Perhaps the most critical trick to all of this was keeping the 4,800ton Tautog level despite the fact that she was constantly taking on water and getting heavier. Subs take on water in part to cool their reactors, and pumps usually recycle it back to the ocean, but the pumps were too loud to use this mechanism close to the Soviets. Michael J. Coy, one of the diving officers on watch, somehow had to keep Tautog's scope at just the right height without the pumps.
It was nerve-racking business. Coy had been on Tautog for only three months, and he knew he was not one of Balderston's favorites. It irked the captain that Coy had enlisted in the sub force only as an honorable alternative to fighting in Vietnam, just as it irked Coy that Balderston kept talking up the advantages of military life. But now the two of them worked together as Balderston employed a solution that was ingenious and amazingly low-tech. He called upon an old submariner's trick and ordered all off-duty men out of their bunks, out of the crew's mess, and on a march: first to the forward half of the boat, next to the engine room in the stern. Back and forth they went for hours, living counterweights, keeping Tautog's nose up and the submarine buoyant. There were no breaks for Coy, not even to go to the head. Instead, when it came time to adjust Coy's buoyancy, Balderston sent for an empty coffee can.
In the end, Tautog watched the Soviets for two days-capturing the entire missile test from start to finish. Balderston brought home so much data that the Navy awarded him one of its highest personal honors, the Legion of Merit. Now, in the summer of 1970, as Balderston drove Tautog toward Petropavlovsk, captain and crew were convinced they could do just about anything. One thing high on their list was trailing an Echo II sub. This sort of trail might prove crucial to safeguarding the U.S. carriers off Vietnam, and it was one of the most important roles a sub could play in the war effort.
As luck would have it, it was an Echo II that registered on Tautog's sonar almost as soon as she reached Soviet waters. There was no mistaking it-sonar showed the Echo's trademark pair of four-bladed propellers. The sub was moving south from Petropavlovsk, and Tautog's crew had visions of following the sub through an entire patrol.
The Echo was noisy and seemed as though she would be an easy target, but no trail was ever really easy. Relying on passive sonar, Tautog's men essentially had little more to interpret than textured static (the muffled whir buried within that static was their only "view" of the Soviet sub), and the flickering oscilloscope that transformed some of that static into a light display.
It helped that the Soviet commander seemed to be taking no precautions against a hunter. Instead, as Tautog followed behind, he motored noisily, spending five hours maneuvering through an odd undersea dance that submariners call "angles and dangles." It was almost an undersea "cossack." Submariners on both sides do this awkward dance, a series of random figure eights, sharp turns, and changes in depth meant to shake things out, to see what kind of noise a submarine is making, and to find out whether anything is stowed where it shouldn't be. The dance has little of the offensive fury of a Crazy Ivan, but the steps are tempestuous. And it is impossible to outguess a commander who might order his submarine up or down, right or left, simply as the mood strikes him.
The trick to trailing a submarine tripping through angles and dangles is to back off. But aboard Tautog, the order to back off never came. In fact, as the hours passed, the Soviet sub's angles and dangles had begun to seem routine, and Balderston and others left their stations to their seconds-in-command. The captain went down to his quarters to get some sleep, a marked departure from the past year's missile-test mission when he had stood awake at the helm for nearly forty-eight hours.
On this mission, Tautog had an unusual complement of two sonar chiefs instead of one. But, as it turned out, neither of those chiefs was in the sonar shack while the captain was in his bunk. One of them had been assigned as chief of the watch and was overseeing the enlisted men in the control room. The other was off duty. That left the sonar operations supervised by a more junior man, Sonarman first-class David T. Lindsay.
Before this mission, Lindsay's biggest claim to fame was accidentally being photographed with Pat Nixon. The first lady had been visiting wounded Vietnam veterans at a Honolulu military hospital. Lindsay was there because of an accident on his motorcycle, a super-souped-up machine that he lovingly called "Betsy." When the first lady came to the submariner, no one had the courage to tell her how he had been hurt. It was a photograph of the two of them that made the local papers.
Lindsay had lost an inch off one leg in the accident, and on Tautog he was dubbed "Step-and-a-Half." Now Step-and-a-Half was listening for the Echo, relaying information to the helm, manned by Tautog's executive officer, who was holding to a track set by the captain. As Tautog cut through depths of 120–200 feet at a moderate 12–13 knots, her path was leading her dangerously close to the Echo. Finally, the XO sent for Balderston.
Balderston showed up in the control room wearing a dark blue and maroon bathrobe and slippers. He walked directly over to Scott A. Van Hoften, the officer of the deck who had won minor celebrity among the crew for being the boat's best ship handler and for winning the onboard Coca-Cola consumption record. Now Van Hoften gave the captain a tactical update.
Meanwhile, Paul S. Waters, one of the sonar chiefs, returned to the sonar shack, taking over operations there. Putting on a headset, Waters listened for the Soviet Echo.
"Son-of-a-bitch, it's close," Waters murmured lust before he got up to brief the captain.
"Captain, to the best of my knowledge, this is an Echo II. It is close aboard."
Balderston towered over the short sonar chief, staring at him from beneath those famous eyebrows. As the two men spoke, Balderston settled into a small foldout seat just behind the periscope stand. With that one move, he took over. He made no dramatic pronouncements. He didn't have to say a word.
Van Hoften remained officer of the deck and continued to yell the orders, but everyone knew they came from Balderston. He would not leave the bridge again-not to return to his hunk, not to change out of his bathrobe. At his side was Michael Coy. By now, the all-Navy captain and the decidedly nonmilitary Coy had struck an uneasy peace. Coy had learned to refrain from repeating that he had no intentions of staying in the Navy, and Balderston had stopped talking up the advantages of military life. Besides, Coy also was the boat's supply officer and kept the health-conscious commander in vitamins, Sanka, and enough walnuts to keep his body swimming in lecithin.
Balderston began to scrutinize the oscilloscope. On its nine-inchwide screen a single electronic amber arc offered a sonar-generated image of the Echo. Usually, ten or more faint arcs flickered on the sonar screen, computer depictions of the noise generated by distant boats, land masses, even whales. But the image created by the Soviet sub was large and bright, and it was jumping back and forth across the screen. There was only one interpretation possible. The Echo was very, very close.
"Here… she… comes…. There… she… goes," the captain commented, drawing out the sentence to add emphasis to anyone and no one in particular as he watched the Echo's athletics. He would repeat that comment a few minutes later, and a third time after that.
The XO stood to Balderston's left, studying the navigators' plots. About five feet away, Van Hoften bent his 6'5" frame over the fire control station, monitoring the weapons computers, which were also tracking the Echo's direction, speed, and distance from Tautog. Just outside the conn, in the sonar shack, men crowded shoulder to shoulder and continued to track the Echo.