Operation Ice Breaker, page 12
Toward the end of the fourth hour, we were all getting pretty tired, especially the divers. Ski asked to participate in the last two dives. Neither Ham nor I could see any reason why not, so Whitey and Ski changed places. Wally had assumed driving the Basketball. Ski was on the bottom, and Harry was half-way out when Wally half-shouted, “Back in the lock, guys! We’ve got a visitor.”
“What is it?” I asked. “A Greenland Shark?”
“Nope. Look at this.” Wally pointed to the monitor.
There, in all its glory, was a male narwhal, about 17 feet long with a 7-foot tusk. I called the skipper.
“Sir, we’ve got a large male narwhal poking around near the Egress hatch. They can breath-hold for twenty-five minutes, so he’s probably got ten or more minutes left. If you wish to see him, you’ll need to get to a monitor ASAP.
“Sir, Narwhals have never harmed humans, and their tusks are not dangerous. With your permission, I’m going to let the divers exit and place the anchor. It might be interesting how the narwhal reacts to them.”
“Okay, Mac, but be careful. I don’t want to lose a diver because of a miscalculation.”
I turned around and said to Bill, “Put the divers into the water. The narwhal does not use its tusk as a stabbing weapon, but they are innately curious. It will definitely follow them and check out what they’re doing.”
Bill put Harry and Ski in the water, telling them to do their job quickly and return. “Mac says they do not use their tusks to spear prey, but I gotta guess it would hurt like hell if one hit you with its tusk.”
Ski held the anchor, and Harry pounded it. Upon the first blow, the narwhal slid down under the sub and placed its left eye inches from their work. It examined the anchor, and then backed off and touched it with its tusk. While it did so, Ski and Harry returned to the Egress Lock. Immediately after Harry left the water, the narwhal swam right up to the open hatch and examined as much as it could through the relatively small, rigid opening, as seen from its perspective.
“Close the hatch, guys,” I told them. “We gotta move along.”
After we closed the hatch, the narwhal disappeared. To the guys’ questions, I answered, “He’s only got about twenty-five minutes of air, and open water is off to the southeast somewhere. He knows where it is, I’m sure. He’ll be back before we’re done. He’s one genuinely curious critter.”
A half-hour later, as we settled into our final position, the narwhal suddenly appeared, swimming directly toward the Basketball. It seemed to recognize that it was not something to eat, and it was fascinated by the beam of light. Wally maneuvered the Basketball, so the light shined on the bottom beneath the hatch. The narwhal immediately went to the hatch, and when it popped up, the narwhal’s left eye scanned inside the lock.
Harry reached down and gently pushed the narwhal away from the opening, and then he lowered himself into the water. The narwhal moved back slightly and rubbed his tusk along the entire length of Harry’s body.
“He’s sizing you up, Harry,” Ski squeaked. “Maybe he wants to fuck you!”
“…and the narwhal you rode in on,” Harry squeaked in response.
Ski joined Harry, and they pounded the last anchor into the seafloor, watched closely by the narwhal. Wally pulled the Basketball back.
“I’ll be damned,” Chief Davidson said. “There’s another one…without a tusk.”
“That’s a female,” I said. “Looks like he brought his girlfriend, guys,” I said, chuckling.
“I guess he doesn’t want you, after all, Harry,” Bill said. “Too bad. I would have loved to see that!”
I looked at Ham with a smile. “That was historic.”
He grinned back. “Maybe we can tell our great-grandkids about it.”
I got a call from Control. “Meeting in the Wardroom in ten—Lieutenant Commander James, Doctor Brand, Senior Chief Jones, Chief Davidson, Master Chief Comstock, and yourself.”
I informed the people in Dive Control and left for the Wardroom. In addition to the people I already listed, Barry, Senior Chief Forbes, and the XO were present. Barry had laid out a hand-drawn chart on the Wardroom table. The skipper stepped through the door.
“Attention on deck!” the XO said.
