Excerpt from Blind Man's Bluff by Sherry Sontag, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Three days passed, and Austin had still collected only a few Soviet voice transmissions. Benitez decided to make one more nighttime pass to give Austin a chance to find more. Austin would have been willing to sit for weeks. He was itching to nab the grail, to record some Soviet missile telemetry.

It was on this last evening that something began to come through. It didn't sound like a launch, but Austin had also been told to look out for equipment tests. Maybe that's what was going on. Maybe the Russians were tuning up their gear, getting ready for a show. He asked Benitez to order a turn, to try to position Cochino for a clearer signal. Even after that, Austin was still not sure what he was hearing, or even whether it was coming from land or from sea. This wasn't voice, that much he knew.

For a moment the frequencies seemed about right for a weapons test. But there wasn't nearly enough coming through--in fact, not anywhere near the wash of sound that would have signaled the telemetry from a missile test. Intelligence officials back home might have imagined that the Soviets were engaged in endless launchings, readying to take their missiles to sea. But if that were the case, the Soviets had taken a break just as Cochino came near. Austin's spy mission was a failure, at least so far. He was scheduled to get another try later, but for now, Cochino was going back to her initial mission. She was going to play hide-and-seek with Tusk so the two subs could learn like any young predators how to become hunters and killers.

From Blind Man's Bluff : The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage, by Sherry Sontag; Christopher Drew; Annette L. Drew. © 1997 by Sherry Sontag; Christopher Drew; Annette L. Drew. Used by permission.