But what if Parche were sent by a different route, a very different route, one that could confuse any efforts at surveillance? The word was put out to the crew: Parche was leaving earlier than usual, in April instead of late summer, and she was going to go south, on an "endurance mission," south past the Equator, away from the Arctic, away from the Soviet Union. She would travel along the U.S. Pacific coast, past Central America, and down along South America to Cape Horn.
What was held back was that Parche would ultimately round the Cape and head back north through the Atlantic for the Barents. She would also have to swing wide of the Falkland Islands, where Britain and Argentina were at war. It was the most indirect route anyone could have thought of, save for a trip through Antarctica. It was a feint of masterful misdirection and it would also allow Parche to avoid the heavy ice she would have encountered, since she was leaving so early in the year. Parche would have to travel more than 15,000 nautical miles each way, a round trip that would make the mission last nearly five months. She was to go entirely underwater.
"They want to see how long we can last," the men began telling one another as they unknowingly repeated their own cover story. "We are going for a record."
As Parche was loaded for a possible 150 days at sea, so many cans of food were hoisted aboard that the men had to cover a toilet seat with a plank in order to transform one of the heads into a pantry. After that was filled to the ceiling, the upper-level operations passageway was crammed with enough food to make it completely impassable. Anyone trying to reach the wardroom had to walk through the captain's quarters, through his bathroom to the executive officer's bathroom, and out of the XO's door, emerging to take a right at the first cleared path.
Commander Peter J. Graef was at the helm for this trip. Graef, the father of six, looked out for his crew, and they knew it. If he wasn't in the conn, Graef was probably playing cribbage in the wardroom, riding an exercise bike he had stashed in the engine room, or sitting with one of his chiefs. Rank didn't matter to him, Parche did. He believed every minute he was on board that he was at the high point of his career. What was to come after, he once told one of his men, "just doesn't matter, it's all downhill."
As he led his crew out for their "Odyssey 82," some of the men were reveling in their special celebrity. Others just reveled. "Animal" was on board, so dubbed because he delighted in breaking his own record for time lapsed between showers and because he alternately entertained and tortured his mates with his "stink-off" contests. Then there was "Bumper Car," who had acquired his name because he liked to walk through the sub bouncing off walls saying, "Look at me, I'm a bumper car." There was also a quartermaster called "Big Bird." He weighed in at more than 300 pounds, and he couldn't move through any of the hatches on board without somebody shouting, "Open, shut."
As far as the crew was concerned, the best diversion of all came from one of the youngest officers, Lieutenant Timothy R. Fain. The men saw him as a "raghat" just like them. He sported a goatee and shared their disdain for officer decorum. They targeted Fain's good nature for their most daring pranks. Their favorite was "EB-Greening" him-grabbing Fain and mummifying him with the leaf-green duct tape favored by the Electric Boat company because it could withstand sea pressures. It had been developed to seal up small cracks in equipment, but on Parche it was used primarily to bind and gag Fain. On this trip, he would be left green-wrapped for Graef on the wardroom table, and he would be similarly bandaged and left in the tunnel on the way to the reactor compartment as a surprise for the engineer officer.
The XO, Timothy W. Oliver, had less patience for the crew's antics, especially after the door to his compartment somehow ended up beneath the engines, then in the "wine cellar," a space by the bilges, and on into other hiding places around the boat. "No movies tonight!" Oliver would shout, echoing-by all accounts, unaware James Cagney's portrayal of a blowhard supply-ship captain in Mr. Roberts.
Parche might have been headed toward a mission more daring than any depicted a couple of years later in The Hunt for Red October, but she was manned by a crew taking its cues from M *A *S *H.
There was just one moment when everyone on hoard was certain of their position, and that was when they crossed the Equator. In a ceremony that had been repeated on many submarines, first-timers were initiated, and humiliated, as they paid homage to "King Neptune." They were forced to eat a bilious concoction off the King's belly, quite literally the stomach of one of their more-experienced mates.
There were no such celebrations when Parche finally entered the Barents. This time, her divers were installing a new kind of tap pod. The clamps were gone. Instead, this pod was designed to break away and remain on the sea bottom if the Soviets tried to raise the line for any reason.
Other procedures also had been changed since the Soviets found the Okhotsk tap. After Parche's divers laid the pod and her spooks had listened in for about a week, the submarine pulled out for comparatively safer waters before heading back in a week later to monitor the cable again. Graef may have been giving the recorders time to accumulate extra data for short-term review. The more likely alternative is that she came back in to add a second recorder or to lay a second tap in a new spot. That's what had been done in Okhotsk. Besides, the extra recording capacity would have been needed: Parche was scheduled for an overhaul after this mission and wouldn't come back to the Barents for two years.
Parche finally came home after being at sea for 137 days. For this "endurance op" she won another PUC, maintaining her streak of one Presidential Unit Citation for every trip to the Barents. This PUC, her fourth in four years, was signed by Reagan, who also sent Graef a box of cigars. The certificate used the standard language about "extraordinary heroism," but then it went on to say that Parche had "established new standards for endurance and excellence in underwater operations." The president had immortalized the Navy's cover story.
With Parche scheduled to be in overhaul throughout 1983, there was no other submarine that could be trusted to service the Barents cable tap. Seawolf was in the shipyard, recovering from storm damage, but her days of tapping Soviet cables were clearly over. Naval Intelligence never imagined Seawolf clunking and hanging around the Barents, and the Soviets' discovery of the Okhotsk tap had ended any tapping missions in that sea. When Seawolf finally did emerge from the yards, she would mainly be used to search for pieces of test missiles and other Soviet hardware in the open ocean.[20]
It also was still just drawing up plans to convert the USS Richard B. Russell (SSN- 687) into its fourth and final special projects sub.
So Naval Intelligence was without its best source of information during what would become one of the most tense years of the cold war since detente. The Navy was trying to learn how to trail the Soviets under the ice by following them there from their ports, but as the U.S. Navy sent more and more attack subs, the number of skirmishes with the Soviets in the Arctic increased. Not only that, trailing the Soviets under the ice was proving difficult. The Navy was most successful in the deep polar regions where the waters had sound properties most like those of the open ocean. That wasn't the case in the marginal ice zones.
Still, the Navy had no choice but to keep trying. There was enough Soviet activity that Admiral James Watkins, who had succeeded Hayward as CNO, finally told the American public that the latest front in the cold war had moved far up north. And, he said, "if there are forces in that area, we'd better know how to fight them." He added, "The ice is a beautiful place to hide."
20
By now, the Navy also had modified its two newest minisubs,