Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (23 page)

The officer, as well as Craven and many others agree that there needs to be more investigation, perhaps another effort to take a look inside Scorpion's torpedo room. For now, Craven remains convinced that a torpedo was the most likely cause of the sub's loss. He is not alone. In June 1998, Craven stood before a throng of Navy officers when he became the first man to be given the distinguished civilian service award by the Naval Submarine League for his work on Scorpion, Polaris, and other projects. When the ceremony was over, an officer approached him. His voice lowered so it wouldn't carry through the crowded room, the officer began talking about Scorpion and told Craven that he had been convinced for years that she was lost after a torpedo accident.

Without knowing about the alert sent from Keyport, without knowing that there were known problems with the batteries powering the Mark 37 torpedos, the officer told Craven: "I know it was a torpedo because I had a torpedo battery cook-off on me."

   Commander Chester M. Mack, a 6'6" maverick known as "Whitey," after his pure blond pate, looked through his periscope out onto the Barents Sea. He was here in search of a new and lethal Soviet ballistic missile submarine that NATO had dubbed, without mirth, the "Yankee."

It was March 1969, and in one terrifying technological leap, the Soviets had finally come out with a nuclear-powered missile sub with a design that seemed borrowed from Polaris and that might be capable of striking the White House or the Pentagon from more than 1,000 miles offshore. It was Mack's job to learn more about it.

Mack had driven his sub straight through the Barents, the zealously guarded training area for the Northern Fleet, the Soviet Navy's most advanced and powerful. He was traveling with the arrogance of somebody who knew he was at the helm of one of the Navy's newest subs, a Sturgeon-class attack boat armed with the latest sonar and eavesdropping equipment. He was also traveling with a lot more luck than most, because in this game of hit and miss, he had just found what he was looking for.

There in front of his scope was a Yankee, 429 feet long, .39 feet across, weighing in at 9,600 tons. Mack sidled Lapon up to within 300 yards and stared.

"Holy Christ, that son-of-a-hitch looks like a Mattel model," he blurted out. The submarine was indeed a Polaris look-alike, from the shape of its hull down to its sail-mounted diving planes. The image was broadcast down in the crew's mess on a television wired to the periscope-what submariners called "periviz." Later, Mack would even air reruns, the sight was that striking.

Mack hooked a Hasselblad single-lens reflex camera onto the periscope and held down the shutter. The film advanced on a motorized drive as Lapon moved slowly forward, Mack lifting her scope out of the water for only seven seconds at a time in an effort to avoid detection. With each peek of the periscope, he grabbed a few photos, each time capturing another small portion of the massive boat. It would take seven of the photos pasted together to show the entire Yankee.

During the years the first Yankees were under construction, U.S. intelligence had collected little more than fuzzy images captured by spy satellites showing the Soviets were preparing to mass-produce the new weapon. But over the last year, as the Yankees ventured out on sea trials, U.S. surveillance subs had been moving in for a closer look at this nuclear monster decorated with sixteen doors hiding sixteen portable missile silos. The Yankee seemed a huge advance over the other ballistic missile subs the Soviets had put to sea, the diesel-powered Zulus and Golfs and the first nuclear-powered missile boats, the Hotels. None of those boats had inspired the same fear the Yankee inspired now. The earlier subs were loud and easy for SOSUS and sonar to spot. Now the U.S. sub force was faced with a crucial question: Did the Yankee mimic more than Polaris's shape? Was it possible that, just six years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviets were positioned to launch a first strike with little or no warning? If the subs were as silent and deadly as they seemed, then, at the very least, the Soviets would have matched the United States in creating a second-strike capability, a way to punch back if all their land missiles and bombers were destroyed.

Captain James Bradley knew his spy program had already produced a lot of critical information about the development of Soviet subs and missiles. Photographing the sunken Golf had been a technological coup. But the Golfs posed little threat compared to the Yankees, and nothing was more important now than learning how to find these new subs, how to destroy them.

Photos of a Yankee did only so much good. The U.S. Navy and its NATO allies needed to see these boats in action, see just where they carried their missiles, needed to collect sound signatures to ensure that the subs could never pass SOSUS listening nets unheard, and so that surveillance subs and sonar buoys dropped by P-3 Orion sub-hunter planes could recognize the threat as it passed.

Someone had to get close to a Yankee in action, and he would have to stay close enough for long enough to give the United States ammu nition to counter the new threat. For this, almost any risks were warranted.

As pumped up as Mack was from his photographic feat, he knew that the real star of the sub force would he the man who accomplished a long trail. Other commanders knew it too, and even the loss of Scorpion was not enough to kill the fighter-jock bravado that the new mission was sparking within the ranks. But Mack was feeling quite proprietary about the Yankees now, and he was certain he could be the guy to get in close and stay there. He was sure of that even though nobody else had been able to. Mack had that kind of an ego.

In fact, everything about this thirty-seven-year-old commander was big. His towering, 240-pound frame didn't quite fit through Lapon's low hatches and narrow passageways, and he was almost always bent over in the control room, littered overhead with a maze of piping and wire. Submarines were just too small to contain Whitey Mack. He was a larger-than-life renegade, much like the heroes in the novels he devoured by the basketful. He saw himself as the hero in a story he was writing as he went along, a story ruled by his own tactics and sometimes by his own rules.

