Bradley hoped Kissinger would look past that, as much as he hoped Kissinger would ignore the fact that the timing for this kind of risk was just awful. Halibut would be trespassing when Nixon was publicly painting himself as a peacemaker and statesman. The president had just gone on national television to declare that he personally had rescued flagging arms control talks in secret communications with Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev.
All this left the captain apprehensive when he went to see Haig. With as few details as he could manage, Bradley outlined his plan to search out the cable. "If we can find it, we think we've worked out a way to tap it," he told Haig. There was also, Bradley said, a secondary mission-an underwater search for parts of a new kind of cruise missile being supplied to Soviet subs that stalked U.S. aircraft carriers.
Haig asked no questions, offered no words of caution. He didn't even bother to bring Bradley before Kissinger. Instead, he said, "Keep us informed."
Bradley realized he had just gotten all the official approval he would need. Haig would surely let Kissinger know, but the Navy's diciest plan had passed with the simplest approval process possible. Halibut was going to Okhotsk.
By the end of the summer of 1971, Halibut's refit was almost complete. In addition to the huge hump-the Bat Cave-that had inspired her conversion to a so-called special projects boat, she also sported an extra lump, a secret and crucial piece of equipment that was so ingeniously hidden atop her deck that the Navy proudly advertised its presence with no fear of a security breach.
Local newspaper headlines heralded the accomplishment of this new addition, while intoning that the Navy had relaxed its secrecy surrounding Halibut. Halibut, the papers declared, was to be the mother ship for the Navy's first post-Thresher deep-submergence rescue vehicle. In fact, the lump wasn't a DSRV at all, but a divers' decompression and lockout chamber. Welded in place, it was where they would begin breathing the mixed gases developed at SeaLab, and it was where they would get ready to go out and work underwater.
In these final weeks before Halibut was to leave, Bradley's team began making frequent anonymous visits to Mare Island. Most of the sub's officers and crew knew them only as the men from Washington. Halibut's captain, Commander John E. McNish, wasn't revealing much more.
Even in the final days before their October departure for Okhotsk, the crew still didn't know their destination. They knew only that they were leaving home for three months. That in itself was inspiration enough for the enlisted men to fill the submarine bars around San Francisco. Some of these boys were only months past their high school proms. Others were salted chiefs, veterans of smelly diesel boats or the first nuclear submarines. Together, they spent their final night onshore, in an era when being a hard-drinking, chain-smoking man of the sea was not yet an anachronism.
With their wives and girlfriends looking on, they drank themselves under the tables at Helen's. They drank until they danced buck-naked on top of the tables at the Horse and Cow. This was their favorite place, the "Whinny and Moo" to the initiated, with its darkened rooms, walls lined with photos of submarines, a Klaxon cutting through the air to announce each new round, and stolen pieces of equipment crammed onto every free surface: submarine commodes, plaques, dishes, ceremonial pennants, a torpedo casing, an anchor, enough contraband to drive naval investigators mad.
Snorkel Patty was probably there: she almost always was at these last-night events. For a decade, she had been mother, big sister, and lover to scores of submariners. She was the woman who knew what they would face on patrol without needing to be told, and she taught other young women braving the brash bar not to ask where or how or why. She was the woman who would make the men feel safe when they got home. A tender Mae West-Mary Magdalene of the submarine set.
In return, these men and boys gave her their hard-won silver dolphins, hundreds over the years. They gave her a volcano's worth of lighters decorated with their submarine insignias. And they gave her their undying adoration.
The Klaxon blew, an air-driven howl, a wolf's song mated with the bray of a sick mule. The men drank some more and hooted, then hooted louder when some innocent knob walked into the place still wearing underwear-just about everyone was checked, and anyone found wearing was unceremoniously stripped.
Inspired, the veterans dropped their pants, stood on the bar, and turned around to show off the screws tattooed in twin sets, making sterns of their rears. Legend has it that those inked propellers would ensure a safe and speedy passage. The especially brash powered their screws with a long trail of paper from the head planted in the only place possible on their naked bottoms. With the paper set afire, they raced smoky circles around the bar in what had become the ritual "Dance of the Flaming Asshole."
This was their celebration for finally getting out of the shipyard. This was a wake for their lost freedom. This was how the men of the Halibut launched one of the most critical submarine spy operations of the cold war.
The party wouldn't end until just a few hours before "Smiling Jack" McNish gave the final order to embark. Smiling Jack was the name the men had given their hulking commander, a testament to the tight grin that took the place of a growl or gritted teeth. It widened only with trouble. Few crew members remembered ever seeing the thirty-eight-year-old redheaded captain actually laugh-not now, and not on Halibut five years or so earlier when he had served as her executive officer.
That grin would be there, unchanging, through most of the month Halibut spent transiting to Okhotsk. Any other attack submarine would have made the distance in less than two weeks. But Halibut's 1950s vintage reactor could not kick up past 13 knots, and she was further slowed by the drag of the fake DSRV on her hack. Most of the trip progressed at an infuriating crawl of 10 knots as Halibut traveled a long arc, matching the curvature of the earth. Moving north to the Aleutian Islands, then down past the icy Bering Strait, past Soviet surface ships, she reached the Sea of Okhotsk.
Getting inside the sea was tense business. The crew took several hours to maneuver through a shallow channel, probably at the northernmost part of the Kuril Islands chain just below the southern tip of Kamchatka. From here, the men had a periscope view of an active volcano, but they feared sunlight more. A single glint off the periscope and any nearby submarine-hunting plane or ship would find them.
By now, they knew where they were. McNish had told them that much, and he told them the divers were going out on this mission. But he omitted any talk about Soviet cables. The commander instead declared that Halibut was there to find pieces of the new and deadly Soviet ship-to-ship missile. Only McNish, his officers, the divers, and a few men among those knighted as the "special projects team" knew what they were really up to as he ordered Halibut to move slowly up along the Soviet coastline, periscope up.
Every three hours, Halibut moved along an "S" path, or cut a figure eight, or shifted from one side or the other, or circled around. Anything to give a peek into that blind spot in her baffles, to make sure no other sub followed from behind.
The search continued for longer than a week. The men found nothing, but continued to look, to hope. Then they saw it, sitting along the beach, far up on the northernmost half of the Sea of Okhotsk: one of Bradley's signs proclaiming a warning to the careless-"Do Not Anchor. Cable Here"-or something to that effect in Russian.
At McNish's order, a fish was sent swimming out of the Bat Cave. By now, the problems with the video feed had been fixed. The pictures that came flying up into the submarine's monitors were still grainy and tinged with gray, but they were far clearer than the sonar images the men had to rely on while searching for the Golf. Now, the men staring at the monitors could even see vague shapes of Okhotsk's giant crabs, though only photographs would show the smaller fish, the clouds of luminescent plankton, the teeny jellyfish dancing diamonds as they were lit up by the mechanical fish's incandescent mechanical lights. Anything, no matter how large, that was more than a few feet from the cameras and lights was lost in the murky water-dark greenish brown from silt runoffs, it showed up dark gray on the video monitors. Only a few men were cleared to look at any of this, but the novelty wore off quickly and their shifts seemed to take forever as they stared at the screens for hours at a time.