To Kill the Potemkin
FOR MY FATHER
War is a game.
—CLAUSEWITZ
All war is deception.
—SUN TZU
On
May 27, 1968, at one o'clock in the
afternoon, the USS
Scorpion
, a nuclear submarine
with ninety-nine pen
aboard, was due to arrive at her home port of Norfolk, Virginia, after
a
ninety-day patrol. The families of the crew were waiting on the dock.
At
about three o'clock a navy public affairs
officer announced that
Scorpion
was overdue. She had
failed to request
her berthing assignment and tug services.
Scorpion
had last
communicated on May 21, when she filed a routine position report from
fifty
miles south of the Azores in the mid-Atlantic.
After
several
more hours of continued
silence, the navy undertook a
massive search of the waters around Norfolk. Over the next few days the
search
was widened into the deep Atlantic. On June 5, the navy declared
Scorpion
presumed lost with all hands, and on June 30 her name was struck from
the navy
list.
The
loss of
Scorpion
was the worst
disaster to befall a fully armed United States Navy warship on patrol
since the
end of World War Two.
The
USS
Scorpion,
SSN 589, one of six
Skipjack class submarines, was 252 feet long and 31 feet wide. She was
built by
the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics Corporation in Groton,
Connecticut, and commissioned July 29, 1960, at a cost of forty million
dollars.
Her S5W nuclear reactor, built by Westinghouse, was capable of lighting
a small
city. An attack submarine, a hunter-killer, she carried no ballistic
missiles.
She was armed with torpedoes of various types, including several with
nuclear
warheads designed to destroy enemy submarines and other capital ships,
Her crew
of ninety-nine represented the highest level of training and
achievement of any
military unit in the Armed Forces of the United States. They were the
navy's
elite.
Their
loss
went largely unnoticed. In May 1968 American soldiers and sailors died
every day
in Viet Nam. France endured a general strike. Students at Columbia and
elsewhere laid siege to their universities. The battle of Khe San, the
cultural
revolution in China, the civil war in Nigeria, and the death the
previous month
of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., crowded the front pages of America's
newspapers. Unlike the
Thresher,
which sank in
April 1963 during a time
of relative tranquility, the
Scorpion
has been all
but forgotten.
On
June 5,
1968, a Navy Court of Inquiry convened in Norfolk and took testimony in
secret
from more than ninety witnesses. On August 5
The New York
Times,
in a
two-paragraph article in the back pages, reported that technicians at a
U.S.
Navy SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System) listening station in Greece made
a tape
recording of an implosion in the mid-Atlantic on May 21.
Meanwhile,
the search in the deep Atlantic began in earnest. The USS
Mizar,
an
oceanographic research vessel, was assigned the task of finding the
wreck.
Mizar
towed a sled over the bottom, more than ten thousand feet down, and
searched
with sonars, magnometers, lights, and television and still cameras.
In
August the Court adjourned with no conclusive
evidence as to the cause of the disaster. On October 29
Mizar
found the wreck of
Scorpion
four hundred miles from
her last reported
position, under 11,235 feet of water, and took twelve thousand
photographs of
the debris field.
The
Court
reconvened in November, examined
the evidence gathered by
Mizar
and issued a Findings
of Fact on January
31, 1969. Most of that document remains classified today. In the
declassified
portions the Court declared that "the certain cause of the loss of
Scorpion
cannot be ascertained from any evidence now
available." The
death of SSN 589 became an official mystery.
During
the early
months of 1968 multiple
submarine disasters were reported in the public press. On February 25
the
Israeli sub
Dakar
disappeared in the Mediterranean.
On April 11 a Soviet
Navy Golf II class submarine sank in the Pacific. Several months later
parts of
that sub were raised by the
Glomar Explorer. Scorpion
exploded and sank
on May 21. Were all these events coincidence? Answers may lie deep in
the
archives of all the navies involved. The essence of submarine warfare
is
secrecy and stealth, and submarine operations rank among the most
carefully
guarded secrets of all military powers. In the U.S. Navy, submariners
are said
to belong to the Silent Service. The boats are quiet, but the men are
mute.
Nevertheless,
as
in all navies, there is
scuttlebutt. Rumors circulate for years, become exaggerated and
inflated, but
never lose their fascination. Was there a sub war in the late 1960s,
when the
Soviet Navy was making frantic efforts to catch and technologically
surpass the
U.S. Navy?
The
story that
follows is fiction. The ships
and the men who sail them are imaginary, but their time and the nature
of their
struggle were real. Then, as now, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a
year, the
submarine forces of the United States Navy and the Soviet Navy
confronted one
another under all the oceans of earth, playing a deadly game of nuclear
war.
What happened then, if it happened at all, may happen again...
1
SILVER
DOLPHINS
Twin
dolphins faced each other across Sorensen's chest. Sailors called them
dolphins,
but the strange creatures inked into Sorensen's skin scarcely resembled
the
small singing whales that live in the sea. Their eyes bulged and their
mouths
gaped, as if they were about to devour the submarine making way between
them.
The sub, an old-fashioned diesel-electric with knife-edged prow, crude
sonar
dome and archaic anchor, appeared to drive straight out of Sorensen's
heart.
