Then the sand seemed to rise slightly, a bump on the bottom a foot or two long. The bump disappeared, then returned, a dash in the sand, followed by other dashes in the sand. At first, the men wondered whether they were imagining a broken line within the gray. But there it was again, and again, periodic gray rises and a more occasional glimpse of black. There was something there, something almost entirely buried in the sandy silt.
Halibut began to follow the line. As the video images flickered on Halibut's monitor, the fish snapped twenty-four photographs a second. Later, the fish would he hauled up and gutted, refilled, and sent out again. The film promised images much clearer than this grainy video, but the ship's photographer wouldn't be able to develop any of the rolls until later, when Halibut could move high enough to the surface to snorkel and vent the toxic darkroom fumes.
Finally, McNish gave the order, and Halibut came up in the privacy of a black night. The photographer began unraveling the rolls of film taken from the fish, working with the officer in charge of special pro] ects. In the cramped darkroom, the two men watched the images emerge. There, in the color photographs, lay the Soviet cable.
Now Halibut's crew had to find a flat strip on the sea bottom, a place to lower the two huge mushroom-shaped anchors at her bow and stern. McNish was looking for a spot well outside the 3-mile limit. There was nothing to be gained by tempting fate now. Ultimately he settled on a place in the northern part of Okhotsk, about 40 miles off the western face of Kamchatka. His men maneuvered the boat gently down to a place just above the cable. It took almost a day to move into position and anchor.
The divers had been waiting in the fake DSRV, breathing the helium and oxygen mixture for some time, and their bodies were acclimated to the increased pressure. Now they climbed into rubber wet suits that fit loosely, leaving enough room for tubes that ran down their legs, their arms, into their hands, and around their bodies. A pump in the submarine would push hot water through the tubes as soon as they left the chamber, transforming the suits into something like rubbery, wet electric blankets. The water would come through tiny holes in the tubing, seeping warmth against the chill of Okhotsk. It was November, and the water was at near-freezing temperatures.
The divers also wrapped insulation against their gas jets; there was no point in warming their bodies if they were going to breathe cold gas. Several times they checked their umbilical cords, the two-inchthick bundle of tubes and wires that provided the mixed gases for breathing, the hot-water sluices, and the links for communication, power, and lighting.
Running through the cord was one strong wire that had nothing to do with breathing, talking, or seeing. This was the emergency line, which would be used to yank them back into Halibut should something go wrong. Their only other margin for error was latched onto their belts-small bottles containing three or four minutes of emergency air, their "come-home bottles."
Finally the men were ready to crawl out the outer hatch. In the control room, McNish could see them walking what seemed a space walk. Only barely lit by their handheld lights, they cut a ghostly path through the murky water to the communications cable. Once there, they began using pneumatic airguns to blow debris and sand away from the wire. As soon as it was clear, the men started to attach the tap, a device about three feet long that held a recorder filled with big rolls of tape. Off the main box was a cylinder that contained a lithium-powered battery. A separate connector wrapped around the cable and would draw out the words and data that ran through. The tap worked through induction. There would be no cutting into the cable, no risking an electrical short from seeping seawater.
Inside the boat, men monitored the water currents, taking readings every fifteen minutes or so. Halibut swayed against her anchors, while planesmen struggled to keep her level through the hours that the divers worked to attach the recording device to the cable. After that connection was made, the spooks collected what seemed like an adequate sample of the Soviet voice and data transmissions running through the cable.
Nothing in Halibut's history suggested that this would ever be so easy. The cable had been found without a single snag in the line towing the fish. The mission had gone so smoothly that much of the crew would remain firmly convinced that their submarine had happened upon the cable by sheer accident. They had, after all, been told that the target on this trip to Okhotsk was pieces of Soviet missiles. Now, true to his word, N[cNish turned Halibut and headed for a Soviet test range.
The water there was somewhat deeper than the waters over the cable. Still, Halibut's fish quickly found a spot where the whitish-gray grains carpeting the ocean bottom became speckled with the steel gray and black of electronics and small shards of casing. Halibut had found a place where Soviet missiles went to die.
This mission also was important, for these new Soviet cruise missiles posed a terrible threat to U.S. aircraft carriers. The weapons had a new kind of infrared guidance system that the U.S. Navy had been unable to counter. Bradley had already sent three standard U.S. attack submarines to Okhotsk with orders to try to get close enough to missile tests to record the frequencies of the infrared devices as well as the frequencies of the new kind of radar altimeters that let the missiles skim close to the water surface and out of range of conventional U.S. countermeasures. The idea had been for the standard attack subs to use bulky devices attached to their periscopes to squirt bits of heat at the missiles and see what frequencies reflected hack. The task proved impossible. (At this point, the Navy was so desperate to learn whatever it could about any kind of Soviet cruise missiles that it had sent Swordfish with sonar developed for Halibut, side lit and mounted on her hull, out to scour seabeds in shallow waters. The sonar worked so well that Swordfish could skim the shallows not more than twentyfive feet off the bottom practically at flank speed.)
Only Halibut could actually send men out to retrieve anything, and now her divers were out again, this time to pick up piece after piece. The hope was to find one of the infrared devices or one of the radar altimeters. The divers stowed the pieces in a huge gondola-like basket hooked to Halibut's steel underbelly. When the gondola was filled with hundreds of missile bits, the divers climbed hack into the fake DSRV to wait out the long decompression process.
They were there much of the time it took Halibut to travel back to Mare Island. She docked about a month after she left Okhotsk.
Before the crew could disembark, tapes from the cable tap were on their way to the huge National Security Agency complex at Fort George G. Meade. That complex, located halfway between Washington and Baltimore, was where the Defense Department sent most of the electronics intelligence picked up by submarines and other spy vehicles to be decoded and analyzed. Protected by three layers of barbed wire and fences, one layer electrified, were five and a half subterranean acres of computers. These were used by some of the nation's top mathematicians and scientists to break Soviet codes. There were also thousands of Russian linguists and analysts poring over decoded communications. The massive operations building was nicknamed the "Anagram Inn," and it was behind its 70,000 square feet of permanently sealed windows that the Halibut's tapes would be played, replayed, and judged for content.