by Gordon Ryan
On another wall, hung a color photograph of a much younger Robert McHugh in a white shirt with rolled up sleeves standing in front of an ocean going tug. The nameplate on the tug said, R/V Wayward Wind. The young McHugh was smiling. The office was brightly lit and had a view of the busy docks at the Naval Station in Port Hueneme, California.
“I hear tell you have some training in side scan sonar.”
“Yes, Sir. Sir, my master’s research at Stanford was on the effect that thermal inversions have on surface towed arrays. As part of my research, I experimented with narrow beam side scan sonar, Sir.”
“First off, Mr. Liu, stand at ease, you are making me nervous. Second, if you are going to be my assistant, my name is Bob, not Commander McHugh or Sir.”
“Yes Sir.”
“What do they call you - not Aloysius; I hope.”
“Most of my friends call me Mike.”
“O.K., Mike it is. Why don’t you pull up that chair,” said McHugh as he motioned to one of the steel gray metal chairs with green leather seats.
“Mike, about four months ago one of our oceanographic survey flights taking fairly standard background magnetometer readings over the Hatteras Abyssal Plain in the Atlantic Ocean southwest of Bermuda came up with a marked magnetic anomaly. Nothing like we’ve ever seen before.”
“Maybe it is a large iron ore deposit like they have in the Northeastern part of Minnesota. They have been known to cause magnetometers to go crazy.”
“Nope, we’ve thought about that and this one is different. The magnetometer spiked; nothing natural could have caused that. We thought about sending in Alvin, but the depth is too deep for anything but the Trieste; we think the source of the anomaly is over 3000 fathoms.”
“Is the Trieste available?”
The Trieste, a bathysphere, was the deepest diving vessel, manned or unmanned, in the Navy’s inventory. Although the Trieste had plumbed the deepest depths of the ocean in the Marianas Trench, it suffered from one very big problem. It had no propulsion system, whatsoever.
“No.” responded McHugh.
“NAVFAC doesn’t want to commit the Trieste unless we can pinpoint the exact location. The Trieste, after all is little more than an elevator - incapable of any lateral movement. NAVFAC thinks there may be another system that might work better.”
McHugh continued, “I understand that Western Light’s ocean research laboratory in Annapolis has a towed platform with cameras, lights and side scan sonar. NAVFAC thinks that side scan sonar might be able to assist in finding the anomaly.”
“I’m familiar with that system,” said Mike. “Western Light nicknamed it, ‘Nematode,’ after some microscopic marine parasite because the package is so small and has to be towed. Didn’t the Navy use something like the Nematode to find those H-Bombs off of Palmores, Spain?”
“Yes, but not as sophisticated or proved to the depths that we need to go,” responded McHugh. “An old friend of mine, Ted Sevson, is the project manager. I’ll give him a call and tell him to expect you. I’d like you to coordinate the use of the Western Light system. Have you ever been to Annapolis?
“A couple of times,” responded Mike shifting uncomfortably in his seat.
McHugh took notice. His look prompted Mike to continue.
“Annapolis was my girlfriend’s home and I visited there several times while I was at the University of Virginia. Her father was in the Coast Guard.”
“Good, maybe you can drop in to see her.”
“Can’t sir, we are having some problems right now.”
“Oh,” answered McHugh. “Well, you got to keep those problems contained, son.”
“Yes, Sir,” replied Mike as he noticeably flushed. “You won’t have to worry about that.”
“O.K. familiarize yourself with the Orion report, get a billet at the BOQ and let’s talk tomorrow. Welcome aboard.”
“Thank you, Sir.”
1967: Mike
0930 Hours: Wednesday, August 24, 1967: Annapolis, Maryland
“I fall to p-ieces — Each time I see you ah-gain….” sang Patsy Cline on the car radio.
Tuned to the only country western station that came in clearly, Mike hummed along, reminiscing about his college days in Charlottesville, Virginia, as he drove along Route 50 to keep his appointment with Tom Sevson at the Western Light facility in Annapolis, Maryland.
