The gravest number of the bundle concerns the burial at sea, on 4 September 1974, of six Soviet submariners, and a piece of film whose later history is given in the notes. The author's account is brisk; the reader is asked to let the notes keep pace with it. —Ed.
The men came up with the hull section, and for two weeks that August the government of the United States, which owns a protocol for every contingency including its own decapitation, discovered that it owned none for this one, because you cannot write a procedure in advance for a thing you are never going to have done. There were six of them.1 They had been at the bottom of the Pacific for six years, inside the forward compartments, and the doctors' first finding was that the compartments had kept them, and the doctors' second finding was the reason the rest of this number happens around a steel chamber: the working spaces of that boat had not been clean, in the radiological sense, since before she sank. Nobody in the traffic used the word bodies and nobody used the word cargo; for two weeks they were "the recovered personnel," which is the government's way of holding a thing at arm's length with both hands.
So it became a meeting, because everything in my republic becomes a meeting, and in the third week of August, in a conference room at El Segundo with a coffee urn too small for its agenda, the meeting tried to close the file. The reader should have the shape of the table: two lawyers from Washington, a senior and a junior; a flag officer; a doctor with his dosimetry charts in a grey folder; Guthrie with his register; and me, present as the man whose trade was the public that this matter must never reach. It was the politest room I ever sat in. The word bodies went unsaid at that table too, and the agenda, which Guthrie had typed, said "disposition of recovered materiel, personnel," the comma doing more work than any comma should be asked to do.
The junior lawyer opened, in real hope. "Is there no avenue by which the remains could simply be returned? Through a neutral capital. Unattributed."
The senior lawyer answered him the way you answer a nephew. "Returned from where, counselor? Recovered by whom, by what means, in which ocean? A body is a fact. A fact delivered to the Soviet Union is a confession with a return address."
The flag officer said one thing in the whole meeting and said it early. "However your paper reads, they go over the side with honors. That is what navies owe one another, whatever the governments are doing. Write anything you like around it." And having said it he sat back and stirred his coffee and let the room work out, at its own pace, that he had already won.
The junior lawyer asked the doctor how long the question could responsibly be deferred, deferral being the profession's first love, and the doctor opened the grey folder, and was asked for a figure, and gave one, flatly, in the units of his trade. The junior lawyer wrote the figure down and then stopped writing anything for a while. Nobody asked the doctor a second question. The charts closed off everything involving time; the urn chose that moment to run dry; and Guthrie went out to the corridor for the relief pot and receipted it, I have no doubt, on the way back in.
After that the options narrowed the way options do in that town, by men crossing out one another's exits. Burial at sea, from the ship, quietly: feasible, said the flag officer, and there was precedent by the volume. Then the senior lawyer, whom I had begun to respect the way you respect a good adding machine, took off his glasses and supplied the rest. "Then it is done unwitnessed. No photographs, no film, no log entry past the navigational, no order in writing that reaches past the ship. It did not happen, because nothing happened, because there was nothing there." The junior one nodded, and the room began to drift with them, on lawyers' current, every man studying the blotter in front of him, and it was there, into that particular silence, that I said the only sentence of my career I have never once been able to prove I said.
I said they should film it.
The lawyers came up out of their notes together. "Film is a record," the senior one said. "A record is discovery. Discovery is the end of every man at this table, and I am including the consultant."
And I gave them back my whole inventory, the saucers, the beach at Palomares, thirty years of managing what publics believe, and it came down to this, which I said slowly, because I would only get to say it once. "The day this story surfaces, and it will surface, the first question asked in every capital on earth will be: what did you do with the men? To that question there is no spoken answer that anyone alive will believe. Not from this government; not by then. But there is an answer you can put on a projector. Bury them from that deck with full honors, both flags' worth, in their own language and in ours, film every foot of it, and lock the film in the deepest drawer the Republic owns, and the drawer itself becomes the answer: the government's decency banked as an object, against the day of exposure, in the only currency anybody will still take from you. A denial is a noise. The object you cannot manufacture afterward, because the men will not wait."2
"And when the film leaks," the senior lawyer said. "Film being paper with sprockets."
I told him the truth, which I had on good stock that season. "Everything in this operation leaks. We have all had the year we have had. And when this leaks, what has leaked? A funeral, done right, in two languages. There are worse front pages, counselor. I have written several of them."
Nobody voted; that kind of room doesn't. The flag officer looked at the lawyers until they looked at their notes, and the question went up the ladder and came back down changed in the way I had learned to read, and on the fourth of September, ninety miles southwest of Hawaii, from the deck of the ship that had taken them, the six were buried at sea in a steel chamber, with military honors, with the words said twice through, once in English and once in Russian, in the presence of the crew and of a camera.3 The service had been assembled ashore, both texts, the Russian vetted by a chaplain out of the language school at Monterey; aboard, it was read by one of the mission linguists, a man who had shipped out to translate whatever the claw brought up, and whose whole cargo of work, in the event, was this. I was not aboard. I was never aboard anything again in this life if I could help it, as the reader knows, and this is the one page of the bundle where I set that fact down without any joke attached, because none of the several I have tried in this margin over the years has consented to stand.
