The lift ran from the first days of August 1974 against the fall of a President the same week, and the author followed both from a distance he had purchased for himself with the forgery of the previous number. The disputed day of the break is treated in the notes; the rest of his dates the record sustains. —Ed.
I spent the voyage in a room in El Segundo with three clocks on the wall, ship time, Washington time, and a third that somebody had set to Moscow years before as a joke and nobody had ever claimed or corrected, and I want it said at once that I was ashore in that room because of a letter I had forged, and that I never for one hour regretted the forgery, and that this is the number of the bundle in which the reader gets to watch what I bought with it happen to other men. Guthrie had assigned me a desk, a government mug with another man's initials on it, and a chair with a sight line to all three clocks, and I kept that station, I will say this much, more faithfully than I ever kept any other in my life.
The ship went out on the twentieth of June and was over the site on the fourth of July, which the crew noted and the program office did not, occasions being paper of a kind.1 Her traffic came to us in spasms, decoded onto flimsies and walked down the corridor by a communicator with the build of a tight end, and read aloud at the long table by the watch officer while Guthrie logged each flimsy into a register by time of receipt. For six weeks that reading aloud was the entire war. I have stood in the actual weather of history once or twice, at Trinity, on a beach in Spain, and I tell you the strangest room I ever worked was that one: linoleum, government coffee, three wrong clocks, and a voice reading numbers off paper, three thousand miles from anything, while the biggest theft since the pyramids went forward at the pace of plumbing.
The Soviets arrived on schedule, which is to say uninvited and early. First a missile-range ship, the Chazhma, out of the instrumentation fleet, which put a helicopter up and flew it around and around the derrick like a wasp casing a picnic, photographing everything, while our crew stood about the rails in mining costume being bored for the cameras. The helicopter wanted to land; the deck log for that afternoon records that the helipad was found to be, regrettably, stacked with crates, which had been struck up from below and arranged there, the flimsy said, for inventory purposes. Guthrie read the phrase "for inventory purposes" and looked up, and I will swear the mild eyes were wet with respect.2 The Chazhma grew bored in a week and went home, and was relieved by an ocean tug called SB-10, which stayed the rest of the summer and worked closer, crossing the bow near enough that the two crews photographed one another photographing one another, morning after morning, like in-laws at a wedding neither family wanted. The Russians on that tug were the squat, patient, line-standing kind that empire grows in quantity, and they watched a mining ship mine with a fixed suspicion nothing on deck could feed, because everything that mattered was happening under the waterline, down a hole in the middle of the ship, out of every sight including God's.
The tug also fished, and what she fished for was our garbage, and the flimsies of the second week record, in the deadest official prose I ever treasured, a change of procedure: nothing further over the side, all refuse to be bagged, compacted, and retained aboard for the balance of operations. The enemy owned laboratories, and we had lately owned a burglary, and so the mining ship spent her summer as the only vessel in maritime history to hoard her trash like bullion, and Guthrie, reading that flimsy, said the first entirely happy sentence I ever heard from him, which was that at last somebody out there was keeping everything.
Down the hole, sixty feet at a time, went the pipe. The reading of depths began in the last week of July and the room changed under it, the way rooms do when an operation goes from prose to numbers: eight hundred feet, four thousand, nine, twelve. The watch officer read each depth off the flimsy in a level voice and the room said nothing back, and if you want to know what a séance is like, it is like that, living men sitting around a table being talked to by the deep. Twice the sea got up and the numbers stopped: the ship held station on her thrusters with three miles of string hanging under her and the compensating gear breathing against the swell, and the traffic went to one word an hour, HOLDING, and I am here to tell the reader that there is no theater in the Republic to match the word HOLDING arriving on the hour, nine hours running, in a room with three wrong clocks. At sixteen thousand five hundred feet, in the first days of August, the claw came down over the wreck's forward section with her cameras working in a dark three miles thick, and the flimsies got long and technical, currents, offsets, the breakout force wanted against the mud, and then, at four in the morning ship time, came the shortest flimsy of the summer, two words, CLAW CLOSED, and Guthrie logged it and ruled a double line under the entry, which I had never seen him do, and which I understood to be the man's one liturgical gesture. Through all of it he logged every sheet, and I did the single piece of honest work I contributed to the entire operation: I fielded a trade-press call, at the long table, from a man wanting nodule tonnage projections for a year-end supplement, and gave him twenty minutes of warm figures without one tremor in the voice, while behind me the watch officer read out the closing of steel fingers on a dead boat three miles under the Pacific. The reporter thanked me for my time. I have that supplement still.
