The skegs remained partially buried. The gondola under the Seawolf's belly, the huge "clamshell" that was built to hold missile pieces, partially ripped away. But Seawolf was free.
As she limped home, she was dangerously loud in the water, louder than she had ever been. There was something dangling from below, a piece of skeg, the gondola. Whatever it was, it was making a lot of noise in the water as Seawolf made a slow race for the Kuril Islands and out to open ocean. Crucial systems parts worn down by sand were also grinding and seemed ready to give out any moment.
Then, somewhere in the Pacific, not far from Okhotsk, she was detected. A Soviet boat, probably a trawler, began pinging with active sonar. There was no way to outrun the trawler-the submarine was too hurt-and no way to hide, because whatever she was dragging banged against her hull even when she was sitting stock still. Any speeds faster than 6 knots brought a cacophony of sound, a drum section gone wild.
The Soviet pings rang through the submarine, adding to the din. The ringing would not stop. The Soviets chased, giving up the pursuit after only about twenty-four hours-for reasons that may have been as simple as a trawler captain's whim.
When Seawol f finally pulled into a closed dry dock, the men could see the damage. There were dents in her superstructure and pieces torn off as if she had suffered depth charges. The bilges were still full of sand, hundreds of pounds of it, though a significant amount had been moved to the men's bunks, jars of gray, grainy souvenirs.
There were no awards given for this mission, no formal recognition of the men's brush with death. A cruise hook, crafted much like a high school yearbook, mentioned the ordeal in only one cryptic cartoon memorializing the first and last leap taken by Beauregard the frog.
Back in port, the men trying to repair Seawol f weren't told how sand got into the diesel engines, how it got into the lobe oil system and ate up all of the bearings. Officials in Washington had far more serious fears. Following Seawolf's misadventure, satellites uncovered evidence that the Soviets had found the cable tap in Okhotsk. Nobody was sure how, whether the operation had been compromised by Seawolf's drop onto the cable or by a mole within the crew or, unthinkable as it seemed, among the few intelligence officers who knew about the taps in the first place.
But clearly it was crucial that someone discover how the Soviets had puzzled out one of the most secret U.S. missions.
Eleven — The Crown Jewels
The feeling had to have been one of disbelief. Rich Haver looked at the report on Seawolf's latest patrol, then at his other intelligence reports. There was just no other way to line up the facts.
It had been easy to blame Seatvolf and her crew for blowing one of the most important intelligence operations of the last ten years. Or so it had seemed at the time. After all, Seawol f had slammed tons of steel down on the Soviet cable. That had to have caused a break in communications or at least some static. Why else would the Soviets have sent a survey ship to Okhotsk? How else would they have found the cable tap?
In fact, the Soviets did more than find the tap. They reached down and lifted the large recording pods-both of them-out of the water. There was no hiding what they were-or for that matter, who had put them there. Inside of one was a part emblazoned with the words "Property of the United States Government."
Haver had checked and rechecked his time lines. There could he no mistake. None of this was Seawolf's fault. The Soviet survey ship had been on its way to the area before Seawolf fell on the cable. It had taken a meandering route to Okhotsk, a trek that suggested camouflage, all the way from the Baltic Sea on the Atlantic side. There was, however, almost no chance that U.S. intelligence was going to miss a ship heading toward the tap site. Both in the Barents and in Okhotsk, the U.S. maintained around-the-clock surveillance with satellites, land listening stations, in short, any means possible. That was especially easy in Okhotsk. The sea was so empty any ship that went in and loitered was hound to stand out. Now, that surveillance had paid off with one horrifying realization. The search for the taps almost had to have been deliberate. And if that were the case, Haver knew there was one glaring possibility, the worst possibility-that Seawol f hadn't shown her hand at all. The Soviets may have been tipped. There might very well he a spy.
This was not going to go down well in the Navy or the NSA. That much was clear to Haver as he listed a spy among the reasons why the tap could have been discovered in a report dated January 30, 1982, the day that just happened to be his thirty-seventh birthday. But while Haver expected distress, what he got back was outright skepticism. Top admirals decided he was seeing ghosts again, just as they had believed a few years earlier when he had raised an alert about a possible spy or communications leak in the Atlantic. Now here he was seeing spies in the Pacific.
What Haver was saying seemed unbelievable. If he was right, there was not one but two spies. One man couldn't he responsible for the problems in both oceans. Anyone with operational knowledge of Atlantic submarine trailings in the late I 970s was almost guaranteed to be out of the loop when it came to the Pacific tapping operations. Besides, the cable taps were about the best-kept secret in all of cold war intelligence. No, top admirals concluded, Haver was seeing shadows in coincidences. The Soviets, they figured, had probably just found the Okhotsk tap on a maintenance run to the cable.
Only a few in the Navy saw Haver's report, and they gave his warnings little thought. This was a time when the United States was facing a more immediate and tangible threat. The Soviets seemed to be engineering another big change in their missile-sub strategy, one more dangerous than their move back to the bastions in the Barents in the late 1970s. They were now holding some of their missile subs even closer to their coasts, in "deep bastions" such as the White Sea and the once nearly desolate Okhotsk, and they were hiding others under a nearly impenetrable shroud, the Arctic ice.
Haver and other bright young analysts still felt sure that the Soviets were chiefly trying to protect their missile subs from attack in the early stages of a war, and the early returns from the cable-tapping in the Barents seemed to back up this idea. But if they wanted to, the Soviets also could use the Arctic cover to launch a first strike, and the United States would have less warning than ever before. A missile shot from a Delta in a Soviet bastion in the Barents could take less than thirty minutes to travel the 3,500 nautical miles to Washington, D.C. But a missile traveling from even the northern reaches of the Arctic's Baffin Bay, which sits just above Canada, could cut that time to less than twenty minutes.[18]
Indeed, the Soviets' shift to the Arctic was a brilliant move. After all, it had never been lost on either side that the shortest distance between the United States and the Soviet Union was over the top of the world. Both nations had already aimed their huge arsenals of landbased missiles across the North Pole. But although both had been exploring the Arctic with submarines for decades, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had been able to develop the technology to fight in the exotic Arctic environment effectively.
The Arctic is also the one area of the world where the prey has the distinct advantage over the hunter, where it would be hugely difficult for U.S. forces to root out the Soviet missile subs and destroy them. For one thing, there are thousands of miles of shallow ice-filled seas where the Soviets could scatter their subs. Even the most massive boats could disappear in these shallows, drift silently along with the ice, and allow the currents to decide direction. And by taking the shallow route through the Kara Sea, the Laptev Sea, and the Beaufort Sea around to the North American side, a Soviet sub could end up among the icebergs of Baffin Bay above Canada, the fjords along the west coast of Greenland, or even the channels that reach clear down to the Hudson Bay inside of Canada.
18
Naval Intelligence began to notice that the Soviets seemed to be experimenting with the idea of hiding their missile subs under the ice in 1979. For the Soviets, a crucial moment came in the summer of 1981, when captain Leonid Kuversky drove his Delta SSBN into the desolate Arctic Ocean to see if he could manage to rise up from the ice and calculate a workable trajectory for his sub's sixteen ballistic missies. Kuversky succeeded beyond all expectations. For his initiative and courage, he was named "Hero of the Soviet Union," his nation's top honor. A gaggle of orders and medals went to his crew. The scientists and weapons designers who had traveled along received various state prizes in a ceremony that was held that October.