Operation Ice Breaker, page 26
An Upward Excursion Limits Table in the Navy Diving Manual lists the excursion limits for any saturation depth.
USS Teuthis (SSNR 2) Organizational Chart
EXCERPT FROM OPERATION IVY BELLS
by
Robert G. Williscroft
CHAPTER ONE
At 1,000 feet depth off Point Loma
I hung motionless in the frigid water a few yards from the spherical Personnel Transfer Capsule a thousand feet below the surface. It was pitch black, except for two beams of light emanating from the PTC that terminated in white circles on the sandy bottom a hundred feet below. In the crystal clear water there was virtually no diffusion. I felt motion beside me and turned to see a flood of bubbles rising from Harry’s plunge through the PTC hatch.
We each had a hundred feet of umbilical snaking back into the PTC, where Bill, the third member of our party, kept the slack out of our umbilicals and stood by to help in the event of an emergency. I put a finger in front of my mask indicating silence. Harry gave me a thumbs-up. We started drifting downward, not paying any attention to our depth. After all, we were saturated to a thousand feet; down was good.
“Red Diver, what are you doing?” Master Chief Ray Harmon was having a conniption topside. As the Sat Dive Unit’s Master Saturation Diver, he was running the dive under Lieutenant George Franklin, the Officer-in-Charge.
“Checking something out, Control, just checking something out.” I increased my descent and Harry followed suit. I could hear my distorted voice in my earphones.
“Red Diver!” It was the Master Chief again.
“Red Diver, aye.” I needed to delay him for just another twenty seconds.
“Return to one-thousand feet NOW!” He was pissed.
“Say again, Control, say again.” I needed just another ten seconds.
“Lieutenant McDowell, get your ass back to the PTC…NOW!” Oops, that was Franklin, and he was really pissed.
“Roger that.” I scooped a handful of sand and stuffed it in my leg pocket and looked up at the PTC. It appeared as a lighted jewel against velvet black. Our activities near the bottom had stirred up some detritus, and the water around us sparkled with light flickering off tiny silt particles – an alien, fairytale world.
I gave Harry two thumbs-up, and we slowly ascended, our umbilicals snaking above us, live serpents in the frigid water. Inside the PTC, Bill recoiled the umbilicals to take up the slack. It took us less than two minutes to get back to a thousand feet; our total excursion had lasted no more than four minutes. I pointed to the expanded metal work bin attached to the outside of the PTC. Harry pulled out the make-work project for this training dive, and we started screwing screws and turning bolts.
And that’s when it happened!
My first impression was a flashing shadow through one of the light beams, a flicker just below my threshold of awareness – something big and fast.
“What the fuck was that?” Harry squeaked, his voice distorted by helium and electronic descrambling.
“Green Diver, report!” That was the Master Chief.
“Jeezus…” Harry dropped down three feet and grabbed my left fin. I felt him trying to pull me toward him, toward the hatch. “Mac…the hatch!” Harry’s desperation came right through his squeak. Then he jerked and let go. “Kee…rist!”
“Red Diver…what’s going on down there?” That was Franklin.
Off to my right, a green phosphorescent shape flicked into and out of existence. A pink one materialized to my left. Suddenly, from right in front of me, something bright blue hit my faceplate with the force of a sledgehammer.
Everything went black. I don’t mean I passed out…everything went black, literally. I reached up and discovered a really large thing covering my entire helmet. It was smooth and spongy, and it was undulating. I heard a scraping, grinding noise against my faceplate. Something wrapped itself around my left arm, jerking my hand away from the pulsing mass. I pulled my arm back and felt a rush of cold water enter my suit at the wrist. A tear…whatever it was had torn a goddamn hole in my suit! What the hell can tear a hole through compressed, nylon-reinforced neoprene? That shit’ll stop a knife!