The ship came home to Long Beach at the end of September, and I worked her homecoming the way I had worked her christening, which is to say entirely, with both hands, in daylight. Mining relations turned out the trade press and a respectable pier crowd; the company line was a proving voyage, systems validated, commercial recovery in prospect within the decade; and somebody thoughtful in the program had seen to it that there were genuine nodules to show, dredged at genuine expense, and I had a dozen of the ugly things arranged on grey velvet in a display case like the crown jewels of nowhere. A reporter from a metals weekly held one in his palm and asked whether it was true they lay down there in the billions of tons, and I said the resource was real and the engineering was the story of the century, and both of those sentences were true, and he wrote them down. It went off beautifully; it was the best day's work of my cover career; and I did it dockside, in plain sight of the derrick, three weeks after the wake closed, and if the reader wants to know how a man does that, the answer is fluently, and then he catches the evening flight north, and bills the day.
I saw the film in October, in a screening room at El Segundo with folding chairs and a projector that ate the leader twice while a warrant officer rethreaded it and the room studied its shoes. There were nine of us: the flag officer, the doctor, two men from Washington whose names were not offered, the chaplain who had vetted the Russian, Guthrie, myself, and two I never placed. We sorted ourselves onto the chairs with the instinct of ushers, nobody in the front row, and the warrant officer put out the lights from a switch by the door and rode his machine throughout, one hand on the arm of it, the way a good engineer rides a winch. The film ran fourteen minutes.4 I can report, because reporting is what I did instead of whatever the other eight were doing, that the room was over-air-conditioned for October; that a colonel two chairs down had a cough he kept trying to own quietly; that the camera work was steady, the operator having been chosen, I later learned, for exactly that; that the film had sound, which I had not expected, wind mostly, and the two languages arriving small and level through the one speaker; that the light on deck that morning had been the flat pewter light cameramen pray against and this one had managed; and that at the end, when the chamber went from the tilted board into the sea, the film held on the wake for a while, there being nothing else for it to look at, and the projector ticked, and nobody in my row breathed on any schedule I could detect, and the two men from Washington did not look at each other once in fourteen minutes, though they had come in talking like partners at cards. Then the lights came up and we filed out past the warrant officer, and I signed nothing, as always, and Guthrie receipted the reel back into its can, and I said, to nobody in particular, that it was well made and would serve, and I booked the afternoon in my own ledger as a job well done, and that entry stands; I have re-audited it at intervals for twenty-six years and it stands.
We came out in ones and twos, at intervals, the way men leave such rooms, nobody pairing off, each man finding urgent business with his keys, and the afternoon outside was an ordinary California afternoon attending to its ordinary business, glare and gulls and a sprinkler running somewhere on a strip of ivy.
In the parking lot, across the asphalt, a small neat grey man, older now, was standing by a rented car, and as I came out into the sunlight he lifted his hat half an inch and settled it back. Nothing was said. I do not set down what I made of it. I drove to dinner.
The week after, Guthrie appeared at my office door with next year's budget under his arm, bound, tabbed, and receipted to himself, and stood there with something that on a face less mild would have been excitement, and told me it was decided: there was to be a second voyage, next summer's window, for the two-thirds that had gone back down. The engineering was already moving; the claw would be rebuilt stronger; the money, he said, turning to the tab as if I might doubt him, was found.
"Decided by whom?" I asked, and Guthrie said, "It was decided," in the grammar I had learned at Romaine Street, and I understood that the machine had voted itself another year, the way machines do, by continuing to run.
I sat there and let my nose and my arithmetic confer, and for once in their long partnership they returned the same figure independently, which in my experience of instruments means the reading is real. Ten months to the window. A burglary unsolved, an index in Hollywood with the program's name on the fourth line, a town full of lawyers changing sides, and the most interesting ship on earth tied up in Long Beach in plain sight, being interesting.
"The story won't keep ten months," I said. "It won't keep five."
Guthrie logged the estimate, 1114 hours, source: consultant. It is the only prediction of my life that anybody ever wrote down at the moment I made it, and I commend the reader to the next number, where it comes true on schedule, in the newspapers, with my fingerprints nowhere and my life's work everywhere.5
The remains of six crewmen were recovered with the forward section. The radiological condition of the working spaces is as the author gives it, and is the reason the burial was made in a sealed steel chamber prepared aboard. Nothing else was ever done with them, and nothing else had ever been planned. —Ed.
No minute of any meeting of August 1974 preserves the recommendation the author claims, and the decision to film the ceremony is nowhere attributed in the accessible record. The ceremony was filmed. The doctrine he cites as his own, that a disbelieved government should keep evidence of its decency against the day of exposure, appears in his mouth in this manuscript and on the record nowhere. —Ed.
The burial was conducted on 4 September 1974, approximately ninety nautical miles southwest of Hawaii, from the deck of the Hughes Glomar Explorer: the six crewmen in the steel chamber, with full military honors, the service read in English and then in Russian, the ship's company in attendance. —Ed.
The film runs somewhat under a quarter of an hour, as he says. In October 1992, in Moscow, the Director of Central Intelligence, Robert Gates, presented it to President Boris Yeltsin of Russia, for the families. —Ed.
K-129 sailed with ninety-eight men by most accounts; some give ninety-seven. The Soviet government published no roster, acknowledged no loss, and told the families nothing for decades; the dispute over a single man in the count has never been closable, there being no official number to close it against. Six of them came home to the sea on 4 September 1974 with the honors of the navy that took them; the other ninety-one or ninety-two are where they have been since March of 1968. The author, who was not aboard, is not among the voices on the film. —Ed.