The thing that puzzled Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt at the southern tip of Vancouver Island — the listening post for the U.S. and Canadian SOSUS network — was that the undersea hydrophone should have picked up a sub that had attacked a Canadian coastal steamer, the MV Jervis. The steamer, alerted by her shipboard lookout, had actually seen the wave of the torpedo that had struck her and failed to explode — a standard Soviet 530-millimeter-long fish of the type that had decimated the NATO convoys. What worried Esquimalt was that the SOSUS hydrophones should have heard the enemy sub much earlier. No matter how silent a nuclear sub was, its reactor wasn’t noise-proof, and the reactor couldn’t be shut down because it would take hours to “cook up”—suicidal for an operational sub as it would give ASW forces ample time to reach the area and pound it with ASROCs and depth charges. Besides, without the sub’s prop going, it would not have been able to stalk the ships it attacked.
It continued to be a mystery until the CNO’s office in Washington, on advice from COMSUBAT — Commander Submarines Atlantic — in Norfolk, Virginia, informed Esquimalt and Bangor, Washington State, Trident and Sea Wolf Base eighty miles to the south of Esquimalt that the reason a Russian sub had got so close to them was that the Russian navy yards at Leningrad and elsewhere must have improved even further on quietening their props after the gigantic advantage given them by the Walker spy ring and by Toshiba’s sale in the 1980s of state-of-the-art prop technology to the Russians.
Either that, said Norfolk, or the SOSUS listening network of hydrophones on the sea floor had been cut or, more likely, “neutered” by synthesized noise “override,” producing fake yet natural-sounding sea noise that would be interpreted by the SOSUS’s monitoring teams at Esquimalt and Bangor as phytoplankton scatter, or, as the sonar operators called it, “fish fry.”
In any event, it was decided that deep-diving submersibles out of Vancouver should be used to inspect the network in the area of the attack. But if they were wrong about fish fry, Norfolk warned, it would mean that the United States had suddenly become vulnerable to close-in ICBM sub attack— America could be blindsided.
There was no malfunction in the SOSUS, however — the “sonograms” called up on the computer showed that like a seismograph picking up the slightest tremor, SOSUS had had no difficulty picking up the sound of the dud Soviet torpedo hitting the steamer, which had been well within the supposed impenetrable Anti-Submarine Warfare Zone. Something was wrong.