“As you were,” the skipper responded. “Frank…”
“What you will hear in the next few minutes is Top Secret—Special Access,” Lt. Cmdr. James stated. “You may not discuss it with any of your subordinates or any of the other officers and crew.” He pulled an extendable pointer from his breast pocket and pointed to a line running a bit north of northwest about five nautical miles from the shorelines of Nordvestø and Fireø. “This is the array we just laid.” He drew a light penciled line from the southern end of the array to the gap between Nordvestø and Fireø, continued it into a small protected channel between Nordvestø and Mellemø, and terminated it slightly inland on the southeastern shore of Nordvestø. Then he placed his pencil tip on the line about a half-mile from shore. “We will lay the cable along this line until we reach the one-hundred-foot-deep-point. Teuthis will penetrate the ice here, creating an open area about a hundred feet wide. I will contact Thule, and they will dispatch a chopper with a Special Ops crew of SOSUS installation specialists. He circled the point lightly. “Teuthis will settle to the bottom here. Divers will anchor the cable firmly here and attach an RTG transponder. Then the sub will release the remainder of the Carey Øer cable.”
“The chopper should be here about a half-hour after they hear from me. The divers will attach a messenger line with a radio transponder buoy to the cable and release it. The chopper will retrieve the messenger line, haul up the cable until most of the slack is taken up, and then will lay it along this line and bring it ashore here.” He pointed to where the light line crossed the Nordvestø shore.
“The Special Ops people already emplaced a small facility here to relay SOSUS signals to Thule,” he pointed to the shore again, “along with the necessary equipment and a microwave tower for line-of-sight coms with Thule. When they are satisfied that they have the cable, that it has no excess slack, and that they have a signal from the array, the chopper will drop an M-80 at our approximate location. This will release us from the Carey Øer ops.” Frank stopped talking and looked around the table. “Any questions?”
Ham spoke up. “Why not have the divers pop the buoy, and then the chopper lowers the hook into the water at the buoy above the anchor spot, and have the divers meet the hook at seventy feet and attach the cable?”
“We don’t know how clear the area above the sub will be,” Frank answered. “If it were clear enough, that would be an option, but we won’t know until the chopper gets there. At that point, coms are difficult.”
“At a hundred feet on the bottom, the divers would know how clear the surface is,” I said. “If it’s sufficiently open, the divers do as Ham said. If not, Ham’s approach is still better than the chopper trying to locate and attach the buoy in heavy ice.”
“That could work,” Ham said. “We just need to make sure the chopper maintains a steady altitude and position.”
“I don’t think that’s a problem unless we’re in the middle of a big storm,” Frank said. “We should be okay for a couple of days.”
“So, what have we decided?” I asked.
“We’ll do it Ham’s way,” Frank said.
The skipper cleared his throat. Everyone turned to look at him. “I want to put a wrapper around this whole thing,” he said. “The Soviets know that we can track them virtually anywhere. They don’t really know how. They know about our SOSUS arrays—at least in principle, but they don’t know how we do it. By trial and error, they have mapped out blind spots in our network. They hide out in the blind spots, and whenever possible, they rush pell-mell from one blind spot to another. It has become increasingly difficult to place arrays to cover all of them.
“That’s what we are doing. We just placed an array that will cover anything coming over the top into the western Atlantic. We’re about to head to Point Hope north of Bering Strait, where we will do the same thing.
“Maintaining the secrecy of this project has the highest priority. Increasingly, the Soviets are coming over the top to maintain their first-strike capability. What we are doing will help keep our families safe for at least a decade…if they don’t learn about it.”
The skipper stood to leave the Wardroom. “Carry on,” he said as he shut the door behind him.
