The Viperfish had made a total of thirty-two test firings of Regulus missiles at sea. Each shot required the crew to surface, open a large door (christened the “bat cave” by the crew), roll a Regulus missile out of the hangar and onto its track, establish radio contact with the guiding system of a nearby American jet, and then finally fire the thing into the sky. The entire operation took about twenty minutes. Immediately afterward, the crew rapidly closed the bat cave and rigged the boat to dive so that, as quickly as possible, the Viperfish could disappear beneath the surface. The Regulus system provided nuclear protection prior to development of the Polaris missile program and construction of the first Polaris submarine, the USS George Washington (SSBN 598).
“With the Polaris missile system now going ahead full steam, the Viperfish isn’t involved with Regulus missiles, right?” I asked Chief Mathews the obvious as we entered Pearl Harbor’s main gate.
“Right,” he answered. “They unloaded the missiles and changed her back to SSN.” There was a period of silence, and I waited for him to continue.
Finally, feeling stupid, I blurted out, “Okay, what does the Viperfish do now, Chief?”
He hesitated, then began speaking in slow, measured tones. “Although her mission is secret, she has been redesigned to perform activities that you will find extraordinary. Because of these changes, there are now three crews on board the boat. There is the nuclear crew, composed of goddamn nukes like yourself, and the others who keep the reactor on the line and the steam in the engine room.”
After turning left past the main gate, we were moving in the opposite direction from the arrows pointing to the submarine base.
“And then there is the forward crew, the men who really run the boat,” he said. “They are occasionally called the forward pukes by the nukes-our shipmates to the rear. The non-nukes run the ballast control systems, the diving station, navigation, sonar, fire control-”
“I understand all that, Chief,” I interrupted. “And the third crew?”
He took a deep breath, stared straight ahead, and softly said, “The third crew is for the Special Project.”
We turned right, drove down Avenue D and into the naval shipyard. “What kind of special project, Chief?” I asked, sensing that I was going to learn little.
“You’ll find out all about that from your security briefing, Dunham. All you need to know for now is that we are developing a combined civilian and military project, a cooperative effort, so to speak, that expands the capabilities of the Viperfish.”
Although the prospect of civilians being assigned to a nuclear warship seemed unusual and even a little unsettling, it was apparent that the chief was not going to say anything more on the subject. We made a right turn off South Avenue to 7th Street, where a cluster of towering shipyard cranes came into sight. Mathews began talking about cranes as we approached the dry dock area. He said that the largest cranes were of the “hammer-head” style, as unique to Pearl Harbor as the Arizona Memorial.
The Viperfish was not moored at the Southeast Loch submarine base with the other submarines. The Viperfish wasn’t even in the water. Mathews parked the car, and we walked in the direction of the biggest dry dock, looming like a gigantic rectangular hole ahead of us. I stopped at the edge of the massive concrete chamber and stared down at the submarine that was to be my new home for the next three years.
* The term “boat” is generally used to denote a small vessel that can be hoisted on board a ship. Early submarines were small enough to fulfill this definition. The camaraderie of the first “boat sailors” and their pride in serving on board such unique vessels resulted in this term remaining in common use among submariners. The official U.S. Navy definition of a submarine is a ship, but submarine sailors, in accordance with tradition, continue to call their vessel a boat.
SINCE THE EARLY 1960S, the waters off the eastern coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula have been closely monitored by United States surveillance systems that acoustically track submarines as they approach and depart the naval bases at Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk. One of the most comprehensive of these systems is the passive hydrophone array, known by the Department of Defense as the sound surveillance system (code-named SOSUS), capable of accurately identifying the positions of ships at sea. Installed at a cost of $16 billion and stretching for thirty thousand miles, the SOSUS microphones were arranged in a highly classified manner throughout the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for the primary purpose of detecting Soviet missile-carrying submarines. By 1966, this system was already in operation and quietly analyzing the acoustic signatures of Soviet submarines sailing from their home ports into the Pacific Ocean from the Sea of Okhotsk and the Kamchatka Peninsula.
The ocean is filled with noise spanning a wide range of frequencies emitted by abundant biological life-forms. From the train of sharp clicks generated by the sperm whales (often rattling thirty to forty clicks per second, they sound like a cadre of carpenters hammering simultaneously) to the growling of the fin whales, the rasping and drumming of the triggerfish, and the whistles of the killer whales, SOSUS heard them all. With regularity, the sensitive microphones of SOSUS detected the deep-throated rumbles from the screws of passing freighters mixing with the clatter of Soviet diesel submarines as they ran their engines to charge their batteries. Less commonly, SOSUS picked up the sounds of explosive charges detonated by antisubmarine aircraft and ships, along with a profusion of underwater communications, during war game activities.
Every ten or twenty years, maybe once or rarely twice in the career of a SOSUS specialist, there were the loud noises of collapsing steel and rupturing compartments as a vessel on the high seas lost her integrity and began to break apart. On these infrequent occasions, the noise continued for a minute, sometimes longer, as the ship dropped below the surface and, falling thousands of feet, broadcast her trail of progressive destruction into the sensitive microphones on the bottom of the sea. When the reverberations finally ceased and the ocean was returned to the sounds of the whales and the fish, the SOSUS analysts were left with a final epitaph to the men and the vessel that no longer existed.
THE VIPERFISH WAS A monster of a submarine.
Stretching 350 feet from bow to stern, she was bigger than any vessel I had seen at New London. Sitting high on blocks arranged across the sunken floor of the dry dock, she looked like an ominous black trophy on display. Any sleek lines envisioned by her designers never made it to the final product. Flapperlike bow planes sticking out near her nose gave her the appearance of a 1930s submarine, the huge tumorous hump bulging out of her skin disrupted her shape, and the square limber holes along her sides looked like a colossal engineering mistake.
Torrents of water shot straight out from holes in her flanks and, arcing far into the air, fell to the concrete floor below. Workmen scurried over the various steel protrusions and sent streams of sparks across the hull as their grinders and air hammers clattered a dissonant cacophony. In the background, barely audible through the bedlam from the dry dock, curious clanging sounds announced the movements of the enormous cranes rolling across railroad tracks around the perimeter of the dry dock as their cables lowered open crates filled with men to the deck of the submarine.
“Ugly bastard, ain’t she?” Mathews hollered over the noise of the chaos in front of us.
“Never seen anything like it,” I called