Operation Arctic Sting, page 20
“What does the big guy eat?”
“Anything that swims,” I answered. “I suspect it’s mostly pelagic fish, fish swimming around in the water, and probably demersal fish near the bottom. He just opens his mouth while underway and swallows whatever enters.”
“What about sharks, large tuna, and other bigger ones?”
“He prefers those, but when they are not present, I think Borysko is perfectly satisfied with the little guys. Near shore, there are seals, walruses, and even Polar Bear—we’ve seen that.” I grinned. “Food is not a problem. If we ensure he has air, he’ll do just fine.”
Twenty hours later, just as I completed my watch, I slowed to DIW and communicated with Teuthis.
“Teuthis, this is Lyre,” I transmitted over the Secure Gertrude. “I’m pretty sure Borysko has been following us. I’ve been punching through the canopy every forty-five minutes or so when it was too heavy for him to break so he can breathe. I’m about to punch a hole here and then slide over a hundred feet to settle against the canopy for a battery charge.”
“Roger that.” It was Franklin. “Is he here?”
“Don’t know, but the divers will know as soon as they enter the water,” I answered.
“The captain wants a fix, so we’re gonna crack ice, too,” Franklin said.
Forty minutes later, we were side-by-side resting against the ice. The view with my monitors was pitch black until I turned on the lights. A minute or so later, the Basketball appeared following three divers—Harry, Jimmy, and Sergyi. Whitey remained in the Egress Lock tending Harry and Jimmy, who were on umbilicals. Sergyi wore a rebreather and acted as lookout, armed with an APS. The other two carried APSs slung over their backs just in case.
As far away from land as we were, I thought it unlikely that we would be bothered by Polar Bears, but better safe than sorry. I was glad Ham had armed them.
“Wish we were with them,” Wyatt said, draping an arm around Long’s shoulder. “You’re working them to death.”
“It’s what they live for,” I said. “We would have a mutiny on our hands if we kept them out of the water any more than absolutely necessary.” I grinned.
“Really…?” Wyatt said.
“Naw, but they would definitely be an unhappy bunch.”
“Hey! There’s Borysko,” Long said. “Look at that!”
Borysko was rubbing his snout against each diver in turn and then asking for a tongue scratch. To everyone’s total astonishment, he produced a length of 4 x 4.
“You guys gotta know,” I said to the assembled crew in Control, “Borysko has carried that piece of wood with him for several hundred nautical miles.”
Spook had the watch during the battery charge, and over on Teuthis, the XO had relieved Franklin for the last two hours. The divers were wrapping up and spending a bit of playtime with Borysko and his 4 x 4. Frankly, I wished I could join them.
Out of the darkness off our bow and Teuthis’ stern, a very large, dark shape emerged.
“What the fuck is that?” Sergyi yelped as he backed away from a 20-foot-long, 2,000-pound shark that approached him slowly. He brought his APS to bear on the giant.
“Sergyi…NO!” I transmitted through our local comm system for divers on rebreathers. “That’s a Greenland Shark. What you see is as fast as it can swim…just stay away from its mouth. It can create a suction that will draw you right into its gullet.”
My crew crowded around the monitors.
“We dealt with one of these fuckers on our way out here,” Jimmy said, his comment forwarded through our hookup. “He chopped Harry’s fins off right at his toes. Those suckers are hangin’ in Dive Control.”19
Our monitors were filled with the monster’s head, gaping mouth a full four feet top to bottom. It had a double row of smooth, razor-sharp teeth in its upper jaw. They looked like two-inch daggers, the front row pointed slightly outward, the back row slightly inward. The lower jaw seemed a bit disjointed and also held two rows of teeth. Unlike the top row, these teeth each had two cross members, looking so much like little saws.
Borysko kept away from the shark’s mouth, but he didn’t seem intimidated by the giant. Instead, he nudged Sergyi away from the shark and placed his larger body between the predator and Harry and Jimmy, who had moved to the open Egress hatch. Borysko didn’t attack the Greenland Shark at first, but he drove his snout into the shark’s flank several times with enough force to have rocked the Lyre had he struck the sail. It became obvious that he was shoving the monster away from the vicinity of the divers. The Basketball followed the struggle, looking down from above, shining its spots on the shark.
