Like Benitez, Worthington had taken command just days before they were all to leave for this trip, and like Benitez, Worthington and Benson were skeptical of their new trek into espionage. Benson believed that, at best, it was a side mission, one that wasn't nearly as important as training in the art of true underwater warfare. Red Austin thought he knew better. But then again, this spy stuff seemed to he his calling.
"I got to have something spooky to do," Austin liked to say. "It's just the way I am."
But if all of this was second nature to Austin, it wasn't to others. His special equipment was to be installed in a shipyard in Portsmouth, England, where even the yard workers were somewhat befuddled by the new gear.
"Shit, this is just a piece of spaghetti," an inpatient Austin fumed, holding onto a piece of coaxial cable that the workers just couldn't seem to install correctly. "Plain old coax, half-inch. And it looks to me like you ought to be able to get plans to do this thing. Why can't you just go by the plans?"
Austin was itching to get started. A tiny cubicle was being set up for him and his spy gear on the same deck as the control room, close to the radio room. He was ready to run the coaxial cable into what he called his "black box." Actually colored good old Navy gray, the box was one of a kind, built to capture the radio signals that the Soviets would have to use to send telemetry instructions to any missiles they were trying to test. Standing but two and a half feet tall, the box was designed to record signals on slivers of wire tape, and it was probably the most sensitive and secret device on Cochino.
The line from that box would run up through the hull and connect to new "ears" placed on the side of the sub's sail, the large steel piece that created the shark fin on the submarine's otherwise smooth hull. These special antennas really did look like ears. They were little wire C's sprouting about a foot from the sail, one on each side. With these extra wires added to Cochino's array of the usual antennas, the sub had the look of a B-movie alien creature.
Everything was finally installed by mid-August, and Cochino set out from Portsmouth accompanied by Tusk and two standard fleet boats, the USS Toro (SS-422) and the USS Corsair (SS-4,35). They were operating under strict radio silence, on what the Navy called a "simulated war patrol." No one onshore was supposed to know where they were. When they left England, they were to disappear.
Within hours of their departure, the seals around Austin's cables gave way, giving Austin an unwelcome shower inside his cubicle. He managed, with a bit of tightening and some fiddling, to get his system working again. But if the seals failed again, he would have to clamp off his cables, and his part of the mission would he over.
By now, the crew knew that this mission was going to be different, just as most knew that their newest crew member was not what he seemed. Red Austin might have worn a radioman's sparks on his uniform but he really worked for the Naval Security Group, the fabled cryptological service that had intercepted and decoded crucial Japa nese Navy communications during World War II. That much was secret, but even the crew realized that no common radioman would ever consult this closely with the captain.
Still, submariners are submariners, and the most popular on board are always going to be the guys with the best sea stories. That was especially true on Cochino, where about one-third of the crew had been through the war. Austin brought war stories from his cruiser days, and he played a mean game of acey-deucey, a sailors' take on backgammon that had been carried to sea for more than a century. Besides, it was hard not to become fast friends when everyone was "hot-bunking"-grabbing sleep when other guys woke up, moving on to make space for the next shift, time-share submarine style. The crew was divided into three groups operating according to three different time zones. One group lived by Eastern Standard Time, another by Honolulu time, and another by Indian Ocean time. There were three sets of sonar operators, of weapons techs, of cooks, of radio operators, of men for whatever job needed to be done.
Only the CO, his executive officer (XO), Lieutenant Commander Richard M. Wright, Austin, and his assistant lived across those time zones. Austin didn't mind his triple-duty load, not when he got a chance to eat some of the three breakfasts, three lunches, and three dinners served on board everyday. The man loved food, even Spam, and he saw no reason to quarrel with powdered eggs.
It was after one of Austin's first or second lunches or dinners that Benitez grabbed the spook for duty in the conning tower, a cramped space a ladder's distance above the sub's control room, the place from which the commander or other officer in charge directed the sub.
"Man the number 2 periscope, Austin," the captain directed. It was a post where he could keep Austin busy and involved. It was also, Austin was certain, a post from which Benitez knew he could keep a wary eye on him.
Soon, the two fleet boats that had accompanied Cochino and Tusk broke off and headed toward the edge of the Arctic ice pack northeast of Greenland for exercises in those frigid waters. Cochino and Tusk continued on, heading much closer to the Soviet Union.
They spent their first few hours chugging up through the Norwegian Sea north of the Arctic Circle. Both subs had faucetlike spigots in their torpedo rooms to take in water for temperature and salinity tests, and both were charting the sea bottom. By Saturday, August 20, 1949, the boats were in the Barents. Now they too split up, Tusk to go off and conduct sonar tests, and Cochino to head toward a spot about 12 miles off the northern tip of Norway to begin Austin's mission. From here on out, Benitez would order the course changes requested by Austin, zigging the sub this way and zagging that way as the spook tried to hone in on Soviet signals.
Austin tried not to let on, but he was worried. If he was to capture any signals, those special ear-shaped antennas would have to be raised above the waves. That meant that the sub would have to "plane up"-travel shallower than even snorkel depth-and expose part of her sail. This time of year, this far north, the sky was bright even at night, and the crew would have to be careful to avoid detection by the surface ships and fishing trawlers that dotted these waters. The long day also increased the danger of being spotted if Cochino had to surface.
"Too much daylight," Austin fretted. "This bodes evil. No place to hide." Benitez was logging similar concerns. "The night as such has disappeared," he wrote. "The best we can hope for is about two hours of semidarkness. There can be no surface running here during wartime."
Austin swept for electronic signals as Cochino passed by the northeastern edge of Norway. Now the sub was about 125–150 miles away from Murmansk, too far away to see land, but close enough, he hoped, to intercept Soviet missile telemetry. This was about as close as Benitez wanted to go.
On a map, Murmansk sits on what looks like the base of the thumb of a land mass shaped like an inverted glove, its fingers defined by Norway, Sweden, and Finland. The thumb is the Soviet Kola Peninsula, home to the operating bases of Vayenga (later called Severomorsk) and Polyarnyy. These were among the Soviets' most important northern ports because they could be used year-roundkept warm enough to be free of ice by a branch of the Gulf Stream. Polyarnyy was a submarine base, as well as home to the subterranean headquarters for the commander-in-chief of the Northern Fleet. Secreted beneath brick-and-stone administrative buildings were the Soviet code rooms and communications centers.
Austin was looking for telemetry signals coming from these bases or from ships nearby. Because missile telernetries were usually broadcast in the highest ranges, intelligence officials had set Austin's black box to capture the higher frequency bands of a launch in progress. If something were happening, he should he able to hear it. Or so he hoped. This spy mission was as much a guessing game as anything else. There was no way to know whether the Soviets had planned any launches at all. All Austin could do was spin the dials in his cubicle and listen for any activity. He also had taken to wandering into the radio room and tuning into Russian voice communications. Austin didn't speak Russian, and neither did the radiomen. But Austin could pick out the Cyrillic alphabet in Morse code, one of those tricks he had learned to fill the tedium during his days on surface ships. Now, as he sat clacking out Russian on Cochino's manual typewriter, he imagined he could actually understand what he was typing. In his mind, one Soviet ship was making a daily report, telling its command how much rice was on board, that the fruit had all been eaten. Another was reporting the day's sick list.