These seven guys under Ham's leadership were my responsibility for the months ahead. We were a close-knit team. Our individual lives depended on the knowledge, ability, and judgment of each team member. To an outside observer they might have appeared a motley crew, but these guys were hand-picked for the task ahead; they were the best of the best, way smarter than your average bear, and in tip-top physical condition.
Today we started what the Navy calls a "fast cruise." Since we were going to be out for an indeterminate length of time, but certainly longer than a month, we needed to be certain that everything was running as perfectly as humanly possible. For forty-eight hours, we would operate alongside the pier as if we were out to sea. We would operate every piece of equipment onboard, trying to break it before we left, so that when we left, everything would work.
I dropped through the hatch into the Control Room.
CHAPTER SEVEN
In many ways fast cruise is tougher than being out to sea. When you're out, you just do your job, and take in stride what comes along. During fast cruise you deliberately push everything to the limit. If it's going to break, better alongside the pier than 2,000 miles away from nowhere, or on the bottom in the Soviets' back yard.
So we pushed it. Ham and I came up with every angle we could devise, including the one that nearly broke my butt on Elk River — but we simulated it, of course. The guys had been working the system for weeks. Ham and Jack were on "port and starboard" watch (alternating duty days), and had done a virtual fast cruise every night watch since we came aboard. The system was as tight as a virgin's… well, anyway…. Try as hard as we could, during the real fast cruise we couldn't break anything. So we drilled.
And I mean drilled! Sat systems are complex, and because they operate under continuously varying high pressures, things can go wrong in a thousand and one ways. Not too long before, during the experimental workup stage for the Navy's saturation diving program there was an incident.
A bit of background. When you're saturated at any depth inside a DDC, you have to eat, drink, and eliminate. Eating and drinking are not difficult. The outside crew passes food and drink through the medical lock — a small airlock through the chamber hull just big enough to pass medical supplies and a pot of food or a cold drink. Forget that under pressure any food tastes like cardboard — you still have to eat. And then you have to get rid of it.
In smaller chambers you use a bucket and pass it out the lock. But when you have four to six guys living tightly packed in a DDC, the last thing you want to do is spend your time passing shit and pee through the main lock. For long duration dives, it was obvious that we needed a built-in sanitary system. It's pretty simple, really, a lot like an airliner toilet — basically a holding tank with a seat. Actually, it's much more like a submarine toilet. It has a big ball valve between the toilet bowl and the holding tank. Once the tank gets nearly full, you close the ball valve, and open an outside valve in the waste line. Internal gas pressure in the tank blows the waste out. When you're done, you close the outer valve, and then crack open the inner valve slowly so you don't pressurize the entire holding tank in a flash. Because the holding tank is quite small, the gas it uses barely changes the DDC pressure at all.
This differs from a submarine in that the inside of the sub is at one atmosphere and the outside is at ambient pressure — the depth of the submarine. In the DDC, it's the other way around. The inside of the DDC and holding tank is at ambient pressure of the dive, while outside is one atmosphere. So the last stage of the operation in a sub has the holding tank at ambient pressure — high pressure compared to the inside of the sub, whereas in a DDC, the holding tank ends up at one atmosphere, way below the DDC pressure. On a sub this can lead to the situation where a sailor has just completed doing his business into the bowl. Forgetting that the holding tank is pressurized, he leans over the bowl and cracks the ball valve to flush. He is instantly covered with shit and pee as the pressurized gas blasts through his business! It makes a mess, but you can clean it up.
Unfortunately, in a DDC, the equivalent action can turn out disastrously. On one occasion, as I mentioned, a diver had just completed his business, and instead of standing up to flush, he cracked the ball valve while still sitting on the commode. The pressure inside the DDC instantly tried to flush him through the ball valve. What actually happened, of course, was that some of the parts of him that could be sucked through the valve actually were — sucked through, that is. His butt made a seal on the seat, and most of his large intestine was sucked out through his anus before the system could be stabilized. He nearly died, and it almost caused a shut-down of the entire program.
So, like I said, shit (literally) happens, and we were determined to reach a peak of tuned response so we could handle anything Mr. Murphy tried to throw at us.
Since Jack was Ham's understudy, he assumed the role of Saturation Dive Master for most of the drills, while Ham and I threw at them anything and everything we could think of. I even had Ham cross-connect the helium and oxygen valves once, to see how long it would take the team to discover the problem, modify their procedures to accommodate the change, and get the system repaired and back on line. They caught it at once. Not bad, really.
Jack was flushing the empty chamber with four simulated occupants pressurized to 200 feet. This meant he had to keep the pressure constant while adding pure helium, while mixing sufficient oxygen in the stream to maintain the correct percentage of gases. He discovered the oxygen level skyrocketing in about two seconds, and shut down the flush. Then he tweaked in some helium to lower the oxygen percentage. When he saw the oxygen level go even higher, he shut off the valve and grinned at Ham.
"You sonofabitch!" As I mentioned, Jack didn't have much of a sense of humor.
Since a Chief doesn't normally address a Master Chief like that, the whole crew looked up in anticipation. Ham just grinned back.
"That was quick," he said. "Good job."
"So, do I fix it now, or run it cross-connected?"
Ham just shrugged.
"Finish the dive, boys." Jack changed his focus back to the panel. "Stay sharp. We'll fix it after."