Hardy, the acoustic expert at the Naval Research Lab, was convinced that Craven was reading way too much into the acoustic data and was chasing ghosts. The only thing that turned east toward the Med, Hardy believed, was Craven's phantom trail. His arguments instilled some doubts within Craven. Besides, it was Hardy's lab that was guiding the Mizar, and Craven needed his support if the ship was going to turn around and start searching to the east. Craven's own relationship with the lab was shaky. As director of the Deep-Submergence Systems Project, he had basically stolen one of the lab's prize possessions, the bathyscaphe Trieste 11, to assist in working out features for Rickover's NR-1 mini-sub.
The officers in charge of torpedo safety at the Ordnance Systems Command soon joined the group of naysayers. They insisted that it was impossible for a hot-running torpedo to detonate inside a submarine. For detonation to occur, the command insisted, a warhead would have to run into an object at top speed and stop moving only as it hit. Then and only then would it go off. The Ordnance Systems commanders were hacked up by the Bureau of Ships. Walter N. "Buck" Dietzen Jr., a top submarine official, was also firmly in doubt. As the debate raged on, none of the men forgot that they were looking for their own dead.
Still at one point, in an effort to lighten things up a bit, Dietzen wagered Craven a bottle of Chivas Regal scotch whiskey that he would turn out to be wrong. Operational commanders were betting with Dietzen. Mizar had already dug up some tantalizing clues on the Norfolk side of Point Oscar. There were three items found that could have fallen from Scorpion: a piece of elbow pipe, what seemed to he a woman's umbrella, and a rope tied in a "monkey's fist," the ballshaped knot that sailors tie at the hitter end of a mooring line to make it easier to catch when it is tossed onto a pier.
There was some argument within the Navy about whether the monkey's fist Mizar found was tied in the U.S. style or in the style favored by the Italian Navy, but the umbrella, the operations officers believed, had to have come from Scorpion's crew. They had made port stops, hadn't they? This could have been someone's souvenir or gift for a woman back home. Months would pass before Navy biologists declared that what looked like an umbrella was actually alive, one of the many odd creatures that live on the ocean floor.
Still, given the Mizar evidence and the strong opinions around him, even Craven began to wonder whether he was wrong, just "smoking opium," as he liked to say. But then again, maybe he was the only one who was right. Craven had no trouble believing either possibility, so he kept digging. He arranged to have a ship drop small explosive charges at Point Oscar. By comparing the acoustic signatures taken at the site with the signals that reached Norfolk, he would be able to figure out once and for all whether an explosion in the area would create echoes-sonic ghosts-as others had contended.
Gordon Hamilton flew into Norfolk from the Canary Islands for the occasion. The two men camped out in a bare cinder-block room in a Norfolk communications station. There they would wait, all day and all night and all the next day, until the calibration charges rang through to shore.
On the first and second tries, the charges were too weak, and none of the acoustic signals made it back to Norfolk at all. By now, Hamilton and Craven were tired of eating cold sandwiches, tired of the bare walls and bare room, tired of sleeping on the blockhouse floor, and more tired of one another. They had exhausted their repertoire of shop talk. Craven had even run out of maxims of the sea.
Craven began doing push-ups. He had already taken to filling in the time left over from his two submarine searches, the design of NR-1, and his running of the SeaLab program by putting himself through the Royal Canadian Air Force exercise program. By now, he could do eighty push-ups at a set. He proved that several times over before the explosives finally signaled through to Norfolk.
They came through with no echoes. And when Craven and Hamilton recalibrated the Scorpion signals with the new data, they realized that not only had Scorpion been traveling east, but she was traveling east even faster than Craven had thought.
Craven was back to his torpedo theory. But he wanted more evidence.
With typical dramatic flair, Craven arranged a reenactment of the tragedy. He needed a submarine simulator, and he needed Lieutenant Commander Robert R. Fountain Jr., the former Scorpion XO who had been detached from the submarine just before she embarked on her final mission.
Fountain was put at the simulator's helm, and a computer was programmed to factor in the orders he gave as the simulator reenacted various possible causes of Scorpion's loss. Ten different scenarios were tested this way, and ten failed to create a match with the acoustic evidence. Then, Craven's team asked Fountain to try one last time. They said nothing about a possible torpedo explosion, they simply told Fountain that he was heading home at 18 knots, leaving it to him to choose a depth. Craven then asked him to test his torpedoes. The team waited ten or fifteen minutes, giving Fountain a chance to stand calm. Then they rang an alert. "Hot-running torpedo in the torpedo room."
Without missing a beat, without waiting, without asking questions, Fountain ordered, "Right full rudder."
There it was. The turn that Craven believed had been executed on Scorpion.
When Fountain's simulated turn was almost complete-maybe half a minute or so after he had called out "right full rudder"-the staff called into the simulator: "Explosion in the forward torpedo room."
The same information was fed into the computer, which began to register extensive flooding in the submarine.
Fountain answered with a seemingly endless stream of orders: blow ballast, initiate watertight security, speed the boat. He did everything a submarine captain should do. Still, the mythical submarine continued to flood, and it continued to head toward the bottom. Exactly 90 seconds after Craven announced the explosion, it passed 2,000 feetpassed right through collapse depth-and the computer registered an implosion. Someone on the staff announced the event with one word: "bang."
The simulated implosion occurred just one second off the 91-second time recorded between Scorpion's explosion at Point Oscar and the first implosion under crushing ocean pressures.
Chills shot through Craven when he saw the results. By now, he and several others attending this test were nearly certain they had replicated Scorpion's loss. No one told that to Fountain. No one told him he had just possibly enacted the circumstances that led to the deaths of the men he had once helped to command. Maybe nobody had to tell him. He left the simulator without asking any questions, without saying a word.
Craven's compassion for Fountain and for the crew of Scorpion couldn't squelch the exuberance he felt. As a detective, he had come up with two new important pieces of evidence, and he now raced them to Admirals Schade and Bernard A. Clarey, the vice chief of Naval Operations. By now, even they were becoming intrigued by Craven's detective work, but they remained unconvinced. As did the Ordnance Systems Command, which continued to insist that there was no way a torpedo could explode on board a submarine.
Nobody was ready to face the specter that the Navy itself was responsible for the deaths of those ninety-nine men. Craven understood their reluctance, understood how difficult it was for the admirals to believe they might have been somehow responsible for a mistake that had caused the loss of so many people's lives. Both admirals had lived through a time when death aboard submarines was common. Both were veterans of the World War II diesel boats, but then death had come from the enemy and not from their own boats. Schade was probably the more hard-nosed of the two, and no wonder. As a young executive officer on the USS Growler (SS-215), Schade had gotten his first taste of command while his skipper lay wounded on the bridge of the sub. Commander Howard Gilmore shouted a final order to young Schade, an order to take Growler into a desperation (live to escape a Japanese gunboat while leaving Gilmore wounded up top. Schade did as he was directed.