When Borysko had driven the shark to the edge of the volume illuminated by Lyre’s lights, he backed off, clearly preparing to strike again. This time, however, he rammed into the shark with his mouth wide open. His fifty conical teeth, twenty-five upper and lower, tore into the Greenland Shark’s side, ripping a six-foot piece of flesh out of the hapless creature. Blood and guts spewed everywhere.
“Into the Egress hatch…all of you!” I shouted into the rigged comm system. The divers complied with more speed than I thought them capable of.
I turned to my crew in Control, glued to the monitors. “Borysko is one of the good guys,” I said, “but there are blood and guts in the water. He may not be able to control himself. Even a one-Orca feeding frenzy would be extremely dangerous.”
To my surprise, however, instead of going crazy the way we had seen when the Orcas attacked the belugas off Point Barrow, Borysko left his feast and swam to the Egress lock. He peered into the lock with his left eye, then rolled over to use his right. Then he whistled several times and headed to the surface for a breath of fresh air.
A minute later, he was back, clearly trying to coax the divers back into the water. I held my breath, wondering what Ham would do. This was entirely unprecedented. I would match his judgment against mine any day, so I waited.
A minute later, the three divers appeared, still carrying APSs. Harry and Jimmy disconnected the shorepower cable and stowed it. Then all three divers clustered around Borysko’s huge head, rubbing his dome, scratching his tongue, and generally bonding with their six-ton playmate. Had I not actually seen it with my own eyes, I simply would not have believed it.
Spook had the watch for the first hour as we got underway. I was with him in Control.
“Spook,” I said, “before putting it into gear, drop to the bottom to see what Borysko is doing. He still has a two-thousand-pound meal waiting for him down there.”
Spook took us down 168 feet to the bottom. Sure enough, Borysko was feeding leisurely on the Greenland Shark carcass. He looked up at Lyre, gave a squeal, and rose about thirty feet to rub the bottom of our sail. He watched us depart before turning back to his meal.
We would be angling southeastward for twenty-two hours toward Enukso Point, the westernmost extension of Foxe Peninsula near the southern end of Baffin Island that we had circumnavigated before we laid the Carey Øer SOSUS array near the start of this whole venture.20 We intended to recharge our batteries just offshore of Enukso Point.
I modified our routine as during the previous leg so that we stopped every forty-five minutes or so to clear our baffles and punch a hole through the canopy for Borysko. As we neared Baffin Island, the ice became more jumbled—a mix of smaller floes and brash. For the last eight hours of our transit, we could forego punching the holes.
At hour twenty-one, I turned the watch over to Spook, and an hour later, he came left to 104 degrees for our twenty-nautical mile run to a bay just south of Enukso Point. He put us on the bottom in 148 feet of water with light brash overhead on the surface. Borysko showed up just as Harry, Whitey (who had replaced Jimmy), and Sergyi completed hooking us to Teuthis. He seemed to understand to keep away from the shore cable, so the divers concentrated on finishing their task so they could play with him.
We were definitely in Polar Bear territory, but they don’t particularly like brash and would have no reason to swim out to our submerged location. Nevertheless, Sergyi kept his eyes open for an unwanted visitor.
Bert finished the charge and got us underway almost due south on the final forty-nautical mile leg of our transit to Hudson Strait.
THE LYRE—HUDSON STRAIT
Three hours into the leg, Sam took over and passed several nautical miles west of Mill Island, one of three islands guarding the entrance to Hudson Strait—the other two were Nottingham Island and Salisbury Island. Sam passed north of both into the Hudson Strait main channel, aiming for McDonald Island, a God-forsaken, stretched-out island several miles northwest of the strangely named Islands of God’s Mercie. I pitied the guys who determined this was an appropriate name for these rocks.
There were so many hundreds of small islands scattered along the southwestern edge of Baffin Island that I was certain the Soviets had not yet surveyed them all from underwater. The Sozh console indicated many of these islands, but I suspected that they were present courtesy of the Canadian Hydrographic Service—the guys who make the Canadian charts.
