Operation Ice Breaker, page 9
Barry assumed the watch from Bert, dove to 300 feet, and set a course of 218 degrees at fifteen knots. Roughly every hour at randomized intervals, he slowed to five knots and conducted several radical course and depth changes that finally brought us back on track and depth while Sonar thoroughly checked our baffles.
Ahead of us lay fifteen hours of the same. During Barry’s six hours, Sonar detected the Alfa behind us three times, apparently following as far back as possible without losing us. On one of his baffle clears, he took the Alfa’s range with the BQQ-2 sonar. The Soviet boat was fifty nautical miles behind us, which gave us a good idea of his passive sonar range.
Doug picked the Alfa up two times for sure, and maybe a third, but he didn’t get a range. Sonar thought the Alfa might have dropped back a bit. We were in the cold, south-flowing Labrador Current by this time, which may have affected sonar range.
After a great breakfast of eggs over-easy, hashbrowns, and bacon—we still had fresh eggs—but they probably wouldn’t last much longer either—Cedric’s fresh buns, and two cups of very passable coffee, I came on watch at 0545. I brought a third cup of coffee with me and stepped to the chart table. We had three more hours of the same ahead of us. Despite the routine, there was always the possibility of finding the Alfa behind us when we cleared our baffles—a step from boring toward very exciting.
Finally, the three hours came and went without incident. It was now time to head into Lancaster Sound. First things first, however; we needed a good fix. Al informed me that we actually had two available Transit birds. I called the skipper on the sound-powered phone.
“We’re getting ready to take a sat fix through the ice,” I told him. Shortly thereafter, he came to Control and took his chair on the periscope stand.
“Helmsman,” I ordered, “come right to new course two-seven-zero, make turns for five knots.” Then I checked the under-ice sonar. We had eighteen inches of solid ice above us with a smooth underside. “All stop,” I ordered, and then I addressed Tubes. “Diving Officer, rig the fairwater planes for ice penetration.”
With our momentum from our earlier fifteen-knot speed, we still had some forward motion. “Back one third,” I ordered, watching my indicators. “All stop.”
We were DIW—dead-in-the-water—at 300 feet.
“Chief-of-the-Watch,” I said to Senior Chief Sam Dokey, “bring us up slowly. I want to come to rest with the top of the sail resting against the ice cover.”
Dokey got us there in about ten minutes.
“Okay, guys,” I said, “this is a bit tricky. I want to drop down five feet and then give us enough upward momentum to crack the ice without pushing the sail through.” I turned to Dokey. “Prepare to hover, Sam.”
The skipper picked up the 1MC mike. “This is the captain. We are about to break through the ice cover. You will hear a lot of noise, and things may shake a bit, but Teuthis is built to do this. Even though we will sound the collision alarm, we will not be in any danger.” He nodded at me.
“Chief-of-the-Watch, sound the collision alarm and crack the ice.”
The collision alarm sounds like a police siren but at a higher pitch and a faster rate. Because it is also used for flooding, it sends shivers down the spine of every submariner, me included—even though I knew exactly what was happening.
We hit the ice rather gently—five feet is not enough to generate much momentum—accompanied by a little bounce and the sounds of cracking and scraping.
“Take her down a couple of feet, Senior Chief,” I said, and eased the attack scope up. I broke through clear water and swung around quickly. “Nothing but ice all around. The sail pushed several chunks of ice onto the ice sheet. We have a few feet of clear water above us. You can raise your scope, Captain.” Without removing my eye from the scope, I said, “Chief-of-the-Watch, commence hovering at sixty-four feet.”
I turned to Senior Chief Quartermaster Forbes. “Okay, Al, you can get your fix.”
He went aft to the Nav Center. Both the skipper and I pointed our scopes toward the stern. The nav mast cleared the surface, remained there for about a minute, and disappeared.
“I got the fix,” Al reported.
“That was quick,” I said.
“Yeah…with two birds…”
I acknowledged and said, “Sam, maintain the hover, but drop down to one hundred feet.” And then, “Sonar, report the Alfa.”
