"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 hack 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.