Operation Ice Breaker, page 16
Jake returned a couple of minutes later with a four-foot piece of wood.
“Run it through the Entrance Lock,” I told him.
About three minutes later, the 2x4 appeared through the Egress hatch.
“Push it toward the beluga,” I said.
As the wood moved forward and up, the whale chased it, grabbed it in his mouth, and actually brought it down to Ski.
“I’ll be golldamned!” Ski said as he shoved it away again, but harder.
While the beluga retrieved the wood, Ski pounded the anchor into the bottom.
“Okay, guys, we got work to do,” Ham said. “Return to the lock.”
Like the narwhal off Carey Øer, the beluga followed the divers to the hatch and then tried to get a look at what was beyond that bright circle of light.
Seth called King, who arranged for the Basketball view to appear on monitors throughout Teuthis, so the crew could enjoy the antics of the beluga.
Seth moved Teuthis for the first five anchors while Whitey and Ski, accompanied by their beluga friend, set them into the seabed. Four times during the course of this activity, the beluga disappeared for several minutes, apparently to get a gulp of air. On his last return, four other belugas joined him, jousting with each other for the 2x4 after Ski pushed it toward them. When they came down near the divers, they were gentle as tame dolphins.
When Barry and Waverly assumed the watch, Ham switched Harry and Jimmy for Whitey and Ski. Someone had located another 2x4. For the next two hours, the crew continued to be entertained by the divers and their aquatic friends.
Finally, Harry and Jimmy were crouched around the last hydrophone, preparing to set several anchors close together to prevent the array from being pulled up by the shore cable. Three belugas were watching intently when, suddenly, a large black and white creature swept into view, smashing viciously into the side of one of the belugas, tearing a huge chunk of flesh from its flank. The beluga whipped away wildly, trailing massive amounts of blood.
“Divers…Into the hatch immediately!” I barked. “Now!”
In five seconds, both Harry and Jimmy were safe inside the Egress Lock. Wally swam the Basketball down to the hatch, and Ski pulled it inside the lock.
“What the fuck…” Harry said.
“Yeah…what the fuck,” Jimmy echoed.
“That was an Orca,” I told them. “Up here, Orcas feed on narwhals and beluga, and even bowhead.”
“And divers?” Jimmy ventured.
“Not normally, but this one was in a feeding frenzy. These guys never travel alone, so his buds were nearby. They would not deliberately attack you, but if you are in the midst of a pod of beluga with blood everywhere…what do you think?”
“We didn’t set all of the last set of anchors,” Harry said. “Will it be safe to go out to set the rest?”
“Actually, yes,” I said. “We’ll give them fifteen minutes. They all will need air, and the belugas will be long gone. The dead one will be floating at the surface under the ice, so that’s where the Orcas will be.”
Twenty minutes later, Ski dropped the Basketball through the hatch. As soon as Wally got it stabilized with a good picture, Harry dropped into the water. As he did, an Orca with an oversize dolphin head slipped under Teuthis and nudged him.
“Shit!” Harry yelped. “He’s gonna eat me!”
Harry backed up, stuck his head through the hatch, and the other three guys pulled him into the lock. As they looked down through the hatch, the Orca’s bill appeared. It was on its side and stopped to peer into the hatch. Then it rolled over to peer with its other eye. Its curiosity was apparent. It wiggled around for a bit until it was on its back. Then it rolled forward and stuck as much of its head through the hatch as possible. Its eyes moved in their sockets as it took in the four divers. It opened its bill about three inches and uttered a loud, piercing squeal followed by a three-second-long chitter. Then it dropped back into the water and vanished.
I gave them five minutes to pull themselves together and then sent Harry and Jimmy back out to finish their job.
USS TEUTHIS—WEST OF POINT HOPE
The next part of the operation was routine but tedious. We would lay the armored cable along the bottom, anchoring it every quarter mile for forty-five nautical miles until the sub could no longer operate submerged. From there, our divers would bring a messenger line to the beach.
In Control, Barry and Waverly handled the first four hours running on the outboards, keeping the skids extended. Ham divided the divers across the time so that everyone had a chance to brave another Orca encounter, but none occurred.
