And Scorpion? Well, Scorpion just happened. I had played a role in locating her. That's where John Craven made his reputation. We found Scorpion because John told us where to look, made us look there despite what the experts said. That was before he became the expert. I guess that's how he got there, mostly.
I'll never forget it, seeing Scorpion on the Atlantic bottom about 400 miles WSW of the Azores, telescoped together with the Engine Compartment having crushed its way through to the Reactor Compartment. I remembered an incident that happened to my sub a couple of years after I left sub school when I still was a Sonar Tech.
We were exiting the Med below the layer. Basically, the Med is a shallow ocean. The surface water gets heated by the ever-present sun, and evaporates so that it becomes very salty and heavy. It sinks to the bottom, especially in the Eastern Med, off the coast of Israel and Lebanon. This heavier water then moves westward along the bottom, and flows out of the Med over the lip at the Strait of Gibraltar into the Atlantic. As the warm, heavy water passes the lip at the Strait, immediately it begins to drop like an undersea waterfall to the Atlantic bottom at about 14,000 feet. This "waterfall" isn't vertical like on land, but slants to the west at about 45 or 50 degrees. The actual location of the "edge" of the "waterfall" moves back and forth depending on a host of complex variables. Oceanographers can actually identify this distinct Med water in deep spots all over the world's oceans. This heavy water is replaced by much lighter Atlantic water that flows into the Med on the surface.
So the inflowing layer of light Atlantic water is about 500 feet thick, and the outflowing heavy, dense Med water occupies the next 500 feet below that. The interface between these layers is very distinct.
Submarines use Archimedes' Principle to operate beneath the water. In order to remain at a specific depth, a sub must weigh exactly as much as the water it displaces. As a sub moves from water of one density to that of another, it must pump water in or out depending on whether the new water is more or less dense.
The Soviets wanted to know about American submarine activity in the Med. To accomplish this, they stationed specially-equipped spy trawlers across the Strait of Gibraltar. These disguised vessels maintained sonar listening posts by dipping hydrophones to various depths in the Strait. In principle, they could hear any sub entering or departing the Med.
In fact, we placed our subs in the appropriate layer, powered down, and drifted in or out with the strong currents. Depending on the need for absolute security, sometimes we would shut things down completely, relying on the currents only to get us in or out. More frequently, however, we simply made turns for about six knots where we were virtually silent. Once we departed the Strait, typically we maintained our depth and powered up to normal cruising turns.
On the occasion I am describing, we had been submerged for over two months, and we wanted to get back to Holy Loch. We were trimmed to neutral buoyancy for the deep, heavy layer, and once we were a few miles past the Strait, we cranked our turns to maximum. In fact, the Maneuvering Room guys added a couple of "coming home turns." So picture a large sub, trimmed heavy to compensate for the dense Med water, cruising at high speed through the deep, dense layer. At some point, our bow poked through the "face" of the "waterfall" into the much lighter water on the other side. Because the sub was so heavy, our bow immediately dropped, and as we passed through the angled layer, we started sliding along the interface toward the bottom nearly 13,000 feet below. As we already were traveling at high speed, we quickly accelerated and rapidly approached test depth — the maximum depth the sub could tolerate. I was in the Sonar Shack at the time, and watched the depth recorder bottom out past the sub's design depth limit. Unless something happened immediately, we were going to implode like a light bulb.
Fortunately, the Exec had the conn, and he was our most experienced submariner next to the Skipper. In fact, he was in line for his own command. I heard him give the order: "Emergency blow all main ballast!" We were immediately surrounded by a deafening rush of high pressure air as it blasted into the saddle tanks surrounding the sub. A few seconds later our descent slowed, came to a stop, and we began a slow upward rise. As we rose, the pressurized air in the ballast tanks expanded, displacing more and more water, so that within a minute or so, we were rocketing uncontrolled toward the surface. But that didn't matter, because we were no longer dead men walking, driving toward the bottom, but were on our way toward the surface.