“We got him on our track, Conn.”
“I’m giving you a quiet hover at a hundred feet, Sonar. Get me your best range.”
A few minutes later, Sonar reported, “We got the Alfa at twenty-five miles. No way he can hear us right now, so he’s just chugging down our track.”
I glanced at the skipper, and he nodded. “Let’s give Ivan some breadcrumbs he can follow,” the skipper said as he left for his cabin.
I had about two hours left on my watch. I dropped to 300 feet and headed due west at fifteen knots. I cleared baffles every hour or so as we had been doing, and each time, Sonar detected the Alfa in what I was beginning to call hot pursuit.
Bert’s and Barry’s watches went the same way. We were leaving a bright trail, and the Alfa was gobbling every crumb.
Just before Doug’s watch, the skipper assembled the watch officers and nav watchstanders in the wardroom. He laid out a chart on the table of the entire Canadian archipelago. He pointed his finger. “We’re here.” He moved his finger around Baffin Island along the path he had earlier outlined. “This is the path we intend to take.” Then he moved his finger from our present position westward through Viscount Melville Sound and southward to the Bering Strait. “This is where we want the Alfa to think we are going, and here is how we will do that.”
Immediately upon assuming the watch, Doug went to 200 feet at flank speed—that’s about thirty-one knots. We sprinted forward, totally blind, of course, but it would take the Alfa more than an hour to figure out that we were sprinting ahead. His logical assumption would be that we were sprinting toward the Bering Strait—precisely what we wanted him to conclude.
Doug kept it up for seventy-five minutes without clearing baffles. Then he changed course ten degrees to the right for another fifteen minutes. This placed Teuthis twelve nautical miles directly north of Prince Leopold Island. Prince Leopold is 3.5 miles across. Its southern end is just five miles north of Cape Clarence on the northeastern tip of Somerset Island.
I woke up from a dream about the red-headed Cheyenne gal I had met on my way to Groton as the Chief-of-the-Watch announced, “Rig ship for ultra-quiet.”
I checked the time: 0400.
Almost immediately, the soft whisper of circulating air vanished, the turbine hum disappeared, and the general submarine background noise—people, dishes, equipment, music—all stopped. You could have heard a pencil drop a hundred feet away. My curiosity got the better of me. I climbed out of my upper bunk, slipped on my blue jumpsuit and steel-toed, crepe-soled shoes, and left my shared stateroom, silently shutting the door behind me.
The sub was rigged for red. It was silent as a tomb. I quietly walked aft past the Radio Room on my right and the Sonar Shack on my left. Although red-lit Control displayed no white light, I could see everything clearly with my dark-adapted eyes. The only sounds were a quiet murmur from the 400-Hertz synchros in the attack center and soft hissing from hydraulic valves controlling bow and stern planes and rudder.
Key people wore sound-powered headsets. When they spoke into the large, rubber-cupped mikes, it was in a quiet whisper.
“Come left to new course one-eight-five,” Doug whispered. “Make your depth one-five-zero feet. Make steerageway turns—adjust turns to maintain bare steerageway.”
I made my way back to the Engine Room. The engineers had shut down the turbine and its relatively noisy reduction gear and were driving the shaft at minimum turns directly with the much quieter electric motor. They had cut back reactor power to a minimum, so the primary and secondary coolant pumps were running at the lowest possible speed. Even though everything in the engineering spaces was fully sound mounted, the noise intensity now was dramatically lower.
I stopped in Maneuvering, where I found Chief Machinist Robert Daley. Whispering, I asked, “How long can we run like this?”
“Long as we want. If we seriously deplete the battery, we can bring the reactor up a bit to top it off or even run a zero-float” (meaning replacing battery power as it was being consumed). I hung around for a few minutes and then returned to Control.
Since I had the next watch, I grabbed some chow and returned to Control to relieve Doug early. I was up, so it made no sense for me not to assume the watch.
I headed slightly east of south for four hours. When the bottom reached 500 feet below the keel several miles west of and a mile or so south of Prince Leopold Island, I walked over to the chart table. I pointed to the hundred-meter curve.