Over
the
years the tattoo had faded to a bluish gray. Tufts of blond hair
obscured some
of the intricate detail, but the legend that curved over the sub was
still
legible: SSN 593.
Sorensen
was a big man. Even in his present condition, drunk, stoned, sprawled
naked on
a whore's bed, his wide shoulders and lean swimmer's muscles spent and
exhausted, he radiated tension like a sheathed sword.
Almost
asleep, he closed his eyes and listened to the girl breathing softly
beside
him.
Ordinarily,
Lorraine took little notice of her
tricks, most of whom came from the navy base. Sorensen was different.
He spent
a lot of money, he knew what he wanted and he treated her right. She
was
enjoying herself. She liked the way his lopsided smile slanted across
his face when he grinned. Dark rings surrounded his eyes, but whether
they were
a permanent feature, she didn't know. His hair was longer than
regulation and
slicked back over large ears. His skin was tan and healthy.
Lazily,
she
traced her fingers over the
tattoo. She had been in Norfolk long enough to recognize the insignia
of the
Submarine Service, and long enough to know which questions not to ask a
submariner. No, they didn't get claustrophobic. Yes, they got insanely
horny on
a long patrol. Yes, they worried about the radiation, but not too much.
They
all said the asbestos was worse.
"How
long you
been in the navy.
Jack?"
Without
opening
his eyes, Sorensen mumbled,
"Too long."
"I
bet you're a
lifer. Otherwise, you
wouldn't have this tattoo."
"Yeah,
well, one
night in Tokyo I had
too much to drink. So it goes, so it goes."
She
giggled. "You
submarine guys are all
a little crazy, you know? But you're the only one I ever saw with a
tan."
He
smiled. "You
like that?"
"You
look like
one of them California
surfers."
"Hardly
likely.
I'm from Oakland. That's
California, but the only beach is a mudflat where people shoot ducks
and watch
bodies float by. That's my home town, but I've never been back."
"Wait.
Let me
guess. Now your address is
on your chest, right?"
"Right."
"SSN
593. That
your ship?"
"USS
Barracuda.
The one and
only."
"You're
a lifer,
Sorensen. Admit
it."
He
opened his
eyes and looked at her.
"We're all lifers, every last one of us.
You, too." He
closed his eyes again. "What time is it?"
"Three
A.M."
"Listen,
be a good girl and let me sleep for an hour. Wake me up at four."
"Sure,
sailor."
He
listened to her slide out of bed, walk across the room and pour herself
a
drink. Ice, whiskey, water. From outside came insect noises and the
grinding
and whirring of a garbage truck. Sorensen pulled a pillow over his ears.
Lorraine
sipped her drink and gazed at the naked man on her bed. He fidgeted in
his
sleep as if he were disturbed by his dreams.
Suzy
had
told her that Sorensen visited the house once or twice a year, usually
the
night before
Barracuda
went on patrol. That evening
he had presented
Suzy with a silk kimono, explaining that he had just returned from a
two-day
round trip to Japan. Upstairs he had a drink and relaxed. To Lorraine's
delight, he had demonstrated a novel miniature tape recorder he had
brought
back from Tokyo. The machine fit into his jumper pocket, and he had
dozens of
tiny reels of ultrathin tape. During the night they had listened to
Fats
Domino, Mose Allison, Beethoven, Hoyt Axton and the Grateful Dead.
While
Sorensen slept she found the Hoyt Axton tape and listened to him sing
about
junkies and cowboys, wondering lazily what life was like under a city
block of
ocean.
Sorensen
listened to the night. A toilet flushed on
the floor above, and he followed the water as it gurgled down through
the pipes
on its way to Chesapeake Bay. He strained to hear the sounds of the
harbor,
ships and buoys, but they were too far away, lost in the shore sounds
of
trucks and trains and the low rumble of a sleeping city. Gradually the
sounds
of Norfolk were replaced by the ocean sounds inside his head. Submarine
sounds,
underwater sounds, whales, snapping shrimp, sonar beacons.
Just
before
passing out, the last thing
Sorensen heard was the sound of engine-room machinery pounding in his
head.
Steam throttled through valves and pumps, pushing turbines and turning
gears.
It was as if he were listening to his own blood rushing through his
arteries.
He fell asleep and dreamed he was a steel fish with a nuclear heart,
swimming
effortlessly through the vast blackness of the sea.
He
had
surrendered to the dream long ago.
Asleep, he became
Barracuda.
The ship's technology became an extension of his senses; her sonars
were as his
own ears, plunging him into a world of pure sound. The open sea is a
noisy
place. Whales signal across thousands of miles. Fish chatter and croak.
Surface
ships clutter up the medium with their struggle against wind, waves and
turbulence. As
Barracuda
,
perfect and invulnerable lord of the deep, Sorensen ignored them all.
He was
searching for one sound, one unforgettable sound. It was another sub,
sometimes
far away, sometimes nearby, but always moving and elusive. The sound
faded in
and out, one moment barely audible, an instant later roaring in his
ear. The
sound was deeper in pitch than that of any other sub in Sorensen's
experience,
and conveyed a sense of raw power and terrible menace. Though he taxed
his
remarkable hearing to the limit, he could never establish its identity.