Twelve hours later, during my watch, Zeb set Teuthis to a hover at periscope depth while the XO assumed the Deck so I could be in Dive Control for this final, crucial operation.
Seth, Sparks, and the skipper recorded and encoded a brief message that gave the location and approximate time the divers would surface. When they completed the message, Sparks compressed it into burst message format. Then he raised the antenna and sent the message. The transmitter was active for less than a second. A few minutes later, Sparks sent the burst message again, and then once more twenty minutes later.
ON THE SEAFLOOR—ONE MILE WEST OF POINT HOPE
Jer and Jake entered the water nine-tenths of a nautical mile from shore and a hundred feet below the thin ice crusting the surface. They wore bright orange Unisuits and rebreathers and Kirby-Morgan helmets with limited range underwater sound communication. Their first task was to fake out a mile of cable across the seafloor in hundred-foot loops.
The pair temporarily anchored the bitter end to the seafloor a hundred feet from the cable pipe.
“Okay, Bart,” Jer said, “start feeding out the cable.”
Under the watchful eye of the Basketball, Jer pulled a loop of cable forward a hundred feet to the right of the bitter end. Then, as Jake pushed cable toward him, Jer laid a neat, hundred-foot length of cable against the previous fake, moving toward the cable-pipe until sixty-one loops lay nicely faked on the seafloor.
“Got it, Bart. Stop feeding cable,” Jer said.
Jake returned to the hatch, where Ski handed him a reel of strong messenger line. He swam out to Jer, followed closely by the Basketball.
“How’s your knot-tying?” Jake asked.
“This cable ain’t heavy,” Jer said, “but they’ll be pulling a mile of it. We better do it right, or this whole exercise will be wasted.”
I jumped into the conversation. “How about a double sheet bend?”
“A sheet what?” Jake asked.
“I know what it is,” Jer said. “Watch me. If I do it wrong, you can ’splain it to me.”
Wally moved the Basketball close.
“Okay, that’s fine, but finish it with a couple of half hitches around the cable.”
“Like this?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“Okay, Boss. We’re ready to swim.”
“You’re swimming by compass. You got your variation set right?” I asked.
“Checked it with the gyrocompass.”
“Okay, but you were inside the sub. Our heading is zero-eight-seven-point-zero-three. Line yourselves up with the sub about a hundred yards ahead of us and make sure your variation is correct.”
“You got it, Boss.”
“I don’t want you swimming toward Bering Strait.”
Jer took the lead using proper compass swimming procedure. It was obvious he had done this before and was comfortable doing it. Jake followed with the messenger line reel.
Wally ran out of Basketball tether 200 feet beyond the sub’s bow. I watched Jer and Jake disappear into the underwater gloom, moving at a comfortable pace. I calculated that they would reach shore in about twenty minutes. Their instructions were to hand off the messenger line and wait until the shore guys they met had retrieved the cable. I figured another twenty minutes for that, then another twenty minutes for their return to Teuthis. An hour, give or take.
Fifty-four minutes later, the Basketball began to pick up a faint shadow ahead. Gradually, the divers’ images emerged from the darkness.
“Dive party, this is Dive Control, comm check, over.” I wasn’t exactly impatient, but I wanted to get the status as soon as possible.
“Dive Control, this is Jer and Jake. Mission accomplished. We’ll be home in a couple.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Hole
USS TEUTHIS—TRANSIT TOWARD POINT BARROW
Our work was done—at least we thought it was. Because the Alfa was somewhere north of us, Commander Roken decided to head north toward Point Barrow. Once there, we would make sufficient noise so the Alfa would pick us up, and then we would let him follow us south through the Bering Strait, down through the Aleutians, and across the north Pacific to San Francisco.
