Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (8 page)

As always, what the spooks would ultimately collect had as much to do with luck as skill. There was no way to predict how the mission would unfold.

Bessac didn't allow his sub to linger long before he gave the orders that sent her creeping up to the 12-mile territorial limit claimed by the Soviets, then just inside. His orders allowed him to do that, to even go inside the 3-mile territorial limit recognized by the United States. This was the real beginning of the operation, the start of a planned onemonth routine. Move in by day, get close, keep most of the sub's 287foot-long and 27-foot-wide bulk hidden underwater, while allowing the periscopes and antennas to broach the surface.

Each night, Gudgeon was to move out 20 or 30 miles, just far enough so that she could run her clamoring engines and charge her batteries and snorkel, bringing in fresh air and exhaling carbon monoxide and other noxious gases through a special pipe. The exercise would provide enough air and battery power to last through another day of silent submersion in Soviet waters.

If the mission went as planned, Gudgeon would not run her engines anywhere near the Soviet coast, and she wouldn't surface past snorkel depth until she was well on her way back to Japan. Until then, the men would live in their cramped steel shell, working through a haze of diesel fumes that even snorkeling couldn't erase.

Her crew hardly noticed the smell anymore. Their clothes, their skin, their hair, everything was drenched in "Eau de Diesel," the trademark scent of a submariner and one that masked other insults. With the crew's shower usually filled with food, the men had, at best, a half of a basin of fresh water a day to wash with. Thanks to the new evaporators on Gudgeon, the water was far cleaner than the running rusted tin available on older diesel boats, but it was in short supply. So the men devised tricks for making the most of the precious commodity. To wash: begin face first, then sponge down. The men ran salt water showers from the engine room bilges and mined a few extra cups of water from inside the boat by setting up buckets to collect the ever-present condensation that left everything on board damp to dripping. There was usually enough condensation to allow the men to wash their clothes at least once on each operation. That was bonus enough so that they hardly bothered to curse the mists that rose from the bilges, transforming their bunk spaces into metallic swamps. So what if their mattresses had to be kept zipped up tight against the dank with plastic flash covers? Every submariner learned fast to quickly unzip, slide into bed and zip back up.

Comfort was one thing, staying alive was another. And for that, the rules were simple. Stay quiet, stay submerged, and above all, avoid being detected. That was the most crucial rule and one Gudgeon was about to break.

It happened on Monday, August 19, 1957, sometime after 5:00 P.m., Soviet Pacific Coast time. Gudgeon had been submerged for about twelve hours. It would take two or three hours to travel to the isolated spot where she would snorkel, and then several more to take on enough air and create enough electricity to last through the next day. Already, the air on hoard had become heavy. It smelled worse than the usual diesel foul, and it tasted just as bad.

A bunch of men were in the mess watching the first reel of Bad Day at Black Rock. Over the whir of a 16mm projector, Spencer Tracy, Lee Marvin, and Ernest Borgnine were playing out the days just after World War II. The movie was reasonably new. What submarines lacked in water, space, and privacy the Navy tried to make up for with good movies and good food.

Then, for a moment, the sub listed sideways. Only slightly really, the sort of sway that normally happens beneath the surface in rough waters. But in the calm waters off Vladivostok, that sort of list only happened when the sail broached, catching a swell. Then Gudgeon began to dive. Again, it was nothing extreme, not an all-out plunge. This was gentler, just an angle that the crewmen could feel under their feet.

Suddenly the alarm rang. There was nothing subtle about the call that came out over the squawk box: "Battle stations!"

Now everyone was up and running at once, scrambling out of bunks, out of the mess, out of just about every corner, squeezing past one another through passageways not much wider than one man. They were grabbing on to the bars welded over the oval watertight doors, shooting their legs through to the next compartment, shoulders and head following. They came sliding down ladders and down stairs that weren't much more than ladders. All of them were making more noise than they could afford.

"We broached," one man shouted to anyone who was there to hear. "The damn Russians are up there. And the old man just took her deep."

Some of the other men thought the electronic countermeasures mast had been left up too long. It was about a foot wide and 18 inches tall, and the officer of the deck was supposed to bring it down the instant it tasted radar signals that meant the Soviets might be honing in on Gudgeon. Normally the mast was up only as long as the scope was, say, 30 seconds at a time. But for these trips near the Soviet coast, the mast was kept up a bit longer, as other intelligence antennas had been added on as branches. Either the order to take it down came too late or Gudgeon's depth controls were handled badly, perhaps leaving both the mast and part of her sail exposed.

Either way, anything sticking out of these calm waters would have made Gudgeon all too easy to spot, and spotted she was. Soviet ships were heading her way even as Bessac began shouting the orders for evasive action. Taking his boat down deep, he was looking for a temperature layer, a mass of cold water that could hide his sub by reflecting back to the surface any sonar pings aimed down from ships above. The Soviets would definitely be going active, sending out the deadly accurate sound beams that created the most complete picture of what was below water. They had no reason to try to listen through the static of passive sonar, no reason not to make noise. They weren't the ones being hunted.

One hundred feet, two hundred feet, Bessac wasn't finding that layer he could hide under. Three hundred feet.

Then the crew heard it. "Ping. . . . Ping. . . . Ping.... " The Soviet probes rang steel chills through Gudgeon and her crew. A ship had zeroed in on them. Bessac began taking the sub deeper and back outside the 12-mile limit. Many in the crew were convinced they had made their escape, but the Soviets were continuing to chase. Operating just on batteries and submerged, Gudgeon couldn't outrun them, couldn't do much better than a few knots.

By now, just about every man on board was focused on getting away. Planesmen held the sub steady through the dive. Other men kept an eye on the depth gauges. Bessac stood in the cramped control room issuing orders. Lieutenant John O. Coppedge, the southern-smooth executive officer, "Bo" to the crew, was by the captain's side.

