Mark Joseph
To Kill the Potemkin
FOR MY FATHER
Opening Quotes
War is a game.
All war is deception.
Prologue
On May 27, 1968, at one o'clock in the afternoon, the USS Scorpion, a nuclear submarine with ninety-nine pen aboard, was due to arrive at her home port of Norfolk, Virginia, after a ninety-day patrol. The families of the crew were waiting on the dock.
At about three o'clock a navy public affairs officer announced that Scorpion was overdue. She had failed to request her berthing assignment and tug services.
Scorpion had last communicated on May 21, when she filed a routine position report from fifty miles south of the Azores in the mid-Atlantic.
After several more hours of continued silence, the navy undertook a massive search of the waters around Norfolk. Over the next few days the search was widened into the deep Atlantic. On June 5, the navy declared Scorpion presumed lost with all hands, and on June 30 her name was struck from the navy list.
The loss of Scorpion was the worst disaster to befall a fully armed United States Navy warship on patrol since the end of World War Two.
The USS Scorpion, SSN 589, one of six Skipjack class submarines, was 252 feet long and 31 feet wide. She was built by the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics Corporation in Groton, Connecticut, and commissioned July 29, 1960, at a cost of forty million dollars. Her S5W nuclear reactor, built by Westinghouse, was capable of lighting a small city. An attack submarine, a hunter-killer, she carried no ballistic missiles. She was armed with torpedoes of various types, including several with nuclear warheads designed to destroy enemy submarines and other capital ships, Her crew of ninety-nine represented the highest level of training and achievement of any military unit in the Armed Forces of the United States. They were the navy's elite.
Their loss went largely unnoticed. In May 1968 American soldiers and sailors died every day in Viet Nam. France endured a general strike. Students at Columbia and elsewhere laid siege to their universities. The battle of Khe San, the cultural revolution in China, the civil war in Nigeria, and the death the previous month of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., crowded the front pages of America's newspapers. Unlike the Thresher, which sank in April 1963 during a time of relative tranquility, the Scorpion has been all but forgotten.
On June 5, 1968, a Navy Court of Inquiry convened in Norfolk and took testimony in secret from more than ninety witnesses. On August 5 The New York Times, in a two-paragraph article in the back pages, reported that technicians at a U.S. Navy SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System) listening station in Greece made a tape recording of an implosion in the mid-Atlantic on May 21.
Meanwhile, the search in the deep Atlantic began in earnest. The USS Mizar, an oceanographic research vessel, was assigned the task of finding the wreck. Mizar towed a sled over the bottom, more than ten thousand feet down, and searched with sonars, magnometers, lights, and television and still cameras.
In August the Court adjourned with no conclusive evidence as to the cause of the disaster. On October 29 Mizar found the wreck of Scorpion four hundred miles from her last reported position, under 11,235 feet of water, and took twelve thousand photographs of the debris field.
The Court reconvened in November, examined the evidence gathered by Mizar and issued a Findings of Fact on January 31, 1969. Most of that document remains classified today. In the declassified portions the Court declared that "the certain cause of the loss of Scorpion cannot be ascertained from any evidence now available." The death of SSN 589 became an official mystery.
During the early months of 1968 multiple submarine disasters were reported in the public press. On February 25 the Israeli sub Dakar disappeared in the Mediterranean. On April 11 a Soviet Navy Golf II class submarine sank in the Pacific. Several months later parts of that sub were raised by the Glomar Explorer. Scorpion exploded and sank on May 21. Were all these events coincidence? Answers may lie deep in the archives of all the navies involved. The essence of submarine warfare is secrecy and stealth, and submarine operations rank among the most carefully guarded secrets of all military powers. In the U.S. Navy, submariners are said to belong to the Silent Service. The boats are quiet, but the men are mute.
Nevertheless, as in all navies, there is scuttlebutt. Rumors circulate for years, become exaggerated and inflated, but never lose their fascination. Was there a sub war in the late 1960s, when the Soviet Navy was making frantic efforts to catch and technologically surpass the U.S. Navy?
The story that follows is fiction. The ships and the men who sail them are imaginary, but their time and the nature of their struggle were real. Then, as now, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, the submarine forces of the United States Navy and the Soviet Navy confronted one another under all the oceans of earth, playing a deadly game of nuclear war. What happened then, if it happened at all, may happen again…
1
Twin dolphins faced each other across Sorensen's chest. Sailors called them dolphins, but the strange creatures inked into Sorensen's skin scarcely resembled the small singing whales that live in the sea. Their eyes bulged and their mouths gaped, as if they were about to devour the submarine making way between them. The sub, an old-fashioned diesel-electric with knife-edged prow, crude sonar dome and archaic anchor, appeared to drive straight out of Sorensen's heart.
Over the years the tattoo had faded to a bluish gray. Tufts of blond hair obscured some of the intricate detail, but the legend that curved over the sub was still legible: SSN 593.
Sorensen was a big man. Even in his present condition, drunk, stoned, sprawled naked on a whore's bed, his wide shoulders and lean swimmer's muscles spent and exhausted, he radiated tension like a sheathed sword.
Almost asleep, he closed his eyes and listened to the girl breathing softly beside him.
Ordinarily, Lorraine took little notice of her tricks, most of whom came from the navy base. Sorensen was different. He spent a lot of money, he knew what he wanted and he treated her right. She was enjoying herself. She liked the way his lopsided smile slanted across his face when he grinned. Dark rings surrounded his eyes, but whether they were a permanent feature, she didn't know. His hair was longer than regulation and slicked back over large ears. His skin was tan and healthy.
Lazily, she traced her fingers over the tattoo. She had been in Norfolk long enough to recognize the insignia of the Submarine Service, and long enough to know which questions not to ask a submariner. No, they didn't get claustrophobic. Yes, they got insanely horny on a long patrol. Yes, they worried about the radiation, but not too much. They all said the asbestos was worse.
"How long you been in the navy. Jack?"
Without opening his eyes, Sorensen mumbled, "Too long."
"I bet you're a lifer. Otherwise, you wouldn't have this tattoo."
"Yeah, well, one night in Tokyo I had too much to drink. So it goes, so it goes."
She giggled. "You submarine guys are all a little crazy, you know? But you're the only one I ever saw with a tan."