Mentally they sifted the soft, rhythmic shw-shw-shw sounds of the Echo's propellers from the blanket of ocean noise coming through their head sets. But nothing they heard or could see on their display read the Echo's depth. For that, the men could only listen and guess. Every few minutes the distance between the subs registered zero. At one point, sonar operators guessed that the Echo had risen near the surface, which would have placed her directly above Tautog. Then it seemed that the Echo was descending again.
This all could have been much easier. Tautog had been scheduled to receive a newly engineered device designed to measure another submarine's depth by measuring the disturbances in the water it created. The device consisted of four hydrophones, which were supposed to have been mounted on Tautog's sail. But the shipyard had been behind schedule, and the submarine left port with the new technology sitting in Pearl Harbor.
One officer muttered that it was too bad about those missing hydrophones, and others began to talk about trying to open up the distance between the two subs. Just then, the image on the oscilloscope leapt again, this time violently.
"Here she comes… " the captain began. He never finished the sentence.
The image on the oscilloscope disappeared. At that instant, the sonar operators lost all track of the Echo. No one knew whether the Echo had gone to the right or to the left. She was just gone.
Then, the Echo announced herself in the worst possible way. The 6,000-ton sub slammed belly first into the top of Tautog's sail with an impact that sounded like two cars colliding at 40 miles an hour. With a horrible screech, the Echo's propellers ground through Tautog's metal with a din that forced Chief Waters to recoil from his headset.
Tautog flipped on her right side, rolling nearly 30 degrees as she was forced backward and down. Men went grabbing for a handhold on rails and tables. Coffee mugs, pencils, rulers, charts, and erasers went flying through the control room. Maraschino cherries and pickle relish splattered all over the mess area. Tools popped out of wall lockers and littered the floor of the engine room. Step-and-a-Half Lindsay was thrown down a ladder. Down in the torpedo room, three men who had been sleeping, curled up against the long, green weapons, were tossed from their "bedpans," those mattresses on top of empty torpedo racks. Around them the massive weapons strained at their canvas straps.
One man jumped up to close the watertight doors to the torpedo room. He didn't check to see whether anyone was inside, didn't realize that he had just locked in Greg Greeley-an eighteen-year-old recruit who had boarded Tautog just three weeks before the mission began. All that man knew was that the exterior compartment might be among the first to flood and as the one closest to the hatch, it was his job to seal it off. Then, as he was trained, he turned his hack, never looking in the small round window to see Greeley frightened inside. It would be several minutes before anyone could be sure the hull was intact, several minutes before anyone let Greeley out.
Meanwhile, other officers jumped out of their hunks, raced out of the wardroom and to the control room, scrambling to assume their preassigned collision stations. Coy took over the diving station and began struggling to level the sub. Van Hoften gave his last order as officer of the deck before formally turning the boat over to the captain.
"Do not sound the collision alarm."
It was awfully late to try to stay quiet and avoid detection and just as unnecessary to announce the collision. Still, according to rote, the crew quietly passed a collision alert from man to man, compartment by compartment. Compartment by compartment, the men reported back that each area of Tautog was essentially intact. The watertight doors were opened.
"They build them well at Ingalls," Waters finally said, referring to the sub's shipyard in Mississippi. His comment would he caught on an audiotape that was running in the sonar shack, recording the drama.
Step-and-a-Half hustled back, grabbed hold of a headset, and shouted, "Fuck you, God, nothing gets through HY-80." HY-80 was the steel that Tautog's hull was made of, so named because it could withstand 80,000 pounds of ocean pressure per square inch.
Then the two men sat back to listen. What they heard, and what was recorded on the running tape, seemed to confirm the worst. It sounded as if one of the Echo's propellers had been torn off and, with nothing to resist the water, its turbine was spinning wildly. If that were true, and the Echo's pressure hull was gashed through, she would likely sink into the ocean. At 2,000 feet down, she would implode. There would be no survivors.
Then the men heard noises like an engine starting up and sputtering, followed by banging, perhaps watertight doors being slammed shut on the Echo. Finally sonar picked up something that sounded like popcorn popping, what Lindsay interpreted as the sound of steel cracking apart.
After that, the ocean seemed to go silent, a blanket of uninterrupted static through the sonarmen's headsets. They listened for anything that could be the Echo racing away, or blowing ballast tanks and surfacing. But everything, the spinning, the banging, the popping, had just stopped.
Someone in the sonar shack jumped up and turned off the recorder. The tape normally ran on a continuous loop, and had the recorder been left on, the sounds of the crash would have been lost.
Stunned, the operators continued to search, looking for any sign that the Soviet sub had recovered. The silence seemed to mean only one thing: that as many as ninety submariners were helplessly sinking into the crushing depths below. It didn't seem to matter now that they were Soviet submariners.
Within minutes of the collision, Balderston gave the order that sent Tautog steaming away, fast. There was no thought of surfacing or even of going to periscope depth. This was, in fact, an undersea hit and run. Tautog's crew would not mount a search for survivors or wreckage, normal procedure for a collision at sea. Balderston's prime directive was to avoid any further encounter with the Soviets.
Tautog headed due east, moving at only about 12 knots and listing at least 10 degrees to her starboard side. Every time Balderston. tried to drive the submarine faster, she leaned over more sharply. One by one, metal plates that had been welded to Tautog's sail were torn off by the force of the water. Each slammed onto the submarine's hull with a resounding crash. The crew started a pool, betting on how much of the sail would be left when they got back to Pearl Harbor.
Water leaked into the control room from the gash left by the Echo's propeller, but it would be hours before Tautog surfaced, hours before a small team of officers could, under the cover of darkness, inspect the damage outside.
Men rushed around, trying to clean up evidence of the debacle. The sugar bowl looked like it had exploded as the captain and his officers gathered in the wardroom to make sense of what had happened. Scott Laidig, one of Tautog's spooks, greeted the senior officers as they arrived. Laidig was a U.S. Marine. He had been assigned to work with the Naval Security Group, which decided that his fluency in Russian qualified him for submarines. Still, he knew he could offer no help during a collision, so he had done the next best thing. He had gotten out of everyone else's way, slipping down to the wardroom to wait out the adventure.
"I don't know how you guys do this," he said now. "You sit out here in the middle of nowhere, and you let somebody run right through you."
"Gee, I hope we didn't ruin your cup of coffee," Balderston countered.
Laidig was a veteran of two tours in Vietnam and was well known on Tautog for his ability to spin a yarn. Now it seemed as if he and Balderston were conspiring to divert the other officers, at least for a few moments.