There in front of his scope was a Yankee, 429 feet long, 39 feet across, weighing in at 9,600 tons. Mack sidled Lapon up to within 300 yards and stared.
"Holy Christ, that son-of-a-hitch looks like a Mattel model," he blurted out. The submarine was indeed a Polaris look-alike, from the shape of its hull down to its sail-mounted diving planes. The image was broadcast down in the crew's mess on a television wired to the periscope-what submariners called "periviz." Later, Mack would even air reruns, the sight was that striking.
Mack hooked a Hasselblad single-lens reflex camera onto the periscope and held down the shutter. The film advanced on a motorized drive as Lapon moved slowly forward, Mack lifting her scope out of the water for only seven seconds at a time in an effort to avoid detection. With each peek of the periscope, he grabbed a few photos, each time capturing another small portion of the massive boat. It would take seven of the photos pasted together to show the entire Yankee.
During the years the first Yankees were under construction, U.S. intelligence had collected little more than fuzzy images captured by spy satellites showing the Soviets were preparing to mass-produce the new weapon. But over the last year, as the Yankees ventured out on sea trials, U.S. surveillance subs had been moving in for a closer look at this nuclear monster decorated with sixteen doors hiding sixteen portable missile silos. The Yankee seemed a huge advance over the other ballistic missile subs the Soviets had put to sea, the diesel-powered Zulus and Golfs and the first nuclear-powered missile boats, the Hotels. None of those boats had inspired the same fear the Yankee inspired now. The earlier subs were loud and easy for SOSUS and sonar to spot. Now the U.S. sub force was faced with a crucial question: Did the Yankee mimic more than Polaris's shape? Was it possible that, just six years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviets were positioned to launch a first strike with little or no warning? If the subs were as silent and deadly as they seemed, then, at the very least, the Soviets would have matched the United States in creating a second-strike capability, a way to punch hack if all their land missiles and bombers were destroyed.
Captain James Bradley knew his spy program had already produced a lot of critical information about the development of Soviet subs and missiles. Photographing the sunken Golf had been a technological coup. But the Golfs posed little threat compared to the Yankees, and nothing was more important now than learning how to find these new subs, how to destroy them.
Photos of a Yankee did only so much good. The U.S. Navy and its NATO allies needed to see these boats in action, see just where they carried their missiles, needed to collect sound signatures to ensure that the subs could never pass SOSUS listening nets unheard, and so that surveillance subs and sonar buoys dropped by P-3 Orion sub-hunter planes could recognize the threat as it passed.
Someone had to get close to a Yankee in action, and he would have to stay close enough for long enough to give the United States ammu nition to counter the new threat. For this, almost any risks were warranted.
As pumped up as Mack was from his photographic feat, he knew that the real star of the sub force would he the man who accomplished a long trail. Other commanders knew it too, and even the loss of Scorpion was not enough to kill the fighter-jock bravado that the new mission was sparking within the ranks. But Mack was feeling quite proprietary about the Yankees now, and he was certain he could be the guy to get in close and stay there. He was sure of that even though nobody else had been able to. Mack had that kind of an ego.
In fact, everything about this thirty-seven-year-old commander was big. His towering, 240-pound frame didn't quite fit through Lapon's low hatches and narrow passageways, and he was almost always bent over in the control room, littered overhead with a maze of piping and wire. Submarines were just too small to contain Whitey Mack. He was a larger-than-life renegade, much like the heroes in the novels he devoured by the basketful. He saw himself as the hero in a story he was writing as he went along, a story ruled by his own tactics and sometimes by his own rules.
He had never attended the Naval Academy. Instead, he was recruited into Officer's Candidate School by a brash ROTC XO at Pennsylvania State University who bragged that he won his wife in a poker game. Mack himself was the son of a Pennsylvania coal miner, and he held up this lack of official polish as a badge of honor. Mack labeled himself a "smart-ass kind of guy," and he faced down his superiors with piercing blue eyes and a brand of brass that had nothing to do with epaulet stars. With wry irony, he sported a homemade pair of Russian dolphins alongside his standard American dolphinsthe emblem of the U.S. submarine fleet-and he liked nothing better than to rush about his submarine shouting obscenities in Russian.
"A faint heart never fucked a pig." That was Lapon's motto and it had been ever since Mack's first voyage on the sub when he used the phrase to announce his decision to follow a new Soviet sub close to her territorial waters. (The line was recorded on a continuous tape running in Lapon's control room.) Although, when the subject carne up once in front of an admiral, Mack delicately altered the phrase to "A faint heart never won a fair maiden."
Mack had plunged into command of Lapon in late 1967, first by horse-trading with other commanders for the men he believed would create an all-star crew, then by installing all manner of experimental, and often unauthorized, equipment on his submarine. He alternately inspired and mercilessly drove his men. He alternately impressed and badgered senior admirals, until he was allowed to skip the usual months of U.S.-based shakedown training and head straight into the action.
To a large degree, Mack was emblematic of his era. Throughout the sub force, captains who avoided risks were branded with nicknames such as "Charlie Tuna" or "Chicken of the Sea." Still, Mack left his superiors-not to mention other commanders who prided themselves on their own daring-debating whether he was dangerously blurring the line between valor and recklessness. To be sure, those close-up photos of the Yankee were as valuable as any intelligence anyone had gotten lately, but Mack had also taken other immense risks for limited intelligence return.
Lapon had already been detected in the Barents once under Mack's watch. It may have been a glint of sunlight off her periscope, no one was sure, but suddenly the men in Lapan's radio shack heard a Soviet pilot sending out an alert in Russian: "I see a submarine."
When Lapon's officer of the deck pointed his periscope toward the sky, he saw a helicopter pilot who seemed to be looking right at him. "He's got the biggest fucking red mustache I ever saw!" the officer exclaimed.
"That's close enough," Mack said, breathless, as he raced from his personal quarters into the control room, still in his skivvies. "We better get the hell out of here." With that, he got his boat out of Dodge before the Soviets had a chance to mount a full search.
Mack also had driven so close to two Soviet subs conducting approach and attack runs that Lapon ended up in the path of one of their torpedoes. Mack knew that, for an exercise like this, the Soviets were shooting duds. But he had no intention of proving his point by letting the torpedo hit. Instead, he sent the order to the engine room that kicked Lapon into high speed. Flying "balls to the wall," as submariners say, Mack outraced the weapon. (The incident occurred just after he had taken Lapon out searching for Scorpion, though well before anyone realized that a torpedo might have killed that boat.)