Bert let Seth do most of the driving. Even though the water wasn’t very deep, by sticking to the path we used coming south, we were able to do a stealthy eight knots northward with safety. Point Barrow lay some 270 nautical miles ahead of us. That would involve thirty-three hours of transit time plus eight hours of baffle clearing. From our point of view, the only thing of interest anywhere in our vicinity was the Alfa, and it lay ahead of us to the north. To be fair, we had no idea about what else might be lurking in the waters around us. To the south, the Kamchatka Peninsula harbored the Soviet’s largest submarine base, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy. To the northwest lay the entire northern coast of the Soviet Union. The ice cover and shallow water helped us remain undetected, but they also limited our ability to detect anything at long range.
Zeb and I had the watch as we slipped silently into the waters off Point Barrow. Submarine crews are always in a quiet mindset, but since leaving Point Barrow earlier, the crew had been in an enhanced quiet mode just short of ultra-quiet. This had put a damper on normal operations, but it had been necessary to prevent the Alfa from detecting us.
And at that moment, we had no idea where it was.
USS TEUTHIS—OFF POINT BARROW
As Zeb hovered a hundred feet over the bottom near the edge of a 500-foot-deep hole eight nautical miles northwest of Point Barrow, King called me by sound-powered phone.
“The Alfa is nearby,” his voice whispered in my ear.
Without waiting to inform the skipper, I sent the word throughout the sub by sound-powered phone to set condition ultra-quiet. The engineers secured the turbine and generators and shifted to the battery. Others shut down the fans and blowers throughout the sub. Everyone who was not actively engaged in watchstanding or another critical activity went to bed.
In Control, a soft 400-Hertz tone from the Attack Center synchros permeated the air, accompanied by an occasional quiet hiss from the hydraulic system as the planesmen shifted planes or rudder. The only other sound was the nearly silent shifting of water into or out of ballast tanks to keep Teuthis at depth. Sam Dokey, my Chief-of-the-Watch, had trimmed the sub with such skill that very little water shifting was necessary.
“Conn, Sonar, the Alfa is within several hundred yards. I hear mechanical noises and shouting, but the turbine is not running, and their screw is not turning. They definitely have a problem, Sir.”
The skipper went into Sonar for several minutes and then joined us in Control. He examined the chart briefly and then said, “Zeb, ease the outboards out, slowly and quietly.” He walked back to the chart table. “Move very slowly to here,” he pointed to a spot on the seafloor near the southern edge of the 500-foot hole. “While transiting, drop slowly so that you settle on the bottom here.” He tapped his finger on the same spot.
Zeb lowered the outboards and skids. Pumps kept the hydraulic pressure up, but the engineers had slowed them down to minimize their noise output. As Teuthis slowly sank to the bottom, the only perceptible sound was the quiet creaking of the sub itself as the hull compressed from the increasing external pressure. In the stillness of ultra-quiet, it sounded deafening.
USS TEUTHIS—BOTTOMED 8 NAUTICAL MILES NW OF POINT BARROW
Over the sound-powered phones, King asked, “Conn, Sonar, can we reset our axis, so we have a broadside view to the northeast?”
“Are we still at neutral buoyancy, Sam?” I asked.
“Yes, Sir.”
“Zeb,” I said, “Work with Sam to point us at three-one-five. Then set it down and have Sam make the sub heavy, so we won’t shift on the bottom.”
Zeb and Sam completed the operation in virtual silence. I could not imagine anyone hearing us through the ice noise along the Point Barrow coast and the general noise of a moving ocean covered with ice plates surrounding us in all directions.
I donned a sound-powered headset to make communications with Sonar easier. King whispered in my ears again, “Conn, Sonar, the Alfa is above us and off our starboard. I don’t speak Russian, but I can hear words, and I hear angry shouts…”
“Hold one, Sonar,” I said.
I turned to the skipper. “King says he can hear people speaking Russian, but he doesn’t understand Russian. I do, Sir. Would you take the Deck so I can spend a few minutes in Sonar?”
“I have the Deck,” the skipper announced quietly. “Go ahead, Mac.”
King handed me a headset as I entered Sonar. I donned it, and I heard in Russian, “…shaft misaligned…damned prototype…sound-mount shifted…keep the reactor hot…” Then I heard a shrill alarm that was cut off almost immediately, followed by, “reactor scram, reactor scram…oh shit, oh shit…keep it hot…reinsert the rods…omygod…omygod…keep it hot…Emergency Blow…Emergency Blow,” followed by the sound of rushing air for a few seconds, followed by five minutes of silence.