That’s when I noticed that I still held a ten-pound steel wrench in my right hand. You don’t move things fast underwater, but I put as much force into my haymaker as possible. The wrench sunk into the mass attached to my helmet, and in a flash, it was gone. I could see again. Several feet ahead of me I could make out two elongated hooded shapes arrayed vertically in the water, pulsing green to pink to blue. Large, almost human eyes as big as my hands gazed at me.
“Control, Red Diver…we got some kind of company… three or four giant squid, I think…” I looked down at Harry, backed up warily against the PTC just below me, dive knife glinting in his hand. I could see a big tear in the left shoulder of his hot-water suit. “Harry…you okay?”
“Yeah…what the fuck! Squid? You’re shittin’ me!” He waved his knife. “One of those fuckers took a chunk outa my suit!”
“You or just the suit?” I asked.
“Just the suit…I think. No blood in the water.”
“Mac…” It was Franklin. “You guys get back into the PTC ASAP!”
“Working on it, Control…” One of the creatures hit the top of my helmet hard. Tentacles draped down the entire length of my body. I could distinctly feel razor-sharp sucker teeth dig into my suit. “Harry,” I yelled, sounding like a compressed Donald Duck through the helium and electronics, “get this fucker off me!”
I felt Harry come up between me and the PTC and repeatedly stab the creature’s carapace. With that, my personal squid apparently had second thoughts, as it unwrapped itself and disappeared. The other two with their changing color patterns continued to hang about ten feet away, large unblinking eyes evaluating me. It seemed as if they were communicating by color and pattern. Suddenly, the right one went dark, dropped its tentacles straight down, and began to undulate. Two thin, suckerless tentacles danced around the creature in a meaningless pattern. I transferred the wrench to my left hand and pulled my knife from its sheath on my right leg. Then, in a blinding white flash, the eight-foot squid whipped to horizontal and propelled itself tentacles first directly at my chest. As it approached, its tentacles rolled back, forming an eight-legged basket filled with a thousand sucker teeth. In the center, I could see a mouth as large as my helmet surrounded by a ring of razor teeth reflecting the squid’s phosphorescent pulses.
I jammed the wrench as hard as I could directly into the gaping maw and left it there. I grabbed an upper tentacle with my left hand and sliced. It was like cutting tough leather. I sawed frantically while the squid grabbed at my hand and knife with two other tentacles while keeping a grip on me with the rest. After what seemed like an hour, but actually was less than a minute, I held the detached writhing tentacle in my left hand. I tossed it away, still squirming like a snake. With the tentacle out of the way, I could see the large, human-like eye, fully six inches across staring at me malevolently. I plunged my knife into the orb – once, twice, a third time. That did it! The two thin tentacles whipped around frantically, and the giant disappeared into the darkness along with its pulsating companion.
“Harry, where are you?” I was concentrating on the water in front of me, preparing for another attack.
“Right below you, Mac. Let’s get the fuck outa here!”
A very long minute later I followed Harry through the hatch opening, and Bill pulled me all the way in.
“Everyone down there okay?” That was Franklin again.
“Control…PTC,” Bill responded, “divers are back inside. Everyone seems to be okay.”
Just then, the smooth water surface in the circular opening began to boil.
“Shee…it!” Bill shouted, as two thick tentacles darted through the surface and began whipping around the PTC interior. “Fucker’s trying to get in the PTC!” Bill’s distorted voice in my earphones matched his lip movements. His face registered not so much panic as total shock.
“Or pull us out,” Harry added.
Bill and Harry grabbed their knives, slashing into the writhing appendages. I reached over the opening and grasped the hatch in both hands, pushing for all I was worth. I looked down into the six-inch eye of the invading monster as I swung the hatch down. I sensed intelligence driven by pure malevolence. The last thing I saw before I dogged the hatch was a half-sliced-through tapered tentacle tip, as it slipped back into the frigid water around us.
Harry removed his helmet and gave Bill a gloved high-five. From across the dogged hatch, I gave them both two thumbs-up and pulled off my own helmet and gloves. Then I grabbed a Ziploc baggie from my personal kit to fill it with my trophy sand, but when I felt my leg pocket for the sand, it was gone. Chalk up another one to the monsters.