In stations set out in a circle around the captain were the fire control officers, who sat ready to aim and fire weapons if given the order, and the quartermasters, those navigators who stood over charts plotting the course changes as Gudgeon moved to elude her tormentors. Out one watertight door, just outside the control room, the sonar techs sat in their darkened closet watching screens and trying to count propeller sounds.

There were two ships above, then more, all joining to pin down the Gudgeon.

Men began taking note of their status. Gudgeon's batteries were at that end-of-the-day low, her air that end-of-the-day foul. And there was no way to run the diesel engines and bring in fresh air or recharge, not unless Bessac could drive Gudgeon near enough to the surface to raise her snorkel pipe and keep it there until the air was cleared. Carbon dioxide levels were already high enough that some of the men were feeling nauseous; others had headaches, the kind where it felt as if the tops of their heads were coming off. This was the worst time of the day on any diesel sub, and the absolute worst time to get caught.

Unessential equipment was shut down to conserve power and to squelch noise. The ice machines were off. The lights were dimmed down to emergency levels, more glow than illumination. Fans and blowers were off.

Bessac gave the order to switch to relaxed battle stations, allowing many in the crew to take to their bunks to conserve oxygen. Above, a ship pinged Gudgeon, driving her toward another ship, which repeated the sonar assault. Every ping reminded the crew that someone on board had made a mistake, a big one.

Word came from the sonar shack. There were at least four ships above now. The men cursed "Charlie Brown," their name for the Soviets when they weren't using more colorful descriptions.

Then came another round of sonar pings. They were followed by something else, something far more terrifying.

With a series of "pops," a wave of small explosions rained down and around Gudgeon. She had been trying to change course again, trying to elude her captors. And they had answered. The Soviets were dropping light depth charges-they sounded like hand grenades-into the water.

The sounds came through the hull, loud. The boat was okay; Gudgeon could withstand these small explosions. But what if the Soviets followed through with the real thing, with full-sized depth charges?

Bessac began giving orders for a new set of evasive maneuvers. In the control room, the men worked, straining to listen beyond the sub. Others lay still in their hunks, listening as well, waiting for the thunder of bigger explosions, the kind that meant Gudgeon might never surface again.

The younger seamen were noticeably nervous. The grizzled vets, the few who had been through World War II, could hide their fear better, but for them this moment was actually far worse. They knew what a depth charge could do. They knew that their boat's namesake, the World War II sub named Gudgeon, was lost in the Pacific in 1944 and was believed destroyed by enemy depth charges. They had lost comrades on subs of that era, and some of them had been on boats that just barely escaped when those charges fell. They had felt the furious shocks, been drenched as seawater spurted through the wounded pipes of their fleet boats, wondered how long they could hold out inside fragile steel.

The Soviets made another pass, then another, raining down pings and grenadelike charges.

"Stay calm, we'll get out of this," Bessac muttered to a young auxiliary man, still in his teens.

The youngster was already sporting talismans against catastrophe, tattoos of a chicken and a pig, one seared onto each foot. That was a tradition of sorts, taken from an old Hawaiian legend. Chickens and pigs, it was said, would always find something to float on and would never drown. Several of the men were marked the same way.

By now, the siege had been going on for nearly three hours. Bessac continued to look for that temperature layer, taking the sub down to test depth-about 700 feet-and then a little farther. No luck. Maybe there was a layer at around 850 feet down. Gudgeon should have been able to withstand the sea pressure even at that extra hundred feet or so below test depth, and Bessac probably would have risked it. But there was another problem, one that prevented the captain from testing the extremes: something had gotten caught in the outer door of the garbage ejector earlier that day. Everything that went into the ejector was supposed to be bagged and secured. Everybody on board knew that. Normally a column of water is forced through the opening, and the water, the garbage, all of it, is forced out to sea. But someone had just tossed something in there, probably thinking nothing of it, and whatever the object was had jammed.

Now there was just the inner ejector door, one piece of steel, holding the ocean back. Even at a depth of just 200 feet, enough water could be forced by sea pressure through a one-inch hole to overwhelm pumping systems and sink a sub. If the inner plate covering the trash ejector gave way now, with Gudgeon as deep as she was, she could be lost.

One of the sub's senior enlisted men, a chief petty officer, had carried a had feeling about that ejector all day, long before the Soviets came. He had suggested sending someone swimming outside the sub to clear it. But Bessac decided they couldn't risk that kind of maneuver. It wouldn't have been an issue if Gudgeon weren't now in a position where a little more depth might save her. But there could be no going deeper.

Bessac began trying other evasive maneuvers. He called for the "noisemakers," devices that could be shot out the signal gun in the stern room. They came in cans, each about a yard long. When launched, they responded by sending a wash of sonar-befuddling bubbles into the water-an effect sort of like a giant Alka-Seltzer.

The Soviets weren't fooled. They answered Gudgeon's noisemakers with another round of grenadelike charges tossed into the water. Punishment for daring an evasive attempt? A taunt to show how badly it had failed? It didn't matter. Gudgeon was still under assault.

Next, Bessac looked at his helmsmen, and with a "Let's try it," began directing them to drive the sub right toward the enemy, hoping that was the one move the Soviets would never expect. It didn't work. Nor did it work when he sent his boat left, then right, then straight ahead again. Each evasive maneuver was answered with a storm of explosives.

There could have been as many as eight ships above now. One ship would pass over Gudgeon, then the next would come in for a run. Throughout, sonarmen kept track of the Soviets, and fire control men kept her torpedoes aimed. But there was a general "no shoot" policy for spy subs: don't shoot unless shot at. So far, the small charges had not been replaced by heavier explosives.