King interrupted me. “She bounced off the undersurface of the ice, and now she’s headed for the bottom, Sir.” King paused for a minute, listening. Then he said, “She’s on the bottom, about a hundred yards away.”
I held up a finger as I heard more Russian: “Abandon ship…ready the pod…all hands…goddamned stupid engineers…” From that point, the talk was drowned out by noise from within the Alfa. A couple of minutes later, I heard loud mechanical cranking and a very loud hiss followed, after a few seconds, by a distinct thump and cracking sound. Then nothing except background noise from the ice.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Sting
USS TEUTHIS—BOTTOMED 8 NAUTICAL MILES NW OF POINT BARROW
“So, what do we have?” the skipper asked me when I returned to Control from Sonar.
“I can only give you my best guess, Sir.”
“That’s all I can ask for.”
“King says this is the same Alfa that’s been dogging us all along—the K-316. I think he followed us into the Prince of Wales Strait and bumped into the ice wall that we crawled under. This damaged his sonar and started a chain of events in his powertrain that resulted in a driveshaft misalignment and displacement of some kind of mount. Somehow, all this scrammed his reactor. I kept hearing the phrase, “keep the reactor hot.” The unresolved scram seems to have been a reason to emergency surface. Apparently, that attempt was uncontrolled, and he didn’t make it through the ice.”
“I’ve heard,” the skipper said, “that the Soviets have been playing around with different reactor cooling systems. Know anything about that?”
“No, Sir. Nothing.” Then I added, “One more thing, Sir. I’ve read some intelligence that they have been testing escape pods that will carry an entire crew. An Alfa crew is small—twenty or so. I think they installed a pod on their Alfas. I thought I heard them abandon ship…into a pod of some kind. I’ve read that they have installed escape pods on their new subs. That works for an Alfa, but I don’t see it for one of their missile boats. I’m pretty sure a pod left the sub, but I don’t think it penetrated the ice.”
“It sounds like we have a small crew of enemy submariners stranded in a pod that is trapped beneath the ice. Unless we do something, they’re going to die.” He sighed. “Have Seth meet me in Radio.”
I sent the messenger to locate Seth. He found him in the Wardroom studying his quals.
ON THE SEAFLOOR—8 NAUTICAL MILES NW OF POINT BARROW
“We have a unique opportunity here,” the skipper told me. “Let’s put your divers out and have them examine the outside of the Alfa. They can sever any comm link with the pod. Maybe we can find a way to get inside her, figure out what she’s all about.”
It was near the end of our watch. Bert showed up early so I could initiate the dive. Ham met me in Dive Control.
“I want two divers on long umbilicals to locate and investigate the Alfa,” I told him. “We’ll play it by ear from there.”
“Probably should use our most experienced divers for this,” Ham said, “Harry and Whitey. Let’s hold Jimmy back for possible medical complications.”
“He’ll be disappointed.”
“How long do you think we will be here?”
“Long enough. So much depends on what we find,” I said. “Let’s get them ready.”
Two hours later, Harry and Whitey entered the water, got their bearings, and commenced swimming toward the Alfa. Derrick accompanied them with the Basketball, running out ahead of them looking for the bottomed sub. King had determined that it was close aboard, a hundred yards or so.
After a few minutes, the murky outline of the Alfa’s silhouette appeared on my monitor. The skipper showed up in Dive Control.
“How long are their umbilicals?” he asked.
“Five hundred feet, Sir,” Ham answered.
“We got her!” Harry squeaked, helium and pressure distorting his voice even after descrambling.
The Basketball swooped down to the divers’ location. Whitey checked his umbilical, pointed to a marker, and said, “She’s about four hundred seventy-five feet away.”
“Twenty feet shallower than Teuthis,” Harry added.
The Basketball showed her starboard side pointed about fifteen degrees away from us.
“First thing,” I told them, “check the entire perimeter. I want to make sure she’s stable.”