By this time, Barry had assumed the watch, but he turned virtually everything over to his JOOD, the Weapons Officer, Lt. Waverly Denver. Waverly carefully brought the sub to 100 feet above the slope, keeping the outboards extended to lay the cable in as straight a line as possible,
Down in Dive Control, Bart paid out cable under Derrick’s watchful eye through the Basketball. We had about five and a half nautical miles of cable to lay before we reached the anchor point. Chief Electrician William Panner—everybody called him Pots—was Chief-of-the-Watch. He kept tight control of the sub’s buoyancy. As we rose through the water column, the Teuthis’ hull expanded, increasing its buoyancy. Pots slowly bled water into the rear trim tank, not only to compensate for the increased buoyancy, but also to give the sub a slight up-bubble, so we remained level to the slope. Barry kept bare steerageway, moving us forward at about one and a half knots.
About three and a half hours later, Barry turned the sub 90 degrees to starboard, so we were facing generally south across the slope, and gently set the sub on the bottom. Unlike the slope at Hecla and Fury Islands, this slope was gentle.
Ham put Jer and Jake into Unisuits and rebreathers, and pressed them down to a hundred feet in the Entry Lock. That took about five minutes. They locked out under Derrick’s watchful eye. There was a fair amount of ambient light compared to the darkness at 1,000 feet. Nevertheless, Derrick illuminated their work area with the Basketball.
A shadow approached from the southwest. “Hey, Guys, you got a visitor,” Derrick said.
As he spoke, a narwhal tusk and then head filled the monitor. Insofar as they could tell, it was the same one we had seen. Apparently, the bright orange of the Unisuits convinced the narwhal that Jer and Jake were not the same creatures it had dealt with earlier. While they coiled the cable and pounded seven anchors into the firm bottom, the narwhal nosed about, nudging first Jer and then Jake, forcing its 4,000-pound body between them to see what they were doing and stroking the anchors and cable with its tusk. Then it darted to the surface above them, grabbed some air, and returned, this time with the female.
Bart started to push the remainder of the cable through the cable tube, bur Jer stopped him.
“This isn’t going to work,” Jer said. “We’re going to have a crazy rat’s nest here. Can you move the sub several yards downslope and then pay out the cable?”
“There’s a bit of a drop-off about twenty yards downslope,” Jake added.
“We can hang onto the cable at the cable pipe while you move the sub,” Jer added.
I looked at Ham and shook my head.
“Can’t do that,” Ham told them. “Return to the Entry Lock.”
They did, under the watchful eyes of the narwhals. Waverly lifted the sub about five feet and moved it slowly downslope using the outboards.
“Stop!” Derrick said at the edge of the drop-off.
Ham sent the divers back out.
“This’ll work,” Jer said.
As Derrick fed the cable through the tube, Jer and Jake pushed it over the drop-off. The Basketball showed that the cable dropped only a few feet into a spread-out pile. Both the narwhals investigated the pile carefully, the male poking it with his tusk, moving the coils around.
“Is that a problem?” Derrick asked.
“No,” Dr. Brand said. “He’s just checking it out, and the cable is strong.”
Jake picked a point on the cable about 200 feet from the anchor and attached the messenger line using a clove hitch. Then he released the buoy to the surface.
Waverly called Dive Control and relayed his reports directly to the divers. “The chopper acquired the buoy…He’s hovering above the buoy…He’s lowering the hook…”
The hook appeared in the Basketball monitor along with the female narwhal’s nose.
“Got it,” Jer said. He figure-eighted the messenger line around the hook, floating about twenty feet above the slope surface. He pulled back from the marriage and said, “Okay, take her away.”
On the monitor, we saw the messenger line rise to the surface, followed closely by the curious narwhals. Then the cable lifted off the bottom and broke the surface a short time later.
I could imagine but did not see the Special Ops guy in the chopper attach a tension sleeve to the cable. The tension sleeve allowed the cable to slip through the sleeve while maintaining tension on the seaward side of the cable so the chopper could maintain control of how it would be placed in the water.
I recalled the divers. As they entered the Entrance Lock, the male narwhal paid his respects, his left eye scanning around the interior of the lock he had not yet seen. Jake closed the hatch. While Bill continued to monitor the decompression of Harry, Whitey, Ski, and Jimmy, Ham slowly surfaced Jer and Jake, following a decompression schedule we had worked out before we put them into the water. Twenty minutes later, they rejoined us in Dive Control.