“Al, I want to follow this curve around Cape Clarence to here.” I pointed to a spot about two miles off Cape Clarence, where the depth dropped to 900 feet.
“Left full rudder,” I ordered. “Come to new course one-four-three. Make your depth one-two-five feet. Continue to adjust turns for bare steerageway.”
Two and a half hours later, the bottom dropped off to 980 feet. I called the skipper. “We’re ready to turn south, Sir.”
The skipper joined me in Control. “Take her down to five hundred feet and ten knots,” he told me. “When you run out of nine hundred feet, come up to four hundred feet, and follow the track.”
I dropped the sub to 500 feet, set a course of 220 degrees, and turned the watch over to Bert and his crew—still at ultra-quiet. Then I dropped down to see Ham. We had some divers to press down to 500 feet and some preps to make.
HECLA & FURY ISLANDS—ON THE OCEAN BOTTOM
Twenty-four hours later, we had traveled 232 nautical miles south, passing through Prince Regent Inlet into the Gulf of Boothia. For the entire track, we were under ice from two to four feet thick, and we remained at ultra-quiet. The Alfa’s chances of detecting us were somewhere between zero and nothing. We had lured him into believing we had continued west through Parry Channel into Barrow Strait on our way to the Bering Strait. At some point, we knew he would figure out that we had hornswoggled him. His first thought would probably be that we had turned south into McClintock Channel or Peel Sound, depending on how far west he got before figuring things out, since both those routes led to the Bering Strait.
The Alfa was faster than we were, although we didn’t learn this until later. Also, he didn’t care if we detected him since his job seemed to be to disrupt whatever we were up to. I suspect he dashed south into both passages looking for us. Then, depending on the Alfa skipper’s mindset, he would either race to the Chukchi Sea off Point Barrow to intersect us there or return to investigate Prince Regent Inlet. If he chose the Chukchi Sea, he would eventually have to conclude he was wrong about our destination. That left Prince Regent Inlet, so one way or the other, eventually, the Alfa would investigate Prince Regent and Boothia. What we couldn’t know was how he would do this. He had the option of following our route from the north or passing south of Somerset Island through Bellot Strait from Peel Sound.
By then, we hoped to be long gone, doing our job up at the Careys. If he passed through Bellot Strait, as I thought he might, the long gone would be a lot shorter. Nevertheless, when he didn’t find us, he would figure that we had either headed around Baffin Island to the south or north, and head back to where he had first found us. We wanted to avoid that at all costs, so we needed to delay him in the Bay of Boothia as long as possible.
That’s where my dive team entered the picture.
In 1821, William Edward Parry took the HMS Fury and her sister ship, the HMS Hecla, northwest through Foxe Basin north of Hudson Bay, looking for a northwest passage. He was stopped by an eight-nautical-mile-long narrow ice-filled stretch of ocean that came to be named the Labrador Narrows. On his next expedition in 1825, he penetrated the ice following the same path we took down through Prince Regent Inlet to the Bay of Boothia and the entrance to the sixty-three-nautical-mile-long straits that led to the other side of the Labrador Narrows. He named them the Fury and Hecla Straits. Unable to transverse the straits because of heavy ice, on his way back, Parry passed a small group of islands about ninety-five nautical miles almost due west of the straits that rise nearly straight up from a 550-foot-deep basin. He named them the Hecla and Fury Islands. Unfortunately, the HMS Fury never made it home. She became icebound about ninety-five nautical miles north just off the coast of Somerset Island, where Parry was forced to abandon her and take the crew aboard his ship for the return to England.
The Pentagon people behind our operation had put a lot of thought into the details. One of the requirements was a power source for the two arrays we would be placing. Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs) had been used for a long time, had been tested in space and underwater applications, were entirely safe, and were small and light—about the size of a large thermos flask. And perhaps the most important, they lasted for decades. We carried several onboard.
