Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (27 page)

Lindsay had lost an inch off one leg in the accident, and on Tautog he was dubbed "Step-and-a-Half." Now Step-and-a-Half was listening for the Echo, relaying information to the helm, manned by Tautog's executive officer, who was holding to a track set by the captain. As Tautog cut through depths of 120-200 feet at a moderate 12-13 knots, her path was leading her dangerously close to the Echo. Finally, the XO sent for Balderston.

Balderston showed up in the control room wearing a dark blue and maroon bathrobe and slippers. He walked directly over to Scott A. Van Hoften, the officer of the deck who had won minor celebrity among the crew for being the boat's best ship handler and for winning the onboard Coca-Cola consumption record. Now Van Hoften gave the captain a tactical update.

Meanwhile, Paul S. Waters, one of the sonar chiefs, returned to the sonar shack, taking over operations there. Putting on a headset, Waters listened for the Soviet Echo.

"Son-of-a-bitch, it's close," Waters murmured lust before he got up to brief the captain.

"Captain, to the best of my knowledge, this is an Echo II. It is close aboard."

Balderston towered over the short sonar chief, staring at him from beneath those famous eyebrows. As the two men spoke, Balderston settled into a small foldout seat just behind the periscope stand. With that one move, he took over. He made no dramatic pronouncements. He didn't have to say a word.

Van Hoften remained officer of the deck and continued to yell the orders, but everyone knew they came from Balderston. He would not leave the bridge again-not to return to his hunk, not to change out of his bathrobe. At his side was Michael Coy. By now, the all-Navy captain and the decidedly nonmilitary Coy had struck an uneasy peace. Coy had learned to refrain from repeating that he had no intentions of staying in the Navy, and Balderston had stopped talking up the advantages of military life. Besides, Coy also was the boat's supply officer and kept the health-conscious commander in vitamins, Sanka, and enough walnuts to keep his body swimming in lecithin.

Balderston began to scrutinize the oscilloscope. On its nine-inchwide screen a single electronic amber arc offered a sonar-generated image of the Echo. Usually, ten or more faint arcs flickered on the sonar screen, computer depictions of the noise generated by distant boats, land masses, even whales. But the image created by the Soviet sub was large and bright, and it was jumping back and forth across the screen. There was only one interpretation possible. The Echo was very, very close.

"Here ... she ... comes.... There ... she ... goes," the captain commented, drawing out the sentence to add emphasis to anyone and no one in particular as he watched the Echo's athletics. He would repeat that comment a few minutes later, and a third time after that.

The XO stood to Balderston's left, studying the navigators' plots. About five feet away, Van Hoften bent his 6'5" frame over the fire control station, monitoring the weapons computers, which were also tracking the Echo's direction, speed, and distance from Tautog. Just outside the conn, in the sonar shack, men crowded shoulder to shoulder and continued to track the Echo.

Mentally they sifted the soft, rhythmic shw-shw-shw sounds of the Echo's propellers from the blanket of ocean noise coming through their head sets. But nothing they heard or could see on their display read the Echo's depth. For that, the men could only listen and guess. Every few minutes the distance between the subs registered zero. At one point, sonar operators guessed that the Echo had risen near the surface, which would have placed her directly above Tautog. Then it seemed that the Echo was descending again.

This all could have been much easier. Tautog had been scheduled to receive a newly engineered device designed to measure another submarine's depth by measuring the disturbances in the water it created. The device consisted of four hydrophones, which were supposed to have been mounted on Tautog's sail. But the shipyard had been behind schedule, and the submarine left port with the new technology sitting in Pearl Harbor.

One officer muttered that it was too bad about those missing hydrophones, and others began to talk about trying to open up the distance between the two subs. Just then, the image on the oscilloscope leapt again, this time violently.

"Here she comes, ... " the captain began. He never finished the sentence.

The image on the oscilloscope disappeared. At that instant, the sonar operators lost all track of the Echo. No one knew whether the Echo had gone to the right or to the left. She was just gone.

Then, the Echo announced herself in the worst possible way. The 6,000-ton sub slammed belly first into the top of Tautog's sail with an impact that sounded like two cars colliding at 40 miles an hour. With a horrible screech, the Echo's propellers ground through Tautog's metal with a din that forced Chief Waters to recoil from his headset.

Tautog flipped on her right side, rolling nearly 30 degrees as she was forced backward and down. Men went grabbing for a handhold on rails and tables. Coffee mugs, pencils, rulers, charts, and erasers went flying through the control room. Maraschino cherries and pickle relish splattered all over the mess area. Tools popped out of wall lockers and littered the floor of the engine room. Step-and-a-Half Lindsay was thrown down a ladder. Down in the torpedo room, three men who had been sleeping, curled up against the long, green weapons, were tossed from their "bedpans," those mattresses on top of empty torpedo racks. Around them the massive weapons strained at their canvas straps.

One man jumped up to close the watertight doors to the torpedo room. He didn't check to see whether anyone was inside, didn't realize that he had just locked in Greg Greeley-an eighteen-year-old recruit who had boarded Tautog just three weeks before the mission began. All that man knew was that the exterior compartment might be among the first to flood and as the one closest to the hatch, it was his job to seal it off. Then, as he was trained, he turned his back, never looking in the small round window to see Greeley frightened inside. It would be several minutes before anyone could be sure the hull was intact, several minutes before anyone let Greeley out.

Meanwhile, other officers jumped out of their hunks, raced out of the wardroom and to the control room, scrambling to assume their preassigned collision stations. Coy took over the diving station and began struggling to level the sub. Van Hoften gave his last order as officer of the deck before formally turning the boat over to the captain.

"Do not sound the collision alarm."