Now we waited…and waited. It took the Special Ops guys twice as long as I had anticipated, but finally, three hours later, a sharp CRACK! in the water above us told us we were free to depart.
It was nearly zero-dark-thirty. Doug had assumed the watch. He had Juby reset the SINS, stowed the outboards, lifted Teuthis off the bottom, retracted the skids, set a course of 220 degrees, and dropped to 300 feet at ten knots.
USS TEUTHIS—UNDERWAY OFF CAREY ØER
The entrance to Parry Channel lay 175 nautical miles ahead of us. With baffle clearing, that would take about twenty hours. That meant that Doug, myself, and Bert would have the joy of re-experiencing the tedious boredom part of submarining.
By the end of my watch, I was almost hoping Sonar would detect the Alfa. At least that would give us something to do. Despite the boredom, however, the watchword was vigilance. For one, the Alfa could still appear, although I suspected he probably was hanging out near Bering Strait. Secondly, something could go wrong. We were a big, complex ship running submerged at nine atmospheres of external pressure. A lot could go wrong, so we drilled just like I did back in my boomer days. Each Control Room watchstander had the opportunity to come up with a mechanical failure. He would give us the symptoms, and as a team, we would work our way through to a solution.
What we didn’t know was that one of these drills would come in handy before we got home.
__________
6 See Glossary entry.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Parry Channel
USS TEUTHIS—LANCASTER SOUND
I was in Sonar chatting with King, comparing notes about narwhals, belugas, and bowheads. Benny Simms had the watch.
Sound filled the room—a background hiss, sharp transient cracking, even an occasional whistle. While King and I talked, part of me slipped back in time to my days as a sonar tech on the boomer. I was much younger in those days. Everything was new—a big adventure. Every unfamiliar sound widened my horizons as I sought to master my strange new world. Much of that wonder had remained with me, so that even now every time I awakened, it was to a sense of excitement about what the day would bring.
As I stood in the darkened Sonar Shack, out of the incoherent background noise, a repeating pattern began to emerge. I found myself counting the beats of a large propeller—four-bladed, it sounded like.
“Conn, Sonar,” Benny said, “I have a contact ten degrees off the starboard bow, designate Sierra-ten.”
“Sonar, Conn, what is Sierra-ten?” Waverly asked from Control.
“Wait one, Control.”
In Sonar, Benny concentrated on the sound. What I could hear over the speaker was a set of beats that seemed to split and then synchronize, and I heard a bit of suppressed cavitation.
“Conn, Sonar,” Benny said a minute later, “Sierra-ten is actually two contacts. The first, Sierra-ten, is a tanker low in the water, slightly cavitating four-bladed screw. Sierra-eleven is an icebreaker, apparently breaking ice in front of Sierra-ten.”
“Sonar, Conn, I will locate their track through the ice and come up for a fix. I’ll turn broadside so you can get a range.”
“Sonar, aye.”
We were used to the process by now. Since the icebreaker and her charge were to our starboard, and since we had not crossed their track earlier, Waverly figured that they had entered Parry Channel from the south and were headed to a settlement on one of the northern islands. Rather than changing course, he remained on his present track, believing he would cross theirs shortly.
That’s exactly what happened. When the under-ice sonar indicated clear water with broken ice overhead, Waverly and Barry set about obtaining a good fix without having to penetrate the ice cover.
Either Barry called the skipper, or he came on his own, but Commander Roken was present for the coming shallow and fix taking. When they were finished, and Barry had reset the SINS, the skipper told them to settle beneath the tanker and match speeds.
“Might as well use all the cover we can find,” he said as he departed for his cabin.
Quartermaster 2nd Class Ben Gross, Barry’s Nav watch, was Barry’s junior quartermaster, which was why Barry assigned Ben to his watch.
“What are the possible destinations for that tanker?” Barry asked Ben.