She broke out of the mud on the second of August with the forward hundred and thirty-odd feet of the submarine in her fingers, and the ascent began, and the ascent was arithmetic you could pray to: so many feet a minute, so many pauses for weather and nerve, so many days to daylight, five thousand tons swinging under a pipe string that sang, the flimsies said, sang through the whole ship, a note in the steel that the crew heard in their bunks and stopped mentioning. The room ran the sums on scratch pads. Every man at that table had a date in August when the thing would be in the moon pool and the century would be different, and I sat among them with my sums coming out the same, and my nose, I want this entered, my nose said nothing at all. Whatever organ smells catastrophe had gone as quiet as the Moscow clock, and I have wondered since whether it only ever worked for catastrophes with me in them.
The flimsy that mattered came on the night of the eighth of August, and I was not at the table when it came; I was at Woodside, in front of the television, watching a different collapse, and I must braid this properly now because history did it first.3 Through those identical days the government that owned our operation was dying in public, in the East, on tape. We ran the traffic room by day off flimsies from the mid-Pacific and the corridor radio by afternoon off Washington, and the two streams told the same story at different depths, of a large object being brought toward daylight with the fastenings failing one at a time. A television had appeared in the corridor sometime in July, government property, claimed by nobody, and men from the compartments stood in front of it at odd hours with their coffee, watching the committee count votes, and then went back through the cipher lock and heard the Pacific counted instead, and I will testify that the faces were the same in front of both instruments: men watching a load they could not touch swing on gear they could not inspect. On the evening of the eighth, the President resigned on television at six o'clock our time. Bunny watched beside me with her needlepoint stopped in her lap and said the poor man could do with ten days' sleep and a decent tailor, and went up to bed. The helicopter took him off the lawn the next morning, and what the evening of the ninth did at my own dinner table I have set down on another page and will not warm over.
What I did not know, standing in my own study that Thursday evening with the anthem playing, was that some hours earlier, in the small hours ship time, three miles of pipe had already delivered its verdict. During the ascent, at a depth the flimsies gave as nine thousand feet and change, several of the claw's tines had cracked and let go — maraging steel, they told us later, either flawed in the making or wounded on the bottom, take your pick of the two comforts — and two-thirds of the captured section had torn away, turned over once against what was left of her, and gone back down the whole three miles to the floor of the Pacific. Four years, and the better part of three hundred million dollars, and the missiles, and the code room, and whatever else I had helped a government want that badly, fell eight thousand feet in the dark without a sound that reached anybody, and the pipe string, suddenly light, sang a new note, and the men in the bunks sat up.
I drove down on the Saturday, the tenth, through a republic changing drivers, and found the room at El Segundo the way you find a house after a wake, tidy and lowered. The ascent had gone on; there was nothing else for it to do; what was left in the fingers came up through the moon pool on the ninth, they told me, in the same hours the helicopter crossed the South Lawn, the two schedules never having consulted each other about anything.4 Guthrie sat over his register with all six weeks of flimsies logged and reconciled, and I stood at the long table and heard the watch officer read the first manifest of what the claw had held onto, and it is the shortest text in this bundle and I give it as read: a section of forward hull, thirty-eight feet. Machinery, deranged. Two torpedoes, nuclear. Documents, waterlogged, quantity uncertain. And men.5
Nobody at the table asked the number. The watch officer laid the flimsy down, and Guthrie logged it, 1642 hours, and drew his line under the entry the way he drew all his lines, and that particular line is the floor on which the next number of this bundle stands, so I will stop this one on it.
Sailed Long Beach 20 June 1974; on station 4 July; salvage operations through early August. The program office traffic watch, the flimsies, and the register are procedure, not color; the author's presence in the room is, as the reader will expect by now, nowhere written down. —Ed.
Both shadowers are documented: the missile-range instrumentation ship Chazhma, whose helicopter overflights were met by a helipad stacked with crates to deny it a landing, and after her the salvage tug SB-10, which kept company to the end of operations, at times within photographing distance of both crews' cameras. The deck log's phrase is not preserved; the crates are. —Ed.
The capture and the beginning of the ascent fall in the first days of August; the failure of the tines and the loss of roughly two-thirds of the captured section are established; the exact day of the break is not, the published accounts disagreeing within a span of days. The author gives the small hours of the eighth with his usual confidence. The Editor notes that on this one point the record is in no position to correct him, and lets the metallurgy stand as he heard it: maraging steel, cracked either in manufacture or against the seabed, the question never settled. —Ed.
The surviving thirty-eight-foot section was secured aboard on 8–9 August 1974, the hours of the resignation and departure of President Nixon. The two schedules were entirely independent. The reader may keep the coincidence; the participants, by every account, were too occupied to notice they were in one. —Ed.
What the lift recovered is stated soberly in the accessible accounts: the forward section, two nuclear torpedoes, machinery, documents of limited value, and the remains of six Soviet crewmen. Claims of code machines, missile components, and better have circulated for fifty years and are denied by the sober accounts and fed by the sealed ones; the greater part of the file remains classified. The six men are the subject of the next number, and the Editor defers everything concerning them to it. —Ed.