It was awfully late to try to stay quiet and avoid detection and just as unnecessary to announce the collision. Still, according to rote, the crew quietly passed a collision alert from man to man, compartment by compartment. Compartment by compartment, the men reported back that each area of Tautog was essentially intact. The watertight doors were opened.

"They build them well at Ingalls," Waters finally said, referring to the sub's shipyard in Mississippi. His comment would he caught on an audiotape that was running in the sonar shack, recording the drama.

Step-and-a-Half hustled back, grabbed hold of a headset, and shouted, "Fuck you, God, nothing gets through HY-80." HY-80 was the steel that Tautog's hull was made of, so named because it could withstand 80,000 pounds of ocean pressure per square inch.

Then the two men sat back to listen. What they heard, and what was recorded on the running tape, seemed to confirm the worst. It sounded as if one of the Echo's propellers had been torn off and, with nothing to resist the water, its turbine was spinning wildly. If that were true, and the Echo's pressure hull was gashed through, she would likely sink into the ocean. At 2,000 feet down, she would implode. There would be no survivors.

Then the men heard noises like an engine starting up and sputtering, followed by banging, perhaps watertight doors being slammed shut on the Echo. Finally sonar picked up something that sounded like popcorn popping, what Lindsay interpreted as the sound of steel cracking apart.

After that, the ocean seemed to go silent, a blanket of uninterrupted static through the sonarmen's headsets. They listened for anything that could be the Echo racing away, or blowing ballast tanks and surfacing. But everything, the spinning, the banging, the popping, had just stopped.

Someone in the sonar shack jumped up and turned off the recorder. The tape normally ran on a continuous loop, and had the recorder been left on, the sounds of the crash would have been lost.

Stunned, the operators continued to search, looking for any sign that the Soviet sub had recovered. The silence seemed to mean only one thing: that as many as ninety submariners were helplessly sinking into the crushing depths below. It didn't seem to matter now that they were Soviet submariners.

Within minutes of the collision, Balderston gave the order that sent Tautog steaming away, fast. There was no thought of surfacing or even of going to periscope depth. This was, in fact, an undersea hit and run. Tautog's crew would not mount a search for survivors or wreckage, normal procedure for a collision at sea. Balderston's prime directive was to avoid any further encounter with the Soviets.

Tautog headed due east, moving at only about 12 knots and listing at least 10 degrees to her starboard side. Every time Balderston. tried to drive the submarine faster, she leaned over more sharply. One by one, metal plates that had been welded to Tautog's sail were torn off by the force of the water. Each slammed onto the submarine's hull with a resounding crash. The crew started a pool, betting on how much of the sail would be left when they got back to Pearl Harbor.

Water leaked into the control room from the gash left by the Echo's propeller, but it would be hours before Tautog surfaced, hours before a small team of officers could, under the cover of darkness, inspect the damage outside.

Men rushed around, trying to clean up evidence of the debacle. The sugar bowl looked like it had exploded as the captain and his officers gathered in the wardroom to make sense of what had happened. Scott Laidig, one of Tautog's spooks, greeted the senior officers as they arrived. Laidig was a U.S. Marine. He had been assigned to work with the Naval Security Group, which decided that his fluency in Russian qualified him for submarines. Still, he knew he could offer no help during a collision, so he had done the next best thing. He had gotten out of everyone else's way, slipping down to the wardroom to wait out the adventure.

"I don't know how you guys do this," he said now. "You sit out here in the middle of nowhere, and you let somebody run right through you."

"Gee, I hope we didn't ruin your cup of coffee," Balderston countered.

Laidig was a veteran of two tours in Vietnam and was well known on Tautog for his ability to spin a yarn. Now it seemed as if he and Balderston were conspiring to divert the other officers, at least for a few moments.

Balderston asked Laidig whether he'd ever been afraid, really afraid. That was Laidig's cue. He launched into a harrowing tale about the time he had led a platoon after a sniper who had been firing on Americans from across a rice paddy. When the Americans were surprised by a second gunman, Laidig sought the only shelter available, a skinny tree. As he pressed against it, a barrage of bullets sawed his pack off his back.

The officers listened, their hands still quaking from the crash. They decided that as bad as their day had been, Laidig had been through worse. He said he wasn't so sure. The men concluded that they were probably all more comfortable dealing with the devil they knew. With that, the officers turned their attention to the devil at hand.

For more than two hours, they tried to reconstruct the accident, and came to a single conclusion. Tautog should have been traveling at a different depth. No one talked about what might have happened to the Soviet sub or her crew.

For the first time, Balderston's officers saw him almost humble. At one point he just shook his head, saying, "You take care of things that need to be taken care of, the safety of the ship, the safety of the crew, and of course, nondetection......

Balderston didn't finish. He didn't have to. His men understood what he meant. Later he would say what everyone was thinking, but not for several hours. Not until Tautog had surfaced and his officers had assessed the damage. Not until he was sure his submarine could make it back to Pearl Harbor.

"Well, there goes my career," Balderston finally said. "I can forget about stars." He had lost his chance to make admiral.

When they were 150-200 miles away from the Soviet Union, Balderston gave the order to surface. Several officers climbed out the forward hatch into the darkness. They couldn't take the usual route out to the sail and up to the bridge. The hatch leading to the bridge had been breached and the sail flooded.

When the officers climbed on deck, they saw that their sail had been dished in one-third of the way back, maybe more. It was almost as if the massive structure had been made of cardboard. A fist-sized chunk of the Echo's propeller was lodged in the tower's upper hatch, which was bent and crammed back into its housing. One of the sub's two periscopes was hopelessly bent. Most of Tautog's antenna and electronic masts were jammed inside the damaged sail and useless. That was going to make it tough to send a message back home, but it was very definitely time to let Pacific command know what had happened.