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

by Roger C. Dunham

  As i prepared to leave the Viperfish for Los Angeles, a new sense of urgency descended on the submarine. After Captain Harris returned from another trip to the Pentagon, activity increased, day and night, on the Viperfish. The captain provided no announcement on his return-no information to clarify the Viperfish's purpose, nothing about the final search looming in her future. Yet, at this time, when we had been hammered by the events of the past two months, when two of our crew were gone from us forever, when antimilitary sentiment was rampant throughout our families and society, there was not a man on board who was not ready to go out and search again.

  Stepping up preparations for another voyage gave further support to these feelings and rallied us around the Special Project, with all its secret implications. One more search was all we asked for. Even though Harris divulged nothing about the Pentagon meetings, a whirlwind of activity stirred the air from the wardroom all the way down to the most junior enlisted man on board.

  Lieutenant Pintard, in charge of the Reactor Control Division, cracked his whip on Chief Linaweaver-get the equipment ready to go, finish all the necessary preventive maintenance work, and ensure that nothing will shut us down on our next patrol. Linaweaver turned around and cracked the whip on the qualified reactor operators, and we, in turn, blasted the two new operator trainees, whom we called Dickie-Doo and Robbie Too, with stern admonishments to "get qualified, you non-qual pukes."

  As the result of these actions, a new esprit de corps roared throughout the boat. We yanked open electronic panels, recalibrated gauges and meters, and poked hissing vacuum hoses into electrical drawers holding circuits exposed to microscopic amounts of dust. As the men in the wardroom planned the details of our next patrol, the rest of us worked day and night to make sure that the equipment would get us there and bring us back.

  Another matter, thought about by all the nukes but discussed by none, was the matter of our diminishing fuel. No matter how much work we might do in preparation for our next effort to find the mystery target, the Viperfish was running out of "gas." The heat from nuclear fission could be produced only by a reactor with enough uranium to sustain the reaction, and Rickover's engineers were about to yank the Viperfish from the pool of operative U.S. nuclear submarines. I had done the calculations before shutting down the plant after our first run, and I knew the allowances necessary for starting up the reactor again. The news was okay but not great. We would have just enough power to get to our previous location in the Pacific and return, if we didn't spend too much time with any significant diversions or emergencies.

  Not worrying about such mundane matters as nuclear fuel, the Special Project civilians and officers also worked around the clock to prepare the cable, load the stores, pack replacement parts for the Fish, and get ready for departure, now barely four weeks away. The entire crew of the Viperfish became so optimistic about trying again that I felt almost guilty when I left for California.

  On my way to the airport to catch the flight to Los Angeles, I drove a rental car to Tripler Army Hospital to say good-by to Brian Lane. He was in the psychiatric ward of the hospital, the receptionist in the lobby said, in B Wing, with all the others having "that kind of a problem." As I hiked up to the third floor, I felt the same sense of anxiety that I had in the engine room at four hundred feet when Lane looked at me with that strange gaze and said, "You can't get to me."

  After talking with a cluster of psychiatric nurses, I was directed far away from the severely disturbed patients in the B wing to the outside exercise area. Brian was in a fenced courtyard of the hospital grounds, an area that looked like a city park, complete with grass, benches, and trees. The compound was filled with Marines from Vietnam, wandering around under the trees, all wearing Tripler robes, most of them with shaved heads, which gave them a strange guru appearance. There were groups of rigidly calm Marines, with frozen expressions and vacant eyes, and other groups of agitated Marines, who were making rapid random movements with their arms or faces. The jolting thought hit me that some of these men might have been with me on my first flight to Hawaii, the ones I had sat with a thousand years ago before reporting to the Viperfish. I searched their faces as I looked for my shipmate, and I felt more of that same basic fear that I had felt on watch with him during our patrol.

  "Hello, Roger." The familiar voice turned me in my tracks.

  Brian's appearance shocked me, and I stepped back a pace. His skin was pale and covered with acne, his head shaved. A two-day beard darkened the lower half of his face. He was staring at me and smiling a half smile, his strange half smile that had been a part of the engine room during our last weeks at sea. Jesus Christ, Brian, I wanted to say, what have they done to you?

  "Hello, Brian," I said. "How's it going?"

  He studied me in silence for a couple of seconds too long and then looked down at his watch. "I'm okay," he answered in a drifting voice and continued to stare at his watch.

  I tried to think of something appropriate to say while he concentrated on his watch. The puzzled expression on his face suggested that he was struggling with a basic thought process, perhaps trying to determine what the positions of the hands on the watch meant. He shook his wrist. He looked at me and then back at his watch again, and he finally fumbled with the band and removed the watch from his wrist.

  "Are you sure you're okay?" I said, feeling my throat tighten and deciding to change the subject. "Everything's going fine on the boat."

  My voice sounded strange to me. Everything's fine except that Chief Mathews has just left the Viperfish forever, I was thinking. He has just "non-volunteered" to nonsubmarine duty, and he has departed Pearl Harbor in a manner that suggests none of us will ever see him again. And you, Brian, are losing your mind.