He had never attended the Naval Academy. Instead, he was recruited into Officer's Candidate School by a brash ROTC XO at Pennsylvania State University who bragged that he won his wife in a poker game. Mack himself was the son of a Pennsylvania coal miner, and he held up this lack of official polish as a badge of honor. Mack labeled himself a "smart-ass kind of guy," and he faced down his superiors with piercing blue eyes and a brand of brass that had nothing to do with epaulet stars. With wry irony, he sported a homemade pair of Russian dolphins alongside his standard American dolphinsthe emblem of the U.S. submarine fleet-and he liked nothing better than to rush about his submarine shouting obscenities in Russian.

"A faint heart never fucked a pig." That was Lapon's motto and it had been ever since Mack's first voyage on the sub when he used the phrase to announce his decision to follow a new Soviet sub close to her territorial waters. (The line was recorded on a continuous tape running in Lapon's control room.) Although, when the subject carne up once in front of an admiral, Mack delicately altered the phrase to "A faint heart never won a fair maiden."

Mack had plunged into command of Lapon in late 1967, first by horse-trading with other commanders for the men he believed would create an all-star crew, then by installing all manner of experimental, and often unauthorized, equipment on his submarine. He alternately inspired and mercilessly drove his men. He alternately impressed and badgered senior admirals, until he was allowed to skip the usual months of U.S.-based shakedown training and head straight into the action.

To a large degree, Mack was emblematic of his era. Throughout the sub force, captains who avoided risks were branded with nicknames such as "Charlie Tuna" or "Chicken of the Sea." Still, Mack left his superiors-not to mention other commanders who prided themselves on their own daring-debating whether he was dangerously blurring the line between valor and recklessness. To be sure, those close-up photos of the Yankee were as valuable as any intelligence anyone had gotten lately, but Mack had also taken other immense risks for limited intelligence return.

Lapon had already been detected in the Barents once under Mack's watch. It may have been a glint of sunlight off her periscope, no one was sure, but suddenly the men in Lapan's radio shack heard a Soviet pilot sending out an alert in Russian: "I see a submarine."

When Lapon's officer of the deck pointed his periscope toward the sky, he saw a helicopter pilot who seemed to be looking right at him. "He's got the biggest fucking red mustache I ever saw!" the officer exclaimed.

"That's close enough," Mack said, breathless, as he raced from his personal quarters into the control room, still in his skivvies. "We better get the hell out of here." With that, he got his boat out of Dodge before the Soviets had a chance to mount a full search.

Mack also had driven so close to two Soviet subs conducting approach and attack runs that Lapon ended up in the path of one of their torpedoes. Mack knew that, for an exercise like this, the Soviets were shooting duds. But he had no intention of proving his point by letting the torpedo hit. Instead, he sent the order to the engine room that kicked Lapon into high speed. Flying "balls to the wall," as submariners say, Mack outraced the weapon. (The incident occurred just after he had taken Lapon out searching for Scorpion, though well before anyone realized that a torpedo might have killed that boat.)

Two spooks on board, George T. "Tommy" Cox and Joseph "Jesse" James, were so shaken by the incident that when they later tried to grab a smoke in the radio room, neither man could steady himself long enough to light up. Cox wanted to be a country-western singer, had once taken first place at the Gene Hooper County Western Show Talent Contest in Caribou, Maine and had worked his way through high school playing backup at a place called Cindy's Bar. After this trip on Lapon, he recorded a ballad called "Torpedo in the Water" on his first and only collection of submarine greatest hits, Take Her Deep. The song was an ode to a close call:

From her encounter with the torpedo, Lapon carried back transcripts and photographs of the initial part of the test, as well as rolls of film filled with other Soviet activities-all of it interesting, none of it crucial, none of it enough to make Whitey a star-the star-of the Atlantic Fleet.

Instead, it was another man who was so heralded, Kinnaird R. McKee, a lithe southern gentleman with bushy eyebrows and a showman's flair. He had set the standard for surveillance operations when he was on the USS Dace (SSN-607), and even though McKee's stellar command was nearly over by the time Mack photographed the Yankee in March 1969, he stood as an icon in the sub force. In 1967, McKee had not only photographed a Soviet nuclear-powered icebreaker as it was being towed, but he grabbed radioactive air samples that proved the ship had suffered a reactor accident. The next year, in one breathtaking mission, McKee collected the first close-up photographs and sound signatures of not one but two of the second generation of Soviet nuclear-powered subs: an attack sub and a cruise missile sub that NATO had named the "Victor" and the "Charlie." He had found one of the new subs in the waters off Novaya Zemlya, a large island between the Barents and Kara Seas that was one of the Soviet's main nuclear test areas.

Like Mack, McKee had been detected. Indeed, he had snapped a photograph of a Soviet crew member standing on the deck of one of the subs and pointing right at the Dace's periscope just before the Soviets began to chase. McKee had to outrace a group of Soviet sur face patrols pinging wildly with active sonar. He finally managed his escape by driving Dace straight under the hazardous reaches of the Arctic ice. When it was safe to emerge, he continued his mission, locating the second new Soviet sub within a week.

"Gentlemen, the price of poker has just gone up in the Barents Sea," McKee announced on his return at a session with the joint Chiefs of Staff and members of the Defense Department. With typical flair, he captured his audience with a briefing no less dramatic for his exclusion of the detection and his omission of the shot of the Soviet crewman pointing at Dace. McKee's presentation and his slide show of other photographs shot through his scope went over so well that his immediate superiors never thought to criticize him for allowing his sub to be detected. Instead, for McKee, the mission was marred only by the fact that the Navy had refused to let him name the Soviet submarines he had found.