When I relieved Potts eight hours later, we were about halfway along the track to McDonald Island. Potts looked a bit pale, almost as if he were a bit seasick—something that does not normally happen on subs.
“You okay, Potts?” I asked him.
“A bit tired, I guess,” he said without his usual enthusiastic nature.
“Try to get some sleep,” I answered. “You got twenty hours before your next watch.”
He grunted and headed below. That’s the last I saw of him for a while. I could hardly blame him. Our routine was about as boring as it gets on submarines. It had been a while since we had done anything but cruise and charge. We were in the middle of our fifteenth day, and the only real distraction recently had been Borysko. I suppose you could add the Greenland Shark, but that did more for the divers than for us in Lyre. We didn’t even have any activity on Okean.
Frisco was guarding our back door, probably lurking south of Nottingham and Salisbury Islands, so Okean could not see her. By now, Swordfish had transited Fury and Hecla Strait and should have been covering Foxe Channel to the northwest. Foxe Peninsula would be shielding her. Drum was out ahead of us, monitoring the entrance to Hudson Bay. Although we had a line-of-sight to Drum, she was 300 nautical miles distant and much too quiet for us to pick her up. Carp was somewhere near Drum—at least that was our presumption. As a Sierra-I, she was a capable submarine but relatively noisy, like Lyre. We couldn’t see her on Okean, but I was confident that Teuthis had identified her.
Bert had the last hour of watch as we arrived at McDonald island for our battery charge. The surface was completely ice-covered, but it wasn’t solid—small to medium floes and brash.
“What do you think?” Bert asked me. “Will Polar Bears be comfortable here?”
“Everything I know,” I answered, “tells me this is ideal bear country.” I pulled out the paper chart so we could see a larger area. “All these islands will keep the ice from moving in any specific direction for very long. It just sloshes around like in a big bathtub. These floes,” I pointed to the under-ice display, “are big enough for the bears. They’ll take to the water to move from floe to floe, and thus from one island or rock to the next. Hudson Bay, to our south, is home to the world’s largest Polar Bear population. The southern end of Baffin Island, where we are right now, takes second place.”
Bert bottomed us in eighty feet of water, and Waverly moved Teuthis alongside. By now, our daily chargings were about as routine as something gets on subs. I don’t mean to minimize what the divers did, their critical role, and the dangers they faced each time. But when you face danger often enough, even danger becomes routine.
Borysko had become another routine part of our daily battery charge. He never seemed to tire of his frolics with the divers. His presence was even more important this time because his being there seemed to keep the big white bears away.
We had two hours of morning twilight and an hour with the sun above the horizon—barely—at the end of our charge operation. We had no bear visitors, perhaps because Borysko took several breaths through the brash right above us. That may have been enough to keep the bears away.
Sam got us underway on a course of 124 degrees at 500 feet to mask our sound from the lurking Carp. We were stretching things a bit on this leg. We would remain on course and depth for 210 nautical miles, just before the shelf that held Akpatok Island. Then we planned to come up to 100 feet for another thirty nautical miles. If necessary, we would bottom for a charge on the shelf at some 200 feet. If possible, we wanted to push our batteries another eight miles past the 240, so we could bottom close-in to the rocky cliffs of Akpatok.
Potts was supposed to relieve Sam, but he couldn’t get out of his bunk. He had a fever and a fast pulse. His stomach was rock-hard.
“What have you been eating?” I asked.
“LRPs,” he said.
“You been mixin’ them like I said?”
“Mostly, except for the last few. We were busy, so I tossed them down and drank some water.”
“Really?” I grabbed his shoulders and said with mock ferocity, “You dumb fuck! That shit has plugged your gut like a bottle stopper.” I shook my head. “Doc’s gonna give you a whole glass of mineral oil to clear that out. Before this is over, you’re going to be shitting your guts out for a couple of days.”
“Sorry, Boss. Just trying to be efficient.” He sounded glum.
“At least, we’re not going to lose you, Potts.” I smiled. “You remain in your rack till we can transfer you to Teuthis.”
