Captain Harris saw the first flash of light. He and the other three men were searching from their vantage point high above the Viperfish as the submarine completed her backing bell. By its nature, the "Y" maneuver led to the vessel moving perpendicular to the wave motion, which resulted in the steep rolling that hampered our efforts to clear away the water from the control center.
It was just a flash, a spark and nothing more, from the center of blackness.
"Sixty degrees off the port bow!" the captain shouted and pointed into the night.
"All ahead two thirds!" Commander Young immediately ordered into the microphone connecting to the engine room.
"Left full rudder!'
"The light's gone, sir!" one of the lookouts said, his binoculars aimed at the area several hundred yards away.
"He's probably under water again," the captain said as the Viperfish responded to the new bell. "We'll just close in on the area of the light. Bring her around, Gerry," he said to the OOD.
"If we don't see the light again, we're going to take a chance on going right over him," Young said.
"Just keep him downwind of the boat," the captain said patiently.
From the control room, there was almost no information about the events topside. We knew that the chief was gone; we knew that the backing bell had either destroyed, or come close to destroying, the turbine bearings; and we knew that the Viperfish was now starting to move forward. The two men on the periscopes continued their search, but they were greatly hampered by the steep rolls tilting the periscopes from one side to the other, which prevented them from getting a fix on anything around us. Everybody in the control room worked in a state of stunned silence. As we continued to clear water from the decking, we kept hoping that some progress was being made from the top of the sail, but we also knew that a recovery under these conditions was extremely unlikely. After hearing the ahead bell and the rudder changes and then the all-stop bell, we waited for ten minutes while absolutely nothing happened. The final story of Chief Mathews came to us only later, in bits and pieces.
From the top of the sail, the men in the cockpit saw the light again, and then again, as the Viperfish completed the "Y" maneuver and came to a halt, upwind of the chief.
"Hang on, Mathews!" the captain yelled as the final approach was made. "We're going to get you!"
There was no answer from the chief as the deck party of look-outs and a thoroughly soaked and freezing Michael Davidson ventured out on the deck for the recovery. They threw lines from the boat in his direction and then threw more lines. Mathews did not reach out for them or move closer to the boat, and he did not respond. In the end, a man went into the ocean to bring him back.
Suddenly, the hatch above our heads opened, and a splash of water dropped into the control center.
"Stand by to bring him down the ladder!" Davidson hollered from inside the sail, and we all gathered around the base of the ladder to help.
Mathews was nearly unconscious when the men carefully lowered him, head first, down the ladder into our waiting arms. He was sobbing, speaking incoherently, and mumbling over and over,
"I never saw the boat."
"It's okay, Paul," we told him as Doc Baldridge checked his abrasions, several of which were still bleeding. He had slammed against the boat's superstructure a couple of times when his chain separated, but he had no broken bones or serious head injuries.
We wrapped him in several blankets and moved him down to his rack, where the Doc repeatedly checked on him for the next two days.
He had been in the water only twenty to thirty minutes, but, for Mathews, those minutes had been an eternity. While in the ocean, before his mind began to fade and before his muscles developed the malignant paralysis of hypothermia, he was certain that he was going to run out of time. He could not see the boat, he could not know we were closing in on him, and he could not know there was still hope.
"Let's take her down," the captain said softly to the OOD at the top of the sail.
"Clear the bridge! Clear the bridge!" Young called out, and the men scrambled down the long ladder into the safety of the Viperfish.
"Dive! Dive!" the chief's voice was broadcast throughout the boat as hatches were shut and we angled down again, away from the fury on the surface. Dropping hundreds of feet, we returned to our quiet existence beneath the sea.
For the next two days, we conducted a mini-celebration of Paul's return and toasted the safe conclusion to his experience. He wouldn't shed his blankets. Staying in his rack most of this time, he seemed to be always cold, always struggling to return his body temperature to normal. His response to our kidding-to such questions as, "How was liberty?" — was a silent gaze. We were aware of a fundamental change in him that had resulted from his experience. He told us no details about the event; he wouldn't talk with us, other than to tell us again that he had never been able to see the boat after his rail chain had broken away from the deck of the Viperfish.
We cruised slowly at about four hundred feet for the next three days, our bow again pointing steeply down and our speed slowed by the difficulty in maintaining a stable depth because of the problem with the hydraulic mechanism. We waited for the storm to pass, and we accepted the dangers of an unstable submarine. There was no consideration of any more trips to the sur- face until the waters returned to a relative calm. When the conditions were finally right, we surfaced again and the problem was readily resolved. Soon, we were back at four hundred feet, level and steady, en route to Pearl Harbor, still six days away.
Having a "doctor-patient" relationship with Paul Mathews, Doc Baldridge never did share much information with us about his treatment of the man. He gave his patient some bourbon from tiny medicinal flasks reserved for such times, and he kept the chief wrapped up. Doc never said much about his psychological state or the mental effects of a near-death experience. To me, Paul seemed depressed, but I also thought that Doc Baldridge was becoming depressed, as well as everybody else throughout the Viperfish.
Because we never saw much of Paul after his rescue, I asked Doc Baldridge what the problem was.
"Wouldn't you be a little shut down after something like that?" he asked me in return. His voice carried a little more anger than I think he intended.
"Of course," I said. "I was just wondering-"
"Paul's doing fine, but I don't have much time to spend with him since I have to work on the film badges, check the garbage gas measurements with our own oxygen levels, update everybody's records with-"
Holding up my hands, I tried to stop him. "It's okay," I said, "It's okay."
"There's not much more I can do here, on this boat out here," he said. "You know-"
"I understand, Doc," I said. "If you want to get off submarines, just put in a 'non-vol' chit and you're on your way. Just remember they're killing-"
"I know, I know," he said, exasperated. "They're killing four hundred men a week over there in the goddamn war, and a lot of them are corpsmen."
Eventually, we were all depressed. Paul lay in his rack, almost noncommunicative. The captain and the men working with the Special Project were frustrated and feeling defeated. The nukes wondered why so much work was going into moving us back and forth, from one unknown place to the next, where we could fail and fail again. The entire morale of the Viperfish at this point consisted of gloom and doom, defeat and frustration. In that setting, Brian Lane started down his path of becoming internally lost at sea.