Once on the surface, we collected our wits, verified that the sub was okay, and got back under the waves before we could be spotted by one of the ever-present Soviet trawlers.
I had suspected that this is what happened to the Scorpion. Except that we subsequently discovered damage near her stern that could only have been caused by a torpedo. No one knows for sure, but after further investigation, it appears that Scorpion was sunk by the Soviets, probably in retaliation for their belief that we had taken out their Golf-II missile submarine K-129 off Hawaii — but that's another story[1].
I had chosen to walk to the Halibut this morning. I wanted one last hour of fresh air, morning breeze, singing birds, and the occasional pretty secretary on her way to an early work assignment. It was about to be a long dry spell.
As I had already delivered my gear aboard, my hands were empty. It was early. The sky was blue and the sun was out, but the air was still chilly. I was dressed in summer khakis and was wearing a fore-n-aft cap. I liked it so much better than my peaked cap, because I could fold it into my belt, and never have to look for it when I needed to go topside. And it gave me unrestricted vision. Caps with bills made me feel like I was wearing blinders.
I finally arrived at the gangway, requested permission to board, saluted the stern and stepped aboard the dark gray surface covered with an anti-slip compound. Our newest attack subs avoided using anti-skid because the turbulence it caused added a measurable level of noise to the sub's underwater signature. In our case, however, we were already so noisy that any additional noise created by non-skid paint was way below our baseline profile.
By now the topside guys knew me, and the watch waved me aboard with a cheerful "'Morning, El-Tee!"
"'Morning, Skidmore." I had most of their names down pat, too.
It had been a long haul, getting the equipment ready and keeping my crew razor sharp. I couldn't have done it without Master Chief Ham Comstock. Ham was an amazing guy, having punched his ticket at the Navy Experimental Diving Unit and then the Man-in-the-Sea Program. At forty, with his sharp blue eyes and thinning, short-cropped dark hair, Ham was a father figure to the guys, and had become my friend. But we were a team, and it really took all of us to get it done.
I mentally reviewed my dive team. Chief Boatswains Mate Jack Meredith, Ham's thirty-five-year-old understudy, had left the SEAL Teams to become a saturation diver. He compensated for his bald pate with a trimmed, brown beard flecked with gray. His weathered face rarely smiled, and his stocky, five-foot-eight muscular frame was deeply tanned. Sonar Tech 1st Class William Fisher — Bill to all of us — had reddish hair and a ruddy complexion like me. He appeared younger than his twenty-five years, and not even Snorkel Patty could rid him of his shyness. Electronics Tech 1st Class Harry Blackwell was an electronics whiz. He could fix anything with electrons — and I mean anything. At twenty-six, he was tall, slender, and athletic with short-cropped brown hair and brown eyes. Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class James Tanner — we called him Jimmy — was a battlefield medic with the Marines in Nam. He was tall, athletic, and wore his light brown hair like a Jarhead. He was twenty-five, and smart as a whip — maybe even smarter than Harry. Quartermaster 2nd Class Melvin Ford — Whitey, because of his light blond hair — was a muscular five-nine. At twenty-three, he boasted more female conquests than the rest of the team combined. His trademark was a small silver bell on a ring pierced through his foreskin — it seemed to fascinate the ladies. Finally were Engineman 2nd Class Wlodek Cslauski — Ski, for obvious reasons, and Auxiliaryman 2nd Class Jeremy Romain — Jer to the rest of us, because he promised to kick ass on anyone who called him Jeremy or Romain. Ski and Jer were former submariners, both having served on the USS Skipjack, the first "modern" fast attack. They were twenty-six and twenty-five respectively, and almost like peas in a pod — stocky and tough, and deeply tanned. Ski's eyes were blue while Jer's were dark. Ski wore his dark hair as long as regulation allowed; Jer cropped his short. Both had graduated from a class before us, and had accumulated some real-world saturation diving experience before joining us.
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