First, the Soviets were increasingly sending attack subs to escort the Yankees and Deltas still heading for the Atlantic. Along the way, the attack boats were circling the boomers as if looking for NATO subs that might be trying to trail. Second, Soviet subs seemed to be waiting to monitor U.S. naval exercises even before U.S. ships and subs arrived on site. A few times, Soviet subs had shown up in waters where U.S. exercises had been scheduled, then canceled. Other times, Soviet subs barreled right into the middle of exercises almost as if they were trying to see how the U.S. forces would react. Finally, the latest subs the Soviets had sent out on sea trials-Victor III attack boats-were much quieter than any of their predecessors, almost as quiet as U.S. subs. It was as if somehow the Soviets had caught on to the idea that silence could be crucial. Before, they had always seemed more focused on sheer quantity.
Was this all coincidence? Or was there a glitch in U.S. communications security? Could there be a spy? Inman had sent Haver and another intelligence officer, William O. Studeman, to the fleet admirals, seeking their help in searching for any possible communications leaks. But the admirals would have none of it. How could their coded communications, the most sophisticated in the world, have been compromised?
All Haver could do now was keep digging. Maybe some of those answers would be uncovered by Parche, if she could manage to find and tap a Barents cable. But Haver would have to wait to find out. The Navy, with strong input from the NSA, was first sending Parche to Okhotsk to plant a second recording pod right next to the first to greatly increase capacity at the tap site. She was being sent, in part, to prove herself before anyone dared to send her to that other, far more dangerous sea.
Prove herself she did, and after a near-perfect run Parche's crew came back with more than a bit of a swagger. The 140 men assigned to this new boat taunted the crew of Seawol f, now in dry dock and in pieces. They called her the "Pier Puppy" and joked that her men were assigned to "Building 575," after Seawolf's hull number. Seawolf's crew had already struck back though. In 1977, Seawolf's divers had planted a cow's skull next to the cable tap, just to give Parche's divers a good scare.
Both submarines were stationed at Mare Island, and their crews lived as neighbors, in wood-framed barracks on the east end at the edge of an old munitions depot, away from everyone else. Neither their proximity nor their shared status, however, prevented their intense rivalry, especially now that Parche was moving ahead, going out to sea, while Seawolf's men were stuck with the most thankless duty a crew can pulclass="underline" overhaul. They were working hours almost as long as those of sea duty, and they were stuck, hot and sweaty, in a shipyard handling tasks that seemed more fitted to construction labor ers than submariners. Their wives, children, and girlfriends were nearby, but there was infuriatingly little time to see them as the men toiled relentlessly at the three R's of shipyard life: "Remove, Repair, Reinstall."
The nukes had it worst of all. Wearing canary-yellow antiradiation suits, they were saddled with the task of cutting their boat in half in order to remove and replace the spent reactor core. There was so much paperwork involved that they had taken to chanting, "Cut down another tree for nuclear power."
Rickover's reactor inspectors, the men the crew called "snakes," were everywhere, their special helmets sign enough to trigger a manto-man alert. The sign for "snakes on hoard" was passed with a quick flash of a two-fingered V.
There was just no glory in overhaul. Indeed, with the country's backlash against Vietnam, there was little glory in being in the military. It seemed that not even the government had respect for its armed forces. Navy pay wasn't keeping up with soaring inflation and interest rates that had skyrocketed into double digits. Longtime submariners were making about $15,000 a year in base and supplemental pay. There were news stories of Navy men on food stamps.'[15]
It seemed there was no refuge. Even the Horse and Cow was turning into a bikers' bar.
So Seau of f's crew watched with envy in 1979 as Parche prepared to shove off a second time toward a mission shrouded in mystery, the mission that had so fascinated President Carter. This time she was headed for the Barents.
She'd travel a route that had probably never been taken before, the one path that would bypass all of the Soviet choke points, just about the most difficult and dangerous way possible. Parche was going to travel north, due north from San Francisco, past Alaska, and through the narrow and shallow Bering Strait, where the U.S. and Soviet borders almost touch and where the ice could sink a sub faster than an enemy. From there, she would travel past the North Pole and back south into the Barents Sea. All told, Parche would have to transit farther than 5,500 nautical miles, much of it treacherous. There was good reason the Soviets would never expect Parche to slip into the Barents from this route.
There was one more precaution. Parche would not leave for the Barents until late summer, well after Carter's summit with Brezhnev. The two leaders met on June 18 and signed the SALT II Treaty, in which both sides agreed to limit the number of their nuclear-missile launchers.
Two weeks after the superpower summit, Parche's CO, John H. Maurer Jr., held a summit of his own-with the wives of his crew. The captain provided baby-sitters, light refreshments, and a description of the men's "extended deployment" that pretty much began and ended with dates of departure and return. He gave the women "FamilyGram" forms, so that they could wire quick messages to their hushands a few times over the three months Parche would be gone, and a two-page list of emergency numbers, starting with that of his wife Carol and going down through a litany of Mare Island doctors, dentists, firemen, and police. He also gave the women a checklist of all the tasks the Navy imagined would fall to them. Know when to tune up the car. Find the telephone numbers of the plumber and the electrician. Make sure your husband leaves a will. In return, the women were asked to give up their husbands for the duration.
There were the usual tears dockside as Parche shoved off that August. The magnetic white hull numbers denoting her as submarine number 683 had been taken down, leaving her anonymous as she passed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and dove.
The crew was now in the hands of the man they called "Captain Jack." He was built thick and strong, and his crew thought him a bulldog, at once determined and playful. There was something about this captain who could walk into the torpedo room and wrestle with his men. There were some, among the torpedo crew especially, who were just crazy enough to beat the captain regularly. The wrestling matches fast became ritual-"the Tag Team Follies."
Maurer was to the Navy horn, his father an admiral. In fact, John H. Maurer Sr. had been commander of submarines in the Pacific in the late 1960s when Halibut was sent looking for missile pieces and before she set out after fantasy cables. Now his son was leading a crew top-heavy with senior chiefs, senior enlisted, and spooks on the most dangerous special projects mission yet.
Secrecy had been tight on Seawol f, far tighter than it had ever been on Halibut. But on Parche, the secrecy was nearly paranoiac. The crew itself had little idea of where they were going. The men were told only that they were being sent to see whether Parche could find her way beneath the frozen expanse and hack, perhaps detecting a few Soviet subs along the way.
15
The morale problems caused by all of this were taking their toll on the rest of the sub force as well. Men were retiring in record numbers, leaving many crews bottom-heavy with new recruits. That along with cutbacks that strained maintenance schedules created an unprecedented spate of accidents. In September 1977, Commander E. J. “Buzz" Galbraith of the USS