Born in China and brought up in urban Washington, D.C., one would not have thought that Mike would be hooked on country and western music. However, his college years were spent in the piedmont of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Albemarle County, Virginia.
Mike had grown up in Washington during the fifties when the capital was a steamy intersection of international sophistication and deep Southern prejudice. It had been with great trepidation that Mike enrolled in that bastion of southern schools, the University of Virginia, on a NROTC scholarship, but he was destined for a big surprise.
Mike found the University to be a far different place from the dirty, throbbing neighborhoods of non-diplomatic Washington in which he had grown up. Growing up in Washington, D.C. had been painful. Some of the slights had been obvious, like the rednecks that would not let Mike’s family onto Calvert Beach, Maryland, during the Fifties. The confusion of growing up in a white person’s world had left an impression on the young Mike Liu.
It wasn’t right that someone could tell you that you could use this fountain or that, changing their decisions not so much from person to person but from time to time depending on how they felt. Sometimes, the rednecks would say Chinese could use white facilities, other times they could not. In some perverse way, the uncertainty was worse than the clear barriers that blacks had to endure in the same places. Prejudices were delivered personally to Chinese, not impersonally through placards. Racism was arbitrary with Orientals depending on the mood of the next redneck you met.
It pained Mike to remember the sadness in his parents’ eyes when they urged their children to not think about going to the bathroom until they got to the safety of their own house; just to avoid the uncertainty and impulsiveness of white shop owners. Growing up Asian in the fifties and sixties in the United States meant you weren’t included, not by the whites nor the blacks.
But this changed dramatically for Mike from his first days at the University; Mike had been immersed in a culture that his ancestors in China would have never understood. The Grounds of the University of Virginia, as the faculty and students referred to the campus, were perhaps the most beautiful thing that Mike had ever seen when he arrived at the school in the fall of 1962.
A favorite memory of his last days on the Grounds was the signing off of radio stations in the early morning hours - alone in his room on the Lawn, the original student quarters designed by Mr. Jefferson in the early eighteen hundreds and continuously used by students ever since. Mike treasured the memory of the orange glow from the dying embers in his fireplace casting flickering shadows on his walls as he labored under the benevolent dictatorship of Professor Fred Morris, his teacher and friend. The memory was embedded in his mind as was the slow haunting refrain of “Dixie” floating over the air as the radio stations signed off, the drowsy ethereal nature of that tune played as it was meant to be played; not the jangling strident march that had been adopted by the Confederacy during the Civil War and segregationists thereafter. He could never understand how that sweet song could have been turned into such a vehicle of hate.
What Mike treasured most about Charlottesville was a sense of finally belonging. This sense of belonging was important to Mike particularly given the isolation he felt while growing up in segregated Washington, D.C. Mike was fighting his own subconscious war against a society that seemed to give aid and comfort to obnoxious racists, who would use whatever skills they had to put others “in their place.” Here he could be himself, and not the stereotyped Chinese, meant to be placed in a corner and ignored as his father and other Chinese had been before him.
It was an auspicious moment
when he was commissioned an Ensign in the United States Navy following graduation in 1966; a sense of finally arriving. After graduate school, Mike was assigned to the Special Projects Office at the Naval Construction Battalion Center. He considered himself to be downright lucky to have been further assigned to work with Bob McHugh on such an interesting engineering problem. He had heard about Bob McHugh and looked forward to learning a lot about oceanography from this warrior-scientist.
The only hesitation Mike felt as he drove to Annapolis was the nagging questions. What would he do if he accidently saw Corrine?
1967: Found
0800 Hours: Tuesday, October 4, 1967: Aboard the USS Marysville Somewhere Over the Hatteras Abyssal Plain, West of Bermuda
Captain George Vander, U.S.N., put his binoculars down and turned to what seemed to be his thousandth cup of hot black, acrid coffee. The latest link in his chain smoking habit hung from his lips and the bluish smoke lazily reached toward the overhead of the bridge.
