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

'There's a flashlight in the engine room with dead batteries. Didn't you guys run the PM[6] last week?'

'I'm sure we did, Chief,' the electrician answered, calmly. 'Which flashlight is it?'

Glaring at the man, the chief stuck out his jaw and said, 'I'm not going to tell you. You're going to have to find it yourself.'

The man looked at the chief but restrained himself from making any comment. He roamed throughout the engine room as he tested each flashlight one at a time. It took him a half hour, but he finally found the bad light and replaced the batteries.

The rest of us jumped on the chief from that point on. In the subtle manner of submarine crews everywhere, we delivered our message without running afoul of the military chain-of-command structure. When anyone asked where something might be located, the answer, almost always within earshot of Chief Morris, was always an impudent, 'I'm not going to tell you. You're going to have to find it yourself.'

At that point, we still had almost two more months on patrol.

There would be no escape for the chief. He would receive the same message, over and over, wherever he might wander throughout the Viperfish. He learned fast, however, and never pulled a 'you gotta find it yourself' trick again.

More than a week after leaving Pearl, and nearly two years since the Viperfish had started her long journey as a spy submarine, we reached a destination that was unknown to most of us The SOBs in the hangar compartment prepared for the search They checked and double-checked our coordinates from the ship's navigation system and compared the data with the information they had been given in Hawaii. Working diligently, they began to prepare the Fish for the complex process required to lower it into the high-pressure ocean.

Finally, they started lowering the Fish down the hole and out through the belly of the Viperfish. It was a cooperative effort by Lieutenant Dobkin, Robbie Teague, Captain Harris, and the cluster of civilians. They all tossed out ideas and orders as they eased the Fish, one foot of cable at a time, into the ocean on the start of its journey that would take it miles away from our submarine.

We did not linger around the hangar during this time, so that the SOBs could do their work without our intrusion. Hoping that something worthwhile would come of it, we managed the rest of the boat. It was apparent that our ability to function as a seagoing submarine in matters of military defense was highly limited with the expensive Fish trailing several miles below us. We could not quickly change course, we could not speed up or slow down, and we were unable to change our depth abruptly without destroying the search pattern or damaging the Fish. We were like a military aircraft, flying through the middle of a battle zone at dangerously slow speeds with flaps extended, landing gear down, and controls frozen.

The Viperfish was vulnerable, and everybody knew it. Even though the Fish was nearly twenty thousand feet below us, it had to be carefully pulled by its cable so that it would remain only a few feet off the ocean floor. The entire operation was extremely delicate, and its success depended on our moving slowly, systematically and deliberately at all times.

During the first few days of the search, my biggest worry was the consequences of any flooding. The Fish and its cable likely would be destroyed during any emergency surfacing action or by a sudden loss of propulsion power resulting from any problem in the engine room. I found myself forcing these thoughts from my mind during the long hours of sitting in front of the reactor panel and wondering who was out there listening for us. All of us worked hard to concentrate on the meters spread across our panels.

After two weeks of quietly moving back and forth across our search pattern, the noise from the first explosion hit our submarine. It was clearly audible to all of us, a distant 'whomp!' followed by a long period of stunned silence from our crew.

'What the hell was that?' I asked Brian Lane. Brian and I had been sitting side by side in front of our control panels for the past three hours, as we watched our meters, puffed on cigars, and tried to stay alert despite the monotony and boredom of our tasks.

Lane turned in his chair and looked at me. For a moment, I thought he hadn't heard the noise-his eyes didn't seem to register the enormity of an explosion in the ocean thousands of miles from land. He looked inappropriately relaxed as he spoke the hang-loose Hawaiian vernacular of the day, 'Ain't no big thing, bruddah.'

I stared at him. 'No big thing? Jesus Christ! We're in the middle of the ocean, Brian,' I said. 'There's not supposed to be anybody else out there.'

'It could be from a thousand things,' he said, dismissing the more ominous implications.

'Or it could be somebody has found us.'

'Survey ships, war games by our guys, fishing fleets detonating fish to the surface, it could be anything.'

Glancing back at the reactor control panel, I scanned the meters and looked for anything even slightly abnormal as more explosions went off. I adjusted the reactor control system and shifted around in my chair.

The man of the house is looking for the intruder, I thought.

Behind us, Lieutenant Katz called the control center, asked couple of questions, and listened carefully. 'The captain doesn't know what the sound is,' he said, hanging up the telephone 'The sonarmen think the noise is probably coming from a sonobuoy dropped by something-an aircraft, a ship, or maybe even another submarine.'

Another explosion went off, and all of us waited for the next one.

'Goddamn!' I said as I put my clipboard down and waited.

'Somebody out there is exploring the thermoclines,' Katz said, referring to the layers of water created by virtue of their different temperatures. A layer of cool water next to warmer water causes the deflection of sonar waves; objects, such as submarines hiding on the other side of the thermocline, are concealed from detection by ships on the surface. To improve the chances of finding deeply submerged vessels, floating sonobuoys eject explosive charges that drop deep below the surface. When the charge sinks to a pre-determined level, it detonates and the sonobuoy broadcasts any reflected echoes to a receiving ship or aircraft.

It is a tricky business because of the 'tunnel effect' that echoes the explosive sound back and forth down the tunnel for many miles and confuses everybody about distances. If we were sitting at the end of a long thermocline tunnel, an explosion from five or ten miles away could sound like it was right outside our hull. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to determine whether or not a tunnel is present. We had no way of knowing if the explosions were from a distant source or right outside our boat.

10. Man overboard!

In early 1968, a Soviet Echo II submarine designated PL-751 ('PL' for podvodnaya lodka, or submersible boat), with ninety men on board, returned to her home port of Vladivostok on the eastern coast of the Soviet Union. For a prolonged duration, she had been on station within range of U.S. targets, and her captain and crew were looking forward to several weeks of well-earned time ashore. According to the timetable of Soviet submarine deployment, she was to be relieved by her sister ship, currently undergoing preparation and scheduled for departure at the Vladivostok submarine base.

To the distress of the men on board PL-751, they were informed on arrival that their relief ship had developed mechanical problems and would not be able to deploy. PL-751 was forced to stock up on food and supplies, cast off her lines, and immediately return to sea for another prolonged period on station in the Pacific Ocean. As she cleared the Sea of Japan, her cavitating screws broadcast their characteristic signature to the listening SOSUS array below. The sounds, as well as her northeast direction of movement, were duly noted by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) monitoring specialists who were thousands of miles away. Cruising north of the Japanese island of Hokkaido, PL-751 passed over the deep Kuril Basin at the edge of the Sea of Okhotsk, navigated between the Kuril Islands, and finally powered into the open waters of the Pacific. She maintained full 30,000 SHP (shaft horsepower) from her twin shafts and dual reactors. Crossing the undersea Shatskiy Rise and approaching the Emperor Seamount, she moved in the direction of her patrol sector within missile range of Midway and the Hawaiian Islands.

When PL-751 reached an area in the northern mid-Pacific Ocean, a region pinpointed at exactly 35° N, 172° E, a violent event destroyed the submarine's watertight integrity. The precise nature of this event is unknown, but it