By the time he was finished, Bradley had won over the room. If the arms control negotiations or political machinations gave these officials pause, they didn't show it. The cable tap mission was approved, and Halibut left for her second trip to Okhotsk on August 4, 1972. Two months after the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex, Halibut was on her way to perform the ultimate wiretapping exercise for an administration that was about to be crushed under its own tapes and covert operations.
This time McNish decided to brief his men about their true mission and the risks they would encounter. He called them into the crew's mess, one-third of the men at a time. Characteristically solemn, his grin a tight wire across his face, he stood against the bulkhead and told them where they were going, told them about the cable, told them about the tap. Then McNish told his men something else: he told them about black boxes strategically placed at how, stern, and midship. They were filled with explosives, and they were wired for self-destruct. The boxes were not carried by regular attack subs, but on Halibut every torpedoman's mate had been trained to crimp the explosive caps attached to fuses to ready the demolition boxes for detonation. Should Halibut become trapped in Okhotsk, McNish told his men, she would not be hoarded, and her crew would not he taken alive.
This briefing was, presumably, at odds with general Navy security rules. Most of the crew had no "need to know" where they were going or why. But McNish was asking his crew to go out for six months and take a risk unmatched in peacetime. Need or not, his men had a right to know.
On the way to the place her men were now calling "Oshkosh," Halibut was stranded-her clutch blew, sending the shaft to her screws spinning uncontrollably. A Halibut newcomer devised a juryrig involving a series of braces and a hydraulic jack attached to the motor. The fix held.
The men were by now affectionately referring to their usually ailing, most of the time moving, underwater nuclear-powered habitat as the "Bat Boat." The moniker stuck when somebody noticed that the huge bump created by the Bat Cave hangar made the sub look like a giant rendering of Bruce Wayne's comic-book super car.
Back in Okhotsk, Halibut found the cable easily. McNish gave the order, and the two huge anchors descended from how and stern. The divers climbed out of the DSRV lockout. In a matter of hours, spooks were listening to voices coming from the cable.
"Get in here, you have to hear this," one of the spooks called to some of the chiefs.
As he listened, one chief's eyes opened wide. He understood "nyet" Russian, but that didn't seem to matter.
"Jeeesus, this is great!" the chief said, shaking his head. "Jeeesus!" Then he began to laugh, a deep-throated, gut-shaking laugh built at once of pure bravado and the realization that they could all be caught listening to a conversation they were never meant to hear. With an adolescent conspirator's sense of occasion, the chief took off his headphones and slipped them to the next man in line.
A fortunate few were these chiefs, these men on the inside track who had the good luck to be pals with the spooks. One after another, they took their turns meeting the enemy they had tracked, pointed weapons at, harangued, and forsaken their families for. They were taking part in history. They were meeting the Soviets ear to ear, with one side deaf to the transaction.
None of this, of course, concerned the two Soviets yammering happily away on the telephone in unscrambled, uncoded Russian. They had no idea that 3,850 tons of steel and more than 120 men had conspired together to listen in to their conversation, or that soon their words would be weighted with layers of classification and given points for intelligence value in Washington.
A celebration was in order, and the divers provided one. Plucking a giant spider crab from the seafloor, they sent it into the Halibut through the DSRV lockout. One of the chiefs grabbed hold of a spindly leg, then a huge body. Someone else found a platter, a big one, the biggest one on the boat. It wasn't big enough. With legs dangling, its brownish-gray body hanging off the steel plate, the crab moved slowly as it was paraded through the engine room toward a massive pot of boiling water on its way to becoming the only casualty of the mission.
McNish kept Halibut hovering over the line for at least a week. Then Halibut made her way out of Okhotsk, leaving the tap planted and the internal recorders running. The submarine would come back to pick the recordings up in about a month. For now, the men were going to Guam. They would stay there long enough to let the tapes fill some more and long enough to patch whatever had broken on their Bat Boat.
It was a routine port stop, at least until their final night. The officers, the enlisted men, the chiefs, most everybody who was not on watch went out drinking. Then talk among the chiefs in the noncommissioned officers' club turned to the cable tap.
No one remembers who was the first to blurt out what was probably on most everyone's mind, but somebody, whether moved by fear or made courageous by beer, cracked the veneer and asked the question: Had they crossed a crucial line? This wasn't like going up against another sub or a ship and watching from afar. This was eavesdropping. What the hell were they doing crawling into the Soviet Union's backyard and tapping a military cable in peacetime? Why were they risking their lives for a mission they were all sure the United States would never acknowledge? Why were they riding a boat with a captain who had made clear that his hand was on the self-destruct button? Why were they riding a boat that could disappear without a word to their families of how or why?
Once it began, there was no stopping it. Fear, anger, concern, poured across the table. This had been building from the first moment the spooks pulled the chiefs into the radio shack and handed them the headphones. Listening to those words they didn't understand coming from a tap they weren't supposed to have planted didn't seem funny anymore. What once struck them as exciting and daring now seemed just plain illegal and dangerous.
Few of the men suffered qualms of morality or politics. As far as they were concerned, detente and diplomacy were public shows put on by both sides to hide true intentions. Still, what they were doing, the men told themselves, could be construed as an act of war. Worse, what they were doing could start the war they feared most.
For perhaps the first time since they had joined the submarine service and faced the power of the oceans and the threat of Soviet depth charges and torpedoes, some of these men were suddenly, deeply certain that what they were doing could kill them.
Then one man said it, said that they ought to tell the old man to stuff it, that they ought to tell him they didn't want to go back. Then others said the same thing in different ways.
More beers were ordered and downed. Then together, they made their way to the dock. Together, they stood in front of their submarine. Then, one by one, they climbed down the hatch, realizing that they weren't going to go tell McNish to stuff it after all. They were going to their bunks or their posts, and they were going back out to the Sea of Okhotsk.
Soon everyone was on board, except Auxiliaryman's Chief John White. He stood on the pier and announced that he was not going down the hatch. As far as he was concerned, the submarine service was a volunteer service, and he was devolunteering.
Nobody expected this. White had served more than nineteen years. He was the kind of man who always worked harder than his crew, the kind who rewarded their hard work by sending them out on the town on his tab. Maybe it was the beer talking, only White didn't seem drunk enough to throw away his career when he was only one year away from a full pension.