  Brian listened to his watch, studied it again, and becoming frustrated, looked like he was going to cry. His eyes appeared to have aged at least twenty years during the past two months as he lifted his face and stared at me.

  "I can't understand anything any more, Roger," he said in a frightened voice. "Nothing makes any goddamn sense at all."

  I said a few more words, tried to encourage him, and told him that we missed him on the boat and hoped that he would be okay. I mumbled, my words trailing off, my own thoughts becoming confused. We shook hands and said good-by, and I left him standing in the exercise yard, surrounded by the crowd of psychotic patients and holding his watch, while he tried to bring his mind back to the time before the Viperfish.

  Burning rubber, I drove away from the hospital, my grip on the steering wheel a crushing force of anger. The rage followed me to the airport and, during the months ahead, clung to me like a curse, telling me without justification that I had in some way abandoned the man. I had not said the right things on watch when he was coming apart. I had driven off and left my shipmate helpless, in that company of psychotic men, with a mind that no longer worked as he struggled with a wristwatch that no longer made sense to him. I could not shake the feeling that I had left Brian in his time of greatest need.

  My wedding and honeymoon with Keiko were something close to taking a brief but gigantic leap from the hell of Brian Lane's world straight up into heaven. As Keiko walked down the aisle of the USC Methodist chapel, she looked at me with the radiant happiness of a woman in love. Tears came to my eyes, and I was filled with her beauty. On our honeymoon to Canada, we explored every small town that we found along the way. I ignored newspapers and events of the world around us and shared the time, meant just for the two of us, only with Keiko. We returned to Honolulu with all of our belongings in one suitcase and one seabag and rented a small apartment in the little town of Waipio.

  Before I reported back to the Viperfish, Keiko and I took an afternoon trip to the north shore of Oahu, where we could have a final picnic and I could do a little surfing. We had both become tense, the upcoming departure of the Viperfish continuously in our minds, and her burden had just been increased because her brother had received orders from the U.S. Army to report to Vietn
am.

  We spread our blanket on the coarse sand near the water, and she waited for me as I dragged my board into the ocean and paddled out to ride the waves. The surf was considerably bigger than usual because of a large swell pushing down from Alaska, and I moved far out to sea to reach the optimal point for takeoff. The vigorous exercise would be therapeutic, I had decided, and I felt that the greater amount of energy I expended, the easier the next two months under the ocean would be.

  When I finally returned to shore, the sun had descended low on the horizon. Sunset Beach was beginning to move into darkness, and Keiko was no longer waiting on our blanket. I found her a couple of hundred yards away, standing at the water's edge, looking out into the ocean, and crying with the almost certain knowledge that I had drowned in the heavy surf.

  Her look of relief at my appearance was quickly replaced by worry and anger.

  "You're going out to sea in two days, and here I am thinking you have already drowned before even closing the hatch of that thing!" she said. Tears rolled down her face, her look of anguish reflecting the turmoil and fear inside. "It's not fair," she added in a small voice, the tears flowing freely.

  I put my arm around her, and we gathered our belongings and drove back to our apartment. We talked late into the evening as I tried to explain why I had to leave, why it was so important, especially after what we had gone through so far. I talked and I talked, and when I finally ran out of steam, she looked at me and said, "But why are you going? Why don't they send someone else?"

  I let her question hang in the air while my mind struggled for an answer. Looking at the whole matter objectively, she was right. Why would anybody in his right mind leave such a woman and such happiness and climb into a screaming engine room for two continuous months under the ocean?

  The reason that I was going, I knew, was not just because I had been ordered to do so, although the military imperative certainly carried some weight. It was not to help discover whatever was out there because nobody would tell us what it was. I wasn't longing for glory-there certainly would be none-and I wasn't planning on receiving any thanks from my country because the American public no longer seemed to believe that military accomplishments were of any value.

  "We are going," I finally said into the tropical night air, "because our mission has to be completed, and I trust the captain to get us there and back."

  I could barely hear the soft words of her response, but she mentioned her brother in Vietnam, the men on the Scorpion, and the fact that trust might not be enough.

  The next day, Chief Gary Linaweaver met us at a table near the row of submarines lining the pier at the Pearl Harbor submarine base. He talked solemnly to Keiko, his voice calm and comforting.

  "Just remember," he said, "the Viperfish is nothing like the Scorpion. The Scorpion was a sleek fast-attack boat. She traveled fast and dove deep, she did the maneuvers those kinds of submarines do."

  He smiled reassuringly. "The Viperfish is big and slow," he continued. "She doesn't move fast and she doesn't go deep. She just cruises along, staying pretty shallow, ready to surface immediately if there are any problems." He held his hands out, obviously without a worry in the world. "Your husband could not be on a safer ship!"

  I was not sure how reassured Keiko was after that discussion, but she accepted his comments without question. She had not been told about the activities of our previous cruises. The mystery of the mission, coupled with the essence of submarine operations, gave all of the wives a burden that cannot be easily relieved, an ordeal that is shared by all who watch loved ones drive their submarines out to sea.