“Control…this is Mac.” I was sure they could hear the relief in my distorted voice. “To hell with the rest of this dive. Just bring us home!”
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DEDICATION
To “Kate,” who inspired me.
Acknowledgments
Several people contributed to the creation of this book.
Most significantly, my wonderful wife, Jill, whom I first met when I returned from a year at the South Pole conducting atmospheric research, and who finally consented to marry me nearly thirty years later, pored over each chapter with her discerning engineer’s eye. She kept my timeline honest and made sure that regular readers could understand fully the arcane details of nuclear submarine and saturation diving operations.
Ed Offley, who wrote the Foreword, applied his lifetime of experience writing about the Navy to edit this story.
USA Today bestselling technothriller author Dave Edlund and technothriller author and diving scientist John Clarke reviewed the manuscript from their unique perspectives, providing helpful input.
Professor John B. Rosenman, recently retired from Norfolk State University and former Chairman of the Board of the Horror Writers Association, reviewed the manuscript, and provided several thoughtful suggestions.
Hard science fiction author Alastair Mayer reviewed the manuscript and offered his scientific, engineering, and editorial insight, and military writer and former submarine commander George Franklin supplied his unique insight.
Others have contributed with their comments and observations, and I thank them. You know who you are.
It goes without saying that any remaining omissions, errors, and mistakes fall directly on my shoulders.
Robert G. Williscroft, PhD
Centennial, Colorado
September 2020
Foreword
By
Ed Offley
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
– William Faulkner
In writing Operation Ice Breaker, the latest in his series featuring veteran U.S. Navy diver J.R. “Mac” McDowell, author Robert G. Williscroft on surface presents a fictional tale of Cold War submarine espionage from nearly a half-century ago. By itself, this gripping account of the Top Secret mission of the USS Teuthis (SSNR-2) into the frozen waters of the Canadian archipelago and its encounter with a Soviet Alfa-class nuclear attack submarine, offers the reader a compelling sea story that—while fictional—presents a detailed, fascinating narrative of life at sea on a nuclear submarine, and the heart-stopping actions of deep-sea Navy divers at work deep below on the seabed.
But it is much more than that.
A veteran of both the Submarine Service and the U.S. Navy’s deep submergence systems program (translation: underwater espionage), Williscroft presents the reader a you-are-there account of the men, equipment and precise tactics that have been employed by the navy for more than six decades in some of the most daring and risky operations against Cold War adversaries like the Soviet Union, and potential foes in the unstable era that followed the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Since 1965, the U.S. Navy has operated four nuclear submarines dedicated to deploying deep-sea divers on these dangerous missions. To many Americans, the names USS Halibut (SSN-587), USS Seawolf (SSN-575), USS Parche (SSN-683), and USS Jimmy Carter (SSN-23), may mean little or nothing. To veteran sailors—and especially submariners past and present—they represent the true tip of the navy’s sword.
The U.S. Navy quite understandably has remained tight-lipped about this particular chapter of its long history at sea. But a telling revalation came in the year 2000 when two prominent non-submariners attended a veterans’ reunion of the Parche in Bremerton, Washington. Former CIA Director (and future Secretary of Defense) Robert Gates, and world-famous techno-thriller novelist Tom Clancy praised the submariners for their unheralded success. Clancy was effusive, saying, “The point of the (U.S. Navy’s) lance killed the (Soviet) dragon … and you were the point of the lance.” Gates echoed his companion, praising the veterans for all their efforts, where “every mission (was) a life-and-death mission…. I know who you are, and I know what you did, and I am honored to be here with you tonight.”
As the world struggles with a global pandemic and resulting economic distress at the mid-point of 2020, other tides are running: The revitalized Russian Navy is operating with renewed aggressiveness throughout the world, even as its American counterpart continues to build and deploy modern Virginia-class attack submarines to keep the military balance. Frequent news reports tell of American submarines operating in the ever-dangerous waters of the South China Sea claimed by China as territorial waters.
