Now Moore had inherited a boat plagued with a temperamental reactor and Rickover's rancor. Built solid like a wrestler, Moore faced his task with quiet determination. His hair, already graying, would go just a hit lighter on this command, but he rarely complained out loud, and almost never about Rickover himself-though he would periodically aim a curse at some of the admiral's more overtly sadistic subordinates.
As Halibut moved more than 400 miles north of Midway, only Moore and a few officers knew what she was after-not even the handpicked, specially cleared denizens of the Bat Cave had been told. Their leader, Lieutenant Commander John H. Cook III, a thirty-oneyear-old electrical engineer with the dual title of operations officer and project officer, mentioned only that they were to scan the ocean hottom 17,000 feet down for any object larger than a garbage can.
Things started out well enough. The team laid a transponder grid on the ocean floor, using Halibut's torpedo tubes to launch more than a dozen of the signal devices. Each had a unique sound signature that could be triggered by remote control from the sub. As each transponder hit bottom, navigators plotted its precise location using a satellite navigation system.
Craven wasn't aboard while all this was happening, but his spirit was. Most of Halibut's crew believed the cover story he had craftedthat the 8-foot-long transponders were underwater mines. The transponders had even been marked with munitions codes and deliv ered to Halibut via a Navy munitions depot. To make sure the crew was convinced, Craven gravely warned the men to deny that mines were on board.
It took thirty-six hours to set the grid. After that, the men launched one of the fish. Most of the crew had been told that the mechanisms were a new type of towed sonar, but the "special projects" crew crammed inside the Bat Cave's tiny control room knew better.
The video signals still weren't coming through. Instead, the men were trying to "see" the bottom by sonar images sent up through the fish. They sat, staring into the gray shadows sent up to the screens, trying to separate one wash of shadow from another, to distinguish what might have been key objects from passing fish, from rocks. There were also panels displaying digital readouts to track the mechanical fish's altitude from the bottom as it swam along illuminating its own path, taking photographs that nobody would see until it was hauled back into the sub.
Things became even more difficult when the Univac 1124 crashed. This time, though, the Bat Cave crew was ready. Armed with a hand calculator carried on board by a Westinghouse engineer, the men did the job for which the computer had been designed. Not long after that, though, Halibut's gremlins almost got the better of the mission. This time the problem was caused in part by a weakness Craven had knowingly left alone, a calculated risk. The hydraulically powered cable spool was smaller than it should have been. To fit within the seven-foot gap between the submarine's pressure hull and the top of the deck, the spool could be only six feet wide. As a result, the seven-mile-long braided steel cable had to be wound so tight that it was stressed to its limit.
Craven had calculated that the cable should stand up nonetheless. But he forgot something. Overall, the cable itself was strong enough, but it was actually made up of a bunch of separate strands wound together. The strands themselves were built of shorter lengths welded together to stretch 7 miles, and each weld was a weak point. It was one of those welds that had snapped, leaving a loose wire jamming the device designed to hoist the cable, and leaving the fish dangling aimlessly at the end of the line. In a desperate effort to prevent the loss of the second of the $5 million devices, a crowd of men began working together to hoist the two tons of aluminum and managed to get the fish back on board and through the tube that launched it. Then Halibut sur faced. Over the next three days, her men pulled the entire 35,000-foot cable off its spool, laid the steel out in the Bat Cave in a seemingly endless figure eight, then rewound the entire expanse-only this time in reverse. The idea was to make sure the broken section remained wrapped around the spool when a fish was sent back out. The effort worked, but the men still never found a piece of missile.
When Halibut slipped back to port late that October, Craven was waiting on the dock. He had already figured out that Halibut couldn't go out again with a welded cable. He put out word through the Secretary of the Navy's research and development office. He wanted a seven-mile-long weldless cable. The Navy began contacting contractors, explaining only that it needed seven miles of continuous cable, no welds, for a classified project. From oil-drilling companies to elevator companies, vendors came to the Pentagon. One man couldn't bear the suspense. "You just have to tell me," he blurted out. "What building is this for?"
Not a single company could meet the Navy specification for 37,500 feet of weld-free cable. Finally, U.S. Steel agreed to modify its cablemaking process. Even then, it would take three months-until January 1968-to spin the seven miles of steel. When the cable was finally finished, Bradley decreed that it was time again to try to catch a missile.
Halibut's departure came roughly at the same time the North Koreans captured and boarded the USS Pueblo, an intelligence ship that spied from the surface. Pueblo was in international waters, intercepting radar signals, when the Koreans attacked. It was an audacious move. The Koreans sprayed the ship with gunfire, and Pueblo's crew, their ship only lightly armed, didn't dare fight hack. When the Koreans moved to prevent the crew from destroying the ship's espionage equipment and records, one American was killed and three others were wounded. In the end, the Koreans stole some of the United States' most highly sensitive cryptographic gear, and U.S. intelligence officials were convinced that the gear would be handed over to the Soviets.
Back on Halibut, all started out well. She made it back to the transponder grid without incident. This time the fish swam without a snag. Grainy sonar images played continuously on the screens of the Bat Cave, a fuzzy reproduction of a far-off planet 17,000 feet below.
The submarine and her crew searched for nearly two months, but there was still no sight of a Soviet missile. Then the cable system broke down again, and the electronics that communicated with the fish shorted out. All this was nothing new. The crew had long ago figured out how to jury-rig a quick fix at sea. The entire operation should have taken less than an hour. The problem was that it had to be engineered on the surface. The men would have to brave Halibut's deck, in the 3:00 A.M. dark.
Up until now, day had blurred into night for these men 300 feet below sunlight. Drifting deep in the quiet of their underwater universe, they had felt little of the big ocean swells above. But now, Commander Moore had no choice. His men would have to face the rough waters of the surface.
As he gave the order to blow ballast, a three-man repair crew began to squeeze into their uncomfortable wet suits. Among them was machinist's mate chief Charlie Hammonds. He waited until Moore gave the order. The captain had been watching the swells, waiting for a time when the deck wasn't taking on water. After a while he gave the nod.
"Flip on your light," said senior chief Skeaton Norton as Hammonds readied to climb out the hatch onto Halibut's hull. Over their wet suits, the repair crew wore life jackets decorated with small, canister-shaped, battery-powered strobe lights. They had been designed for the Air Force, part of jet-fighter pilots' rescue packs.