  The separation of going to sea in this manner was more painful and more absolute than sheer time and distance could justify. The nature of the process itself, the submergence of the submarine, was an important factor in the loneliness of those left behind. For the wives on shore, watching their men disappear into the hatches, riveting their eyes on the silhouette of black steel as the boat moves to sea, and finally seeing the submarine vanish even before reaching the horizon can deliver a chilling fear into the heart of even the strongest person. This disappearance of the submarine, more than the departure, followed by a total absence of communications for weeks or months at a time, along with the secrecy of the mission and uncertainty of the submarine's location, render a daily torture for the women left behind.

  Keiko drove me to the pier next to the Viperfish at midnight the night before we left. After sharing the greatest kiss of my entire life, I waved a final good-bye and climbed down the long ladder leading into the Viperfish engine room to prepare the submarine's nuclear reactor for the start-up.

  Bringing a reactor to a power-producing state is a painfully exact procedure. With voltmeter and technical manuals at my side, I began testing all of the safety systems controlling the reactor. Start-up was planned for 0600 the next morning, which would allow Captain Harris to cast off the lines at exactly 0800.

  Coffee became my salvation as the early hours of the morning slowly passed and daylight approached. Whenever I left the engine room to fill my cup in the crew's dining area, another crewman was coming on board. Each man appeared tired and anxious, as he sought a few hours' sleep before we were to push away from the submarine base.

  "How's the start-up going, Dunham?" each man asked, and I said, "Perfect! The reactor comes on line at six and we're outa here by eight."

  "Way to go, bruddah."

  By 0300, the sleeping quarters were filled with the crew and the coffeepot was nearly empty. By 0400, I confirmed that the fission process would be safe; by 0500, I established that we would be able to conduct safe emergency shutdowns during the next two months if anything went wrong while the reactor was running.

  By 0530, I had one final system to check before starting the reactor. Three large and powerful high-voltage circuit breakers had to be tested-one at a time. They had been previously tested and retested, so it was just a formality that I close the breakers one final time. The first two worked perfectly, but I quickly discovered that the third breaker was seriously damaged, its innards making the strange tinkling sound of pieces of metal falling apart. I looked at the clock-thirty minutes before start-up-and then glared at the breaker. The matter was simple enough: Without the breaker, we couldn't start the reactor; without the reactor, we couldn't go to sea.

  Moving as quickly as possible, I turned off all electrical power to the system and tore the circuit breaker apart. I found a small strip of metal, no more than a half inch wide and two inches long, in three pieces instead of one.

  There was no way to find a replacement part, not at 0530 or at 1000 that morning and probably not within the next week. The piece was uniquely Viperfish, and locating such parts sometimes took weeks and even months.

  I looked around the engine room and tried to figure out what to do next.

  Several minutes later, after I had broken every possible regulation that applied to the engine rooms of nuclear submarines, the circuit breaker worked perfectly. A Coca-Cola can, minus an identical metal strip a half inch wide and two inches long, landed in the dumpster at the side of the pier. At exactly 0600, the engine room filled with men as the reactor start-up neared completion. By 0800, the topside crew cast off our lines and we were on our way.

  When Chief Linaweaver entered the engine room, I started to tell him the Coca-Cola story, but I hesitated and then changed the subject. No point in ruining the man's day, I decided. He definitely wouldn't SCRAM the reactor, turn off the electricity, and try to fix it himself, so there was no point in making him worry every time he looked at the circuit breaker during the next two months. I promised myself that I would find an official replacement part as soon as we returned to port. While the Viperfish headed down the channel in the direction of the Papa Hotel point that joined Pearl Harbor to the ocean, I mulled over just how far into outer space Admiral Rickover and every other design engineer would launch me if they ever heard of what I had used to keep one of our vital circuit breakers opera
tional. And, for the next two months, every time I opened a can of Coca-Cola, I paused before taking a sip and thought about the No. 3 circuit breaker.

  We cleared the entrance to Pearl Harbor at 0830 and promptly descended into the ocean. Our course was unknown, our speed was full power, and our destination was secret.

  To the men in the engine room, our intent was clear. We had one last chance before the fuel was gone, and all of us felt a powerful determination to let nothing stop us. The pot-head students, the Vietnam War protests, the disruptions and turmoil of our society were all behind us now, and we found ourselves concentrating on the job ahead.

  We ran out of real milk on the second day, and lettuce was gone by the fourth day. When we reached the Search Zone (as we began to call it), we were down to the usual canned, pickled, frozen, and otherwise preserved foods. Nobody was much interested in watching Regulus missile movies. If we crossed the 180th meridian into the Domain of the Golden Dragon, there was no announcement that we had done so. The machinery worked perfectly as our thundering propulsion turbines pushed us into colder waters. We finally slowed enough to allow for nearly silent operations for a couple of days as we made further progress through the ocean; about one week after departure, we reached our destination.

  The civilians scrambled to line up the Fish with the hole at the bottom of the hangar. It was soon leaving the Viperfish and descending toward the ocean bottom, more than 15,000 feet below. To our surprise, we heard no detonations in the water. There was no need for emergency surfacing or sudden changes in depth. Hour upon hour, we slowly pulled our Fish through the water as it searched for a mystery lying somewhere far below.