Perhaps the plan was too simple. We continued to cruise slowly at a depth of sixty-five feet, as Captain Harris and the XO watched the ship through our periscopes and called out her every move to us.
"They have raised the box off the side of the ship and it is now being lowered to the water," Captain Harris called. He clicked the periscope to higher power and narrowed his eyes. "The box is now in the water, the release is imminent."
A few moments passed, and Commander Ryack called out from the port periscope, "They have released the object and they are lifting the box off the water."
One of the officers suddenly exclaimed, "Oh, my God!" as the other shouted, "I cannot believe this…the target is floating."
They stared at each other as a voice from the ship's radiotelephone boomed into our control center.
"Now, Hammerclaw, Hammerclaw! There will be a delay in the dropping of the target. Repeat, delay."
The problem was the density of the object. Whoever had prepared it had neglected to determine whether the density of the thing was greater than the density of the ocean water it was to displace. Unfortunately for the secrecy of the entire operation, the object was too light to sink. The shape that nobody was supposed to see was floating at the side of the ship while the crane operators, deckhands, and everybody else stared at it.
After the thing had been fully observed by everyone on the ship, her crew hauled it back to the deck and set about furiously wrapping it with heavy chains and even a couple of anchors for added weight. When the object was finally covered with enough junk to sink a battleship, they shoved the entire mess overboard and it immediately sank out of sight. We heard a sad "Farewell to Hammerclaw" over our underwater telephone as the ship turned away and prepared to take on board a naval intelligence team, scrambled to the area on an intercept vessel to address the massive breach of security. The word later filtered down to us that every man on the ship was interrogated in an intensive debriefing process during the Navy's struggle to negate security leaks that could compromise our mission.
We lowered the Fish thousands of feet out of the Viperfish and began searching the bottom again. Locked in our motionless world once again, we stood watches, ate our meals, watched movies, occasionally showered, and wondered what the shape could be.
Several of the crew and I were sitting in the dining area when photographer Robbie Teague walked in with a handful of 8 x 10 glossy black-and-white photos and an excited but secretive expression on his face. All of us liked Robbie; he was a small fellow with a quiet and pleasant manner. He conscientiously worked to generate the highest-quality pictures that our equipment could produce.
"What do you have there, Robbie?" Sandy Gallivan asked, look- ing at the photographs.
"Interesting pictures?" I chimed in.
"Dirty pictures from Tijuana?" Birken asked, with raised eyebrows and a grin.
Robbie laid the pictures on the table and we all gathered around.
"We have found our target!" he said, his voice charged with excitement. "The guys in the hangar are pretty excited."
As we looked at the pictures, Gallivan asked the obvious question.
"These are great pictures, Robbie, but where's the target?"
Robbie looked surprised and then offended. "It's right there!" He pointed at the corner of the nearest picture. "It's right next to the anchor and chain you can see here in the corner!"
"All I see is an anchor and chain," I said.
"And mud." Birken added.
Robbie straightened his short frame and tried to look indignant.
"You know we can't show you the actual target, the skipper won't allow it. It's top secret!" he said. "But, we found it!"
"Great!" Birken said as he turned to leave the area. "I'm going to hit the rack."
"Robbie, what are we looking for?" I asked.
He pointed at his pictures again. "The shape, the target, the thing we just-"
"Not that, Robbie, what is the real thing? What are we getting ready for?"
He studied Marc and me for a moment, and finally answered, "Everything is so goddamn secret that even I don't know what we're doing. And I'm part of the Special Project team. Okay, I know the shape, but I don't think this thing is the real target. I think our real target, whatever it is that we are going to be looking for out there, has yet to be defined."
He glanced around us, ensuring that the room was empty, and his voice dropped to a whisper. "Even the civilians in the hangar don't know, if you can believe that. Even the officers in the wardroom don't know. The captain and the XO are the only ones who have a clue and sometimes I wonder if even they know the whole story. My guess is that this is a project in evolution."
The next day, we lost the Fish. Two days later, we lost our nuclear reactor.
The problem with the Fish was the cable and its assembly design, which brought together many strands of wire. Each wire was constructed with extraordinary tensile strength and flexibility to withstand the many flexings associated with wrapping it around the spool, but when two strands were welded together, a weak spot was generated. As the long cable was rolled around the spool, some of the strands broke, which created a snarl of wire that prevented us from pulling the Fish all the way back into the boat.
Having an immovable long cable, extending from our belly, attached to an extremely sensitive and expensive device jammed with electronics was a disaster for the testing program. The civilians and Special Project officers grappled with the dilemma but told the rest of us nothing. Finally, they removed the cable from its attachment point on the spool, and the entire assembly, including the Fish, was dropped to the ocean floor thousands of feet below the Viperfish.
Although there were no announcements to the rest of us, the glum demeanor of those associated with the Fish left no doubt as to the outcome of their efforts. The Viperfish had been budgeted for a total of five Fish, and we had carried two; the $55 million allowance for our backup Fish suddenly appeared to be money well spent. We turned and headed in the direction of Pearl Harbor.
On watch two days later, I was sitting in front of the reactor control panel as we dropped down about two hundred and fifty feet and steamed along at full power. I logged in the initial set of reactor readings and then sat back in my chair to scan the meters showing everything of significance about our nuclear plant.
Suddenly, the shrieking noise of multiple reactor alarms blasted me from my seat. As I always did when the reactor control panel turned into a maze of flashing red lights, I stood up, kicked over the coffeepot near my foot, and started hitting various switches across the panel. One of the nuclear machinist mates, Billy Elstner, sitting below us in his tight corner of the lower-level engine room, knew instantly from the rain of coffee on his head that a major problem was developing in the maneuvering room.
"The reactor is shut down!" I hollered. Searching the flashing red lights across the panel for any clue as to what had happened, I felt certain that this was another damnable drill. Admiral Rickover's crew of "NR boys" from the Naval Reactor Division in Washington was scheduled to test our knowledge after we returned to Pearl Harbor, and I figured Captain Harris was throwing another nuclear test our way to prepare us.
After announcing the shutdown to the control center, Lt. John Pintard, engineering officer of the watch, yelled from his position behind me, "What is the cause of the shutdown?"
"No indication, sir!" I hollered back, searching for any abnormalities. "Initiating emergency reactor start-up!"
"Very well!" Pintard said, watching the start-up process begin.
I began flipping switches to bring the reactor back up to power. Donald Svedlow, sitting next to me, raced his hands back and forth across his electrical panel and opened circuit breakers throughout the engine room as the steam pressure feeding his turbogenerators began to drop.