“Mister Evans,” Vander called without looking back. Immediately, a thin, bespectacled Lieutenant appeared from the shadows on the bridge of the USS Marysville and joined the Captain.
Frederick Evans, a Ph.D. from Caltech, had already established a reputation for geosciences measurement including his duty on the fateful March 20, 1967, flight of the P-3B Orion. Evans had been seconded to the Marysville especially for this mission to search for and locate the mysterious object.
“Mr. Evans, have you ever seen anything as dang fool as that Nematode contraption?” referring to Western Light’s side scan sonar that had been put on-board the USS Marysville.
Vander was from the old Navy, assigned to push around research barges in the twilight of his career. In his day, oceanography meant Seechi discs, and sounding wires. The most exotic items in his arsenal were things like bucket thermometers and Roberts-type current meters.
Having signed aboard during the waning days of the big one, Vander served aboard almost every class of warship in the Navy except submarines. “I like to sleep with my portholes open,” was his standard reply.
High-tech, space age gizmos were better left to the eggheads like Evans. Vander could drive his boat and put her exactly wherever the scientists wanted her. Despite his rough hewn exterior or, maybe because of it, Vander was an expert mariner.
“Sir - that contraption may look awkward, but it has some of the fanciest electronics any ocean going instrumentation package has ever seen.”
Vander continued staring out over the bow of the Marysville, oblivious to the techno-jargon that Evans was engaged in. Evans, sensing that the Captain’s interest was probably out of boredom, rather than a thirst for knowledge, turned to the ship’s navigator who stood at the map table and started plotting transits that would coincide with his route on the over flight of the Lockheed P-3B Orion many months before.
Finally, the Nematode was ready to be deployed and with a splash, Nematode was committed to the deep.
“Here’s hoping it ain’t Russian,” whispered Sevson to himself.
1600 Hours: Tuesday, October 4, 1967: Aboard the Marysville Over the Hatteras Abyssal Plain
The sound of the sonar systems filled the darkened instrumentation room on-board the U.S.S. Marysville as she maintained a straight heading under the skillful watch of Captain George Vander.
Up on the bridge behind Vander, Evans poured over the charts with Vander’s navigator. Using dividers and rulers to plot their current position, Evans satisfied himself that their course was exactly the same course the Lockheed P-3B Orion had flown months before. The task was not that easy.
Consider trying to remotely tow a car using a cable deployed from an airplane over three miles up and several miles ahead. A rather formidable job that challenged even the time-tried skills of Vander, cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and a steaming cup of hot black coffee in his weathered left hand.
In the instrumentation room, several levels below deck, designed to be at the center of gravity of the vessel, Mike, McHugh, and Sevson crowded behind the Western Light sonar technician. The only moving thing in the tight cabin was the greenish trace on the cathode ray tube as it displayed the line by line return of the side scan sonar.
The only sounds other than the “blips” made by the sonar in the darkened room were the scratchy noises made by the pen registers as they recorded the images now being laid out on the cathode ray tube or CRT. If it weren’t for the soft rolling of the Marysville, there would have been no indication that Mike was even at sea.
The trace on the sonar’s oscilloscope held steady, a faint greenish line followed the brighter green dot that ran left to right across the circular screen. Except for occasional jiggles of the trace, which could be accounted for by changes in the local magnetic background of the ocean bottom, nothing unusual had occurred.
“Any more theories on the magnetic anomaly, Bob?” asked Sevson.
The ever present half smoked cigar dangling from the corner of his mouth, McHugh was absorbed in thought. The stale cigar smoke competed with the sweet smell of “Barking Dog” tobacco emanating from the corn-cob pipe in the corner of Sevson’s mouth. The tinfoil packet from which Sevson constantly refilled his pipe had the subtext, “Barking Dogs Never Bite.”
