable interest in seeing the results of our boat's old missile days. Prior to the discovery of the movie, nobody on the boat was aware that the Navy ever landed missiles. We logically assumed that once the missile had been fired, it was simply destroyed on impact, along with the target. We all pulled up seats at the dining room 'theater,' turned out the lights, and hollered for the ancient film to roll.

The entire movie was a repetition-the same thing, over and over. First, we saw the blue sky and an occasional palm tree or two waving in the breeze. Suddenly, two tiny specks appeared in the distance and approached the island at high speed. After a few seconds, we recognized a winged Regulus missile, with lowered wheels, closely followed by a Navy jet with a pilot struggling to control the Regulus with radio signals. The missile's engine was off as it maintained a high-speed glide in the direction of the runway.

It was a silent movie, and there was no hint as to the source of either the missile or the jet. They both just came out of the sky, from specks to full size in about thirty seconds. No landmarks identified the island, which appeared to be a remote uninhabited coral reef. Throughout each sequence, the pilot of the jet endeavored to keep his slow-flying airplane from stalling, while he worked to bring the Regulus safely to the runway. We guessed it was a reclamation process of sorts, to salvage the Regulus missiles and perhaps to lower the cost of each test firing.

As we silently watched, the first effort failed miserably. The missile, too far to the left of the runway, was aimed almost at the cameraman before it frantically moved to the other side in a manner that landed it straight into the trees. The next missile, controlled by another pilot, had a better chance. It appeared to be lined up correctly; however, just before its tiny wheels touched down, it began to waver and finally nosed into the asphalt in a spectacular crash that disassembled the thing all the way down the runway. The third missile touched down nicely, its wheels spinning furiously, and we all cheered just before it lifted back into the air and began bouncing wildly down to the end of the runway, where it crashed into the lava rocks. The fourth missile appeared briefly and then suddenly disappeared out of sight, presumably crashing into the ocean.

By the time the fifth pair of specks appeared, we were all taking bets on the chances of chaos versus a successful landing.

'He's looking good! He's looking good!' Doc Baldridge hollered.

'He's going to take out the cameraman!' Chief Mathews yelled.

'Five bucks says it'll crash!' the cook called out.

'Five to one!' somebody else said.

'You're on!'

'Oh my God, look at that!'

'Bring it back to the left! It's off course!'

'It's too high!'

'Now, it's too low!'

'Dumb goddamn pilot!'

Another Regulus missile bounced and spun its way down the runway and finally disassembled into a heap of smoldering metal.

'Skimmer non-qual puke pilot!' was the usual final observation as money changed hands.

Finally, about five landings later, one missile actually came safely to an upright halt and the ocean around the Viperfish reverberated from our cheers. An hour and a half later, five or six more missiles landed safely, and we were left speculating about the award that the photographer must have received for filming so many missiles coming right at him.

The cook finally turned off the projector. Some of the crew drifted off toward their racks for a few hours' sleep, while others wandered off to the far corners of the boat to assume their watches. A half hour later, the next group of men coming off watch assembled in the crew's dining area for snacks and the watching of a special movie,