At the skipper’s direction, Lt. Cmdr. Franklin James had his people construct a small sonar ping transponder powered by one of the RTGs. The transponder produced a ping at the same frequency as our active sonar. At random intervals, it would go active for several pings. Both the interval and the number of pings were randomized. Furthermore, when it received a ping from an outside source, it would choose one of a dozen different response options, and returned pings that gave the ping source tracking information for a nonexistent target. Its responses could only show a target closing or opening on a specific bearing, but the differing tracks would serve to confuse the ping source—in our case, the Alfa.
We intended to place the transponder on the bottom at the north face of the largest of the Hecla and Fury Islands. The skipper figured, and I agreed with him, that this would confuse the Alfa for several days as it tried to determine precisely with what it was dealing.
The bottom line was that the transponder gave us a day or more beyond what we gained by our subterfuge, enough to let us depart the Carey Islands after laying the array and get underway for Point Barrow.
At least, that was the plan.
The XO took my watch while I worked with Ham and Bill to get the divers ready for their excursion on the bottom at the base of one of the main Hecla and Fury Islands. We really had no idea what things would be like down there. Sounding data were virtually nonexistent, except for two vessel paths that could very well have come from something under sail back in the nineteenth century. That would have been with lead lines. Taking lead-line soundings at 500 feet or more is tedious and not exactly accurate, especially in partial ice cover.
Bert assumed the watch as we approached our destination. He made several passes by the east side of the largest island, each a bit closer than the last. When Nav estimated that we were no more than a quarter mile from the island, Bert found the bottom starting to angle up. It was a 33-degree slope near the bottom that changed to 70 or 80 degrees, where the landmass rose from the water.
Bert brought Teuthis as close as possible to the upslope and set her on the bottom with something close to an even keel. That’s some submarining!
I arrived in Dive Control to find Lt. Cmdr. Frank James already there with Dr. Brand and Senior Chief Jones huddled with Ham and Bill. They were poring over a bottom contour chart of the largest of the Hecla and Fury Islands. Penciled in on the chart were the soundings Bert had taken earlier. I joined them, crowding the table a bit. Dr. Brand was explaining his reasoning to the others.
“We have four distinct islands on the chart.” Brand pointed at a spot to the southwest between the large island and the small one at the southern end. “This appears to be a shelf of some kind. Too shallow for our purpose.” He slid his finger through the middle island to a spot at the northern end. “The whole thing is about four nautical miles long.” He traced along the eastern side. “We want the transponder to be heard, but not obvious-in-your-face heard. The steepest slope seems to be here.” He pointed to the easternmost extension of the largest island. “We should do a careful fish scan between us and the steep rise to find the best location for the transponder.”
“Exactly my thought,” a voice behind me said.
I turned to see Commander Roken grinning at us.
“Sorry, Skipper, I didn’t hear you come in.”
“You gents were pretty focused.” He turned to Frank. “Get a really good bottom survey between us and the slope. I want to be as close to the slope as possible, so Mac’s divers can remain closer to Teuthis. I’m not anticipating anything, but I really don’t want a repeat of Hudson Canyon.”
Frank had his Fish team assemble in Dive Control. Chief Ocean Tech Francis Oberst set up a schedule with Wally Dubbs taking the first set and Derrick Jensen the second. Oberst supervised in the background with Senior Chief Jones, whom we called Spook, relieving him as necessary. This was Frank’s operation, so I paid close attention but stayed out of it.
If there is anything more boring than a submarine transit, it’s taking a series of sidescan sonar passes over mostly featureless seafloor. About six hours later, during which the engineering half of the crew took a well-deserved rest, Frank called me to Dive Control.
He had replaced the charts on the table with taped together sidescan printouts. It took a moment for my eyes to integrate the squiggles on the printouts, and then it came into focus. Then it was like I was looking through a window that changed everything to greyscale.
“What’s our flight altitude?” I asked.
“Twenty-five feet.”
The bottom was nearly featureless except for several yard-long oval lumps scattered here and there. Near the wall, a sandy slope rose about thirty to forty feet. Then rock took over, jagged and steep, heading straight up for about 450 feet to the surface.