“So, I’m off the Lyre crew?”
“Sorry, Potts.”
I took his watch and called Teuthis on the Secure Gertrude.
“Teuthis, this is Lyre.”
“Go ahead, Lyre.” It was Barry.
I briefed him on the situation. “We’ll want to transfer him first thing and get a replacement—someone with Control Room experience,” I said.
I turned the watch over to Bert, who would squeeze the last trons from our batteries to get us to the shallow water off the east shore of Akpatok.
___________
18 See Operation Ice Breaker, the second book in the Mac McDowell Mission Series.
19 See Operation Ice Breaker, the second book in the Mac McDowell Mission Series.
20 See Operation Ice Breaker, the second book in the Mac McDowell Mission Series.
USS Teuthis & Lyre at Akpatok Island in Ungava Bay. USS Teuthis & Mystic placing Transponder-4
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Akpatok Island
THE LYRE—BOTTOMED AT AKPATOK ISLAND
In record time, Bert on Lyre and Waverly on Teuthis placed both subs on the bottom in eighty feet of water just twelve feet apart. The moment both deck officers announced they were stable, Mystic unlatched and lifted off Teuthis. Five minutes later, she made a seal against Lyre. We were standing by below Lyre’s after-hatch. Mystic crew members Senior Chief Abelé and Petty Officer First Class Flanger hauled Potts into the DSRV in a hastily improvised sling. The rest of my crew remained behind to facilitate Pott’s rapid transfer into Dr. Everest’s and Chief Corpsman Gunderson’s capable hands.
The canopy was solid ice except for brash alongshore all around the island—mid-winter in Ungava Bay, subject to forty-foot in-out tidal currents. Borysko joined us for our initial Mystic ops. I’m guessing he followed eastward along the south shore of Baffin Island and then cut south across Hudson Strait, where the ice was beginning to break up as it emptied into the Labrador Sea. While Mystic transported Potts to Teuthis, Borysko paid close attention to the DSRV. It was some fifteen feet longer than he and about the same diameter. He kept his distance but watched closely.
“Maybe he thinks it’s a long-lost girlfriend,” Bert said as we watched Borysko on our monitors.
“He’s way too smart for that,” I said. “He recognizes each diver by their ID letters; he tracks us across hundreds of nautical miles; he guards the divers diligently—he’s way too smart.”
“Too bad,” Sam said. “I’d love to see a killer whale try to fuck a DSRV.”
“Not with you inside,” Spook said with a grin. “Borysko would make short work of the fiberglass fairing.”
Bert added, “The titanium spheres would be unscathed, but the piping and electrical would probably suffer.”
“Whadya think, Mac?” Sam asked. “You’ve driven one of those things.”
“We’d survive and probably be operational—sort of; enough to get back to Teuthis,” I said, wondering what I would do if it really happened with me inside. “Let’s be glad Borysko is as tame as he is.”
The DIA guys watched each of us during our exchange. Then Wyatt said, “You guys are a bunch of crazy fucks…and I’m damn glad you’re on our side.”
“Lyre, this is Teuthis. Doc Everest has Potts. He’s gonna be fine.” That was Waverly, getting ready to turn over to Barry.
“Once he gets past the effects of the mineral oil,” I transmitted back.
“Stand by for dive ops.” That was Barry. “We’ll send Mystic over in fifteen minutes to bring half your crew here for dinner and a douche.”
ON THE SEAFLOOR—AT THE LYRE
While Mystic prepared for her second trip in an hour, the divers showed up outside, much to Borysko’s obvious delight. He bounced around, flipping his tail, popping to the surface for a breath, zooming up and pulling back, so much so that the divers took longer to hook up the shore power cable than they normally did. Ham put his four available divers in the water this time—Harry, Whitey, Jer, and Sergyi, with Jimmy tending. By the time they had hooked up shore power, Mystic was settling back on our hatch.
I sent Bert with the DIA team so he could relieve me on his return, and I kept Matt, the DIA sonar guy, to even us out—and because he played a pretty good chess game. We set things up so they would return in about seventy-five minutes.