The details may be different, but the basic elements of Operation Ice Breaker present more than a glimpse into the past; they also provide a realistic look into the present, and future, Great Game being played out at sea by American submariners.
Ed Offley is author of Scorpion Down: Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon – the Untold Story of the USS Scorpion, and several books about the Battle of the Atlantic, most recently The Burning Shore: How Hitler’s U-boats Brought World War II to America.
Cast of Characters
Test Operations Group (TOG)
Lt. Cmdr. J.R. McDowell (Mac)—Officer-in-Charge (OIC) TOG (Narrator)
Master Chief Hamilton Comstock (Ham)—Master Saturation Diver—Came from Experimental Diving Unit and Man-in-the-Sea Program—Served with Ivy Bells
Chief William Fisher (Bill)—Master Saturation Diver—Sonar Tech— Served with Ivy Bells
Petty Officer 1st Class Harry Blackwell—Saturation Diver; qualified Dive Console operator—Electronics Tech— Served with Ivy Bells
Petty Officer 1st Class James Tanner (Jimmy)—Saturation Diver; qualified Dive Console operator—Battlefield medic turned saturation diver— Served with Ivy Bells
Petty Officer 2nd Class Melvin Ford (Whitey)—Saturation Diver; qualified Dive Console operator—Quartermaster— Served with Ivy Bells
Petty Officer 2nd Class Wlodek Cslauski (Ski)—Saturation Diver; qualified Dive Console operator—Submariner (Engineman) turned saturation diver—Served with Ivy Bells
Petty Officer 2nd Class Jeremy Romain (Jer)—Saturation Diver; qualified Dive Console operator—Submariner (Auxiliaryman) turned saturation diver—Served with Ivy Bells
Petty Officer 2nd Class Jacob Palmer (Jake)—Saturation Diver; qualified Dive Console Operator—Submariner (Electronics Tech) turned saturation diver; Recent graduate of saturation dive class
USS Teuthis (See Organizational Chart)
USS Teuthis Medical
Dr. Janus Everest
Unnamed Corpsman
USS Teuthis Deck Gang
Seaman Joe Spanker (Spanky)—
Topside Watch, Lookout / Helmsman / Planesman
Seaman Fred Jackson (Jack)—
Topside Watch, Lookout / Helmsman / Planesman
Seaman Jake Boller—
Topside Watch, Lookout / Helmsman / Planesman
Seaman Jeremiah Walker (Jerry)—
Topside Watch, Lookout / Helmsman / Planesman
Seaman Todd Bennett—
Topside Watch, Lookout / Helmsman / Planesman
Seaman Steve Decker—
Topside Watch, Lookout / Helmsman / Planesman
Seaman Josh Raker—
Topside Watch, Lookout / Helmsman / Planesman
Seaman Julius Hoppenstein (Hoppy)—
Topside Watch, Lookout / Helmsman / Planesman
Seaman Fritz Able—
Topside Watch, Lookout / Planesman
Seaman Greg Patterson—
Topside Watch, Lookout / Planesman
Seaman Billy-Bob Yokum—
Topside Watch, Lookout / Planesman
Seaman Randolph Zimmerman (Zimm)—
Topside Watch, Lookout / Planesman
DIA Team
Wyatt Cook—Senior DIA Alfa specialist—In charge of DIA team
Matthias Hart—DIA Soviet sonar specialist
Gilbert Edwards—DIA Soviet submarine reactor specialist
Kendrick Long—DIA Soviet submarine hull specialist
Sergyi Andreev—Soviet defector; saturation diver
Submarine Development Group One (SubDevGruOne)
Captain Dan Richardson—Commander, Submarine Development Group One
Mystic (DSRV 2)
Lt. Robert Taggert—Chief Pilot
Lt. James Deckhart—Second Pilot
Senior Chief Sonar Tech Gaspard Abelé—Mystic technician
