There was a moment when everyone on Lapon believed that Scorpion had been found. Lapon's radiomen picked up an SOS from "Brandywine." But soon it became sickeningly apparent that the message was a fake, a sadistic joke from merchant seamen or pleasure boaters.
Meanwhile, Craven launched a search that would take so many twists, and leave him so at odds with the rest of the Navy, that he himself would begin to wonder whether he had indeed gone mad. He began routinely enough, thinking of ways to acoustically delve the ocean depths. It was clear that the SOSUS listening nets were going to be useless. While the listening system in the Pacific had picked up that one pop, the only sign of the Soviet Golf's loss, the extensive SOSUS arrays in the Atlantic could not do the same thing. The Atlantic SOSUS system was designed to filter incoming noise, allowing the sonar nets to record the consistent clatter of machinery, the whir of submarine screws, and all the other music made by submarines as they move underwater, while muffling the blasts of oil exploration, undersea earthquakes, and the calls of whales. That sane filtering system would have eliminated any evidence if Scorpion had fallen to the ocean bottom, would have broken apart the terrible cries of a submarine imploding, rendering them nearly indistinct from the normal ocean din.
"How the hell are we going to find these poor bastards?" Craven muttered to himself. Within days, he would be named chairman of a technical advisory group convened to help find Scorpion by Robert A. Frosch, the assistant secretary of the Navy for research and development. Craven and the other group members were to report directly to the CNO and the commander of the Atlantic Fleet.
He began calling upon the small oceanographic research stations that dotted the Atlantic. Top on his list was Gordon Hamilton, a friend who ran an oceanographic laboratory in Bermuda that was funded by the Office of Naval Research.
"Hey, Gordon, do you have any hydrophones in the water that could have heard the Scorpion?" Craven asked without bothering to offer a greeting.
"Well, I don't, but part of my laboratory in the Canary Islands has a hydrophone in the water all the time," Hamilton answered.
The hydrophones generated mounds of scrawled paper, those peaks and blips that accumulated as pens moved over continuously rotating drums. There was a problem, though. Six days had passed since Scorpion's last message to shore, and laboratory workers were supposed to clean up and toss the records after two or three days. Any scrawls that could have registered a final tragedy aboard Scorpion should have gone out with the trash.
Still, Craven firmly believed that people rarely do what they are supposed to do. Housekeeping, he reasoned, is usually the first thing to go. Within a couple of hours, Hamilton called back. Craven was right. There were piles of paper all over the lab, and buried within those piles were two weeks of acoustic records-including eight separate ocean explosions or severe disturbances during the six days Scorpion had been out of contact. But the disturbances could have been caused by almost anything, including blasts from illegal oil explorations, a fairly routine sound ringing through the North Atlantic. And they could have come from almost anywhere, and from any direction.
With only one set of records, Craven had no way to come up with a geographic fix on any of the blasts. To do that, he would need to triangulate three separate recordings from three different hydrophones set up in three different points. Since he didn't have the data to come up with a precise fix, Craven worked backward, charting the times of the explosions against Scorpion's known path and speed. He came up with eight mid-ocean locations where he assumed the sub would have been at the time of any of the disturbances. Bathymetric charts showed all eight sites to be in waters deeper than 2,000 feet, deeper than the crush depth of a submarine.
Acting on Craven's data, the Navy sent planes to all eight spots. The pilots were looking for floating wreckage and oil slicks. They found none. The lack of debris was far from conclusive, given that the water was so deep. But Craven needed more to go on. The hunt for sonic evidence continued.
Independent of Craven's efforts, Wilton Hardy, the chief scientist of an elite acoustic team at the Naval Research Laboratory, the Navy's primary underwater testing facility in Washington, D.C., came up with the next clue. He knew that the Air Force kept two hydrophones near Newfoundland to track underwater shocks from Soviet nuclear tests. One was right off the peninsula of Argentia. The other was about 200 miles from there.
Hardy sent for the records, knowing he was playing a long shot. Both Air Force hydrophones were about as far from the Azores, and Scorpion's last-known position, as any listening devices could be and still be in the North Atlantic. And sitting right between the hydrophones and Scorpion's track was the largest chain of mountains on earth, the undersea Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The mountains were enough to block most sounds from the Azores.
Indeed, at first glance the Air Force records looked useless. There were none of the dramatic peaks that had been registered by the Canary Islands lab. But, to Hardy, it seemed that if he looked real hard, maybe squinted a bit, he could just possibly see something. He laid the Canary Island recordings directly on top of the Argentia recordings.
There they were, almost entirely buried in local noise, slight blips that seemed to match the more dramatic peaks picked up by Hamilton's lab. Hardy called Craven, who was by now coordinating the Navy's entire acoustic search effort. Craven decided to convince himself that the Argentia recordings were neither coincidence nor phantoms.
If the Argentia blips were worthless noise, then the plots would probably fall hundreds of miles or thousands of miles from the relatively tiny line of ocean that made up Scorpion's track. But if the new data pinpointed any one of the eight events picked up in the Canary Islands on that tiny line, the acoustic matches would almost certainly have to be valid.
Hardy found it first. There, right on Scorpion's track, was an explosion strong enough to tear through a steel hull and send a submarine, flooded, toward the ocean bottom.
There was no telling what caused the explosion. But 91 seconds later, there were a series of much louder blasts and there was no mistaking what caused those. Craven and Hardy were convinced that they had to be implosions, the agonized shouts of a submarine collapsing in on itself, compartment by compartment breaking down with the force of nearly 500 pounds of TNT.
The men on the submarine could have survived the initial explosion, if that sound was indeed from Scorpion. They might have lived long enough to see her walls begin to quaver inward, but that would have been all. Nobody could have lived through the first implosion. That shock would have sent the tail section and the bow section plowing into the center of the submarine, like a papier-mache model crushed in front and in back with a single, violent clap. The cataclysmic heat and the shock of that would have killed everyone on board in less than onehundredth of a second. The men would all be dead even as the ocean pressures continued to pummel Scorpion: a second implosion four seconds after the first, then another five seconds later, then two seconds, then three seconds, then seven seconds, then another and another and another. Three minutes and ten seconds after the first explosion, it would have been all over. Three minutes and ten seconds of destruction before the ocean went suddenly quiet.
Recorded only eighteen hours after Scorpion's crew had sent word they were heading home, the blasts meant that the sub had managed to travel less than 400 miles toward Norfolk.
It was now four days after Scorpion had been declared missing. Craven called the chief of Naval Operations to tell him that Scorpion was probably lost forever. Moorer wasn't ready to hear that. He wasn't about to tell the crewmen's families and the nation that there was no hope based on a bunch of tiny, almost indiscernible blips on paper. The fact that they occurred at a point right on Scorpion's track, at a moment when she was expected to be there, was enough to convince him only to declare the spot "an area of special interest." Then he waited to see whether any of the planes, ships, and submarines turned up anything else.