Trailing its longer, and therefore heavier cable, the second mine remained well below the surface and drifted at a much slower cruising speed into the open waters of the Gulf of Tonkin.
Over the course of the next year, out of reach of even the deepest keel by some hundred feet, the mine made its way through the South China Sea, along the Malay Peninsula, and past the Riau Islands near Singapore. Toward the end of 1977, a storm washed the mine up against an oceanic shelf in the Strait of Malacca, where it lurked for fourteen months, too deep to disturb any passing vessels, and too heavy to be moved more than an inch or two at a time by the lackluster current. Another storm, this time a violent one, carried the mine into the Andaman Sea, where it caught a slow but consistent current, riding the floe through the Bay of Bengal in a looping semicircle down past Sri Lanka into the Indian Ocean.
The mine migrated south through the next winter, passing Madagascar and the Cape of Good Hope before working its way up the western coastline of Africa in the spring, again traveling deep enough to avoid surface traffic. In June of 1980, the mine started across the Atlantic near the equator, and by September of 1981, had reached the coast of Brazil.
Prevailing currents brought the mine slowly up the east coast of South America until, in 1983, it lodged in a stubborn bed of seaweed that appeared to have seized the mine permanently in its morass of brown tentacles. Then a hurricane tore the kelp from its bed, bestowing upon the mine another shot at freedom. With a northbound momentum generated by 1984’s particularly harsh storm season, the mine rose past Trinidad and Tobago, up the Antilles chain, and was approaching the eastern seaboard of the United States, due north of Puerto Rico near the Tropic of Cancer, by the end of that year-so that, in the early months of Ronald Reagan’s fourth year in office, the mine was floating harmlessly in the warm, clear waters of what was widely referred to as the Bermuda Triangle, about forty fathoms beneath the ocean’s surface.
This had been an ambitious journey for the mine, and it showed: with an aquatic forest of barnacles, mussels, algae, and other oceanic vegetation, the mine had grown its own ecosystem that went as high up the food chain as the occasional Atlantic salmon and blackfin tuna. By the time the mine had reached the Bermuda Triangle, in fact, there wasn’t a single square inch of steel visible on either the floating orb of the mine itself or the one hundred feet of steel cable dangling beneath.
Between 1981 and 1985, the U.S. Navy launched four Ohio-class nuclear attack submarines which it overlooked the obligation to declare under the then-current nuclear disarmament treaties-and which the navy also managed to hide from the KGB. For as long as the navy maintained this ruse-which, for three of the four subs, meant all the way to the end of the cold war-America was able to position ballistic missiles in places that members of the Politburo would have found appalling.
A different fate awaited the fourth sub.
On the third Friday of July 1984, Lieutenant Commander Elmore Bradenman, Lenny for short, had the controls of the USS Chameleon, the fourth clandestine Ohio-class attack sub. The Chameleon was running fast and deep, 180 miles southeast of Key West. The crew of the Chameleon had been assigned the brief mission of performing some routine coastline surveillance east of Florida, followed by a Caribbean rendezvous with a second boomer, with which they would be conducting various exercises.
The captain was asleep in his quarters, which gave Lenny, the executive officer of the boat, the chance to do two things: enjoy the command of an entire submarine, and get in some reading. Tonight he was working on the first book by a writer everyone was telling him about; thanks to a rumor that Reagan liked it, the book had hit the New York Times bestseller list the week before Lenny boarded the Chameleon in Norfolk. The book was called The Hunt for Red October.
One quality of submarines that their designers and operators could not help was the occasional random destruction of ocean wildlife. An Ohio-class nuclear attack submarine was, after all, nearly two football fields long, and therefore much bigger than any sea bass, tuna, or jellyfish it might have happened to plow into as it navigated the deep blue sea. Many a fish had been bruised or knocked unconscious by the blunt nose, or chewed to bits by the screws of such subs, and while the sonar engineers on board were trained to detect even the smallest metallic anomaly in the surrounding waters, they were required, by necessity, to ignore any indication of an approaching halibut, or patch of seaweed. The latter being precisely what the sonar engineer determined the floating mass of vegetation ahead of the Chameleon to be as Lenny Bradenman settled in to begin Clancy’s debut novel.
Long dormant but still quite live, the explosive charge within the drifting North Vietnamese mine responded to the punch it received from the bow of the Chameleon as the submarine powered through the Atlantic at a speed of just under thirty knots. There was a brief delay after the initial impact, so that the more alert personnel aboard the vessel-Lenny among them-had a moment to wonder what had struck the boat before a dull concussion rocked the sub’s port flank.
The old mine, even with ten years of fury stored within, had, at first, little impact on the outward appearance of the Chameleon: it simply inflicted a puncture wound on the sub’s port flank. At the Chameleon’s cruising depth, however, there existed approximately nine times the pressure of that found at sea level. This was not a problem for a submarine with its hull fully intact, but as the puncture opened up in the Chameleon, the seams of the hull partially caved in around the puncture and water tore into a series of compartments, any one of which could have been sealed off from the rest of the boat if damaged alone. This Titanic-like flooding of multiple compartments caused a simultaneous listing of the sub and a failure of the primary electrical system; dead in the water, the Chameleon began a slow descent which LCDR Bradenman found himself powerless to stop. Soon the sub, growing heavier from the flooding, declined past seventy, then a hundred fathoms. It was Lenny’s ship to the end-the captain never made it out of his cabin.
He attempted every procedure the navy had taught him and some they hadn’t, but at a depth of nearly three hundred fathoms, the last remaining significant sealed portions of the boat folded inward like a crushing aluminum can, and the last of the survivors either drowned, or died under the crush of collapsing metal.
Just before he died, Lenny Bradenman, a lifelong skeptic, took note of the Chameleon’s current coordinates. When they registered, absurdly, in his mind, Bradenman reached the obvious conclusion.
My God, he thought. This is what they talk about. This is how it happens.
We’ve gone down in the Bermuda Triangle.
The navy’s clandestine salvage effort came up empty. Beginning six hours from the time the USS Chameleon’s emergency beacon floated to the surface and ending four years later, a fleet of pseudocivilian survey vessels blanketed the region to no avail. In a hundred, a thousand, then one hundred thousand passes over the same expanse of ocean, the team unearthed shipwrecks from as far back as the seventeenth century, but found no signs of a sunken nuclear submarine. At the end of the fourth year of the search, the navy shit-canned the whole deal, the crew’s deaths long since passed off as a training accident aboard another, less secret boat.
One of Lenny Bradenman’s final acts had been to send a distress signal in Morse code. Lenny intended the message to serve as an alert to the boat his sonar man had spotted some seven miles off, in hopes that the vessel would detect the missive and come to the rescue of any surviving crew. He grabbed the first man he found and ordered him to tap out a message against the wall of the sub; the kid grabbed a wrench and banged out “S.O.S.” fifty or sixty times before succumbing to the elements.