Absentmindedly, McHugh replied, “Nothing radical, Tom. If it is Russian, then we are in deep trouble. We won’t be able to deploy a sizeable station at that depth for any period of time. Based on the magnetometer readings this thing, whatever it is, is substantial. If your Nematode, or whatever you call it, can help us locate the source of this anomaly, we can get down there with the Trieste for a look.”
“Don’t we have sonar arrays deployed at those depths?”
“No, our SOSUS nets are generally deployed at much shallower depths. No submarines are known to be able to dive to the depth associated with the anomaly. If the Russians have a submarine capable of that depth, they could hide in the submarine canyons off Santa Catalina Island and be within thirty miles of Los Angeles and not be detected by our SOSUS nets.”
“Holy shit!” said Sevson, sinking into a chair. “God, it’s Cuba all over again!”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions, Tom. We have no knowledge that the Russians have that kind of technology. If they did, I think we would have heard by now.”
“Bob, I think you’d better see this,” interrupted Mike, who had been looking over the shoulder of the Western Light technician.
“Commander, we have a reading,” called out the sonar technician. McHugh walked across the small room to stand behind the technician. On the CRT, the greenish lines were definitely displaying something.
The green trace was rising steadily, not in dramatic jumps, but steadily as each trace ran across the face of the oscilloscope, the tension in the instrumentation room grew. Evans and Sevson joined McHugh and Mike. More lines were painted vertically on the screen. Each new line gave a better indication of the shape and size of whatever the side scan sonar saw.
As the object began filling the screen of the CRT, McHugh asked the operator to turn on a backup plotter. McHugh went to the plotters and what he saw was something big, as big as a football field, and oval in cross section. This was not a natural feature like a rock outcropping or fault line.
“Damn!” uttered Frederick Evans.
1800 Hours: Tuesday, October 4, 1967: Aboard the Marysville Over the Hatteras Abyssal Plain
“What do you make of it?” asked McHugh.
“From the sonar record, it appears that the object is quite large, perhaps over a football field long. By triangulation we’re pretty certain that the centroid of this thing, whatever it is, is also the peak of our magnetometer trace within a statistical accuracy of one standard deviation,” replied Sevson. Evans nodded assent.
“You’re not writing a scientific paper, Tom. How about some plain speak for the troops,” chided McHugh.
“What it means is that we found whatever was causing the magnetic anomaly on Evan’s Or
ion flight; it’s just that we don’t know what it is.”
“What if we drop the Trieste on this thing,” asked McHugh.
“You could be here for years. All that the Trieste will be able to see would be an infinitesimal part of whatever is there. In order to get a definitive idea of this object, or whatever it is, we need to have mobility. The explanation of this could be perfectly normal. We could be merely seeing the tip of a massive seamount, magma, or a salt dome.
“It’s just that the regularity of the shape bugs the hell outa me. I’ve never seen anything like it before, just doesn’t make sense, especially given the fact that the benthic topography is so uniform for hundreds of miles around. If the geology of the region were such that we could predict a seamount or a salt dome, then I’d feel better, but it doesn’t.”
“You don’t normally associate a salt dome with anomalous magnetometer readings, do you?” questioned Mike.
“Not normally, and certainly not at the levels we have found here. A magma outflow could explain the magnetometer readings, but the area is not known for volcanic activity. Also, magma flows would never be so regular in shape. It’s almost like someone lobbed a gigantic football onto the ocean floor,” explained Evans.
“We’ve got to get down there and have a look, any suggestions gentlemen?” inquired McHugh.
“We could attach television cameras and strobes to the Nematode, but we would be basically seeing only small portions of the object at one time.” offered Sevson. The combination of darkness and the relatively small field of illumination offered by the Nematode’s on-board lighting would not give much of an overview; just small snatches of the object now depicted on the sonar tape.
“Doesn’t anyone have a free swimmer that could get to those depths?” asked an exasperated McHugh.
Both Sevson and Mike’s face lit up simultaneously.