The Skipper: "I've got the Conn."
Me: "I've got the dive."
I turned to the BCP. "Close the forward ballast!"
"Sir?"
"Do it… Now, Pots!"
"Aye, Sir."
"All back full, Pots!"
"All back full, Aye." Pots sent the order to Maneuvering.
"Maintain your planes — hold at ten degree up-bubble."
The ship rumbled with the powerful reverse surge. The stern dropped quickly, and as the next swell hit the bow surged up, dropping the stern even more. Skidmore pulled back on his yoke skillfully. The boat settled into a ten degree up-bubble, settling backward into the deep.
"All stop!" I ordered Pots. Then, "Open forward main ballast! All ahead flank! Full dive all planes. Fifteen degree down-bubble."
Almost like magic, the Halibut seemed to pivot down from the stern, the bow dropping rapidly, while the stern remained at depth.
"Down all scopes," the Skipper ordered as he lowered number one to avoid any damage caused by the flank speed.
"Depth one-hundred-fifty feet," I announced in my temporary role as Diving Officer. "Level her out at two-hundred." I looked at the Skipper. He nodded. "I have the deck and the Conn. Lieutenant Barth has the Dive."
As we leveled out at two-hundred feet, we heard a loud roar directly through the hull, and the unmistakable swish, swish, swishing of a giant propeller. The Choja Maru was passing directly overhead. She never saw us. She never knew we were there.
"How close was that, Nav?" I asked the Quartermaster, Senior Chief Gunty.
"A sec," he answered, looking at a manual with photos and specs of various shipping. He glanced at the depth gauge, and scribbled on a scrap of paper. "'Bout sixty feet to spare, El-tee." He grinned at me. "That was pretty slick."
The Skipper laid his hand on my shoulder. "Where did you learn that, Mac?"
"I had the Dive on a boomer just off the northern coast of Russia a while back. We were at two-hundred feet with a big storm overhead. One moment we're at two-hundred feet — the next, we're on the surface. The waves were so big we couldn't get her back under. The Old Man was yelling at me to get him down, but nothing worked. For fifteen minutes we tried all the standard ways, but each big wave just sucked the stern up again. We were literally in sight of land. We had to get down. That's when I asked the Old Man if I could try something. He muttered something about what did we have to lose, and told me to go ahead, but he stayed about six inches behind me, breathing down my neck. My trick worked, and it's pretty much standard now on boomers for submerging, except for the high revs, of course. I only needed them in that big storm, and here… the Choja Maru was pretty close."
A round of cheers filled the Control Room.
"Piece of cake," I said as the Skipper left the Control Room. "Right twenty degrees rudder. Make your course two-seven-zero!"
CHAPTER NINE
Submarining is generally known as endless hours of tedious boredom, interrupted by moments of sheer panic. I don't intend to spend a lot of time telling you about our month-long submerged trip across the Pacific, and I already told you about our moment of sheer panic at the start of this trip.
Suffice it to say that we drilled a lot, both the ship's crew and my guys. Ham was an absolute evil genius when it came to devising ways to confound the dive team. Like the time he flooded the main lock with Jimmy, Whitey, and Ski inside (simulated, of course), cut off their air into the lock and through the umbilicals, told them the flushing valve was clogged, and then set the team to solve the problem somehow.
When the guys went to use the EABs, Ham shut off that air, too. Now remember, we're talking a chamber full of water, and none of the air sources were working. They had two to three minutes to solve the problem while holding their breaths. Within about thirty seconds Whitey grabbed three come-home bottles, passing them around, which gave them a bit of time to work on the rest of the problem — how to get rid of the water. They tried several things, but Ham kept thwarting their efforts. Jimmy started complaining that he had to take a leak, when Ski suddenly came up with a solution — at least the one Ham was aiming for. He had the outside guys open the sanitary tank drain valve, and then opened the ball valve in the commode.
Sure enough, air started bubbling up through the sanitary drain line, draining the water out of the chamber until it reached the top of the commode. Then they solved the rest of the problem. It turned out, Ham had (hypothetically) clogged the main drain valve with a batch of lithium hydroxide that had gotten mixed with silica gel. Lithium hydroxide is the stuff we normally use to absorb carbon dioxide in our breathing systems, and silica gel is what we use to keep things dry in a moist environment. A spill of both got washed into the deck drain where the wet mix produced insoluble lithium silicate glass that penetrated every part of the valve. The ultimate solution was to replace the valve.
Ham told me he got the idea from when he resurfaced his pool deck. The contractor applied a suspended solution of lithium hydroxide and silica gel that soaked into the prepared concrete surface, and then left behind imbedded lithium silicate which polished up beautifully.
Sure it was a stretch, but it got the guys, including me, to thinking.
Everybody knows that submerged nukes are fast. Not so with Halibut, however. She was old, with an outmoded nuke plant, and she had accumulated a lot of miles. Furthermore, we were carrying the fake DSRV welded to the stern. We could do fifteen knots at flank for a while, but we were in danger of losing the fake DSRV. We needed to get to our destination in one piece, so we limped along at ten knots or even slower.
The great circle distance from San Francisco to the tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula is just short of 3,400 nautical miles. This means that if we put pedal to the metal and hauled ass directly to the narrow channel separating Shumshu Island from the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula — ten knots all the way, do not pass Go — it would take us a minimum of fourteen days and change, if everything worked, nothing broke, and nothing went wrong.
Fat chance!
Our route took us just south of the Aleutians. While that may look like a remote part of the world, it lies on a direct path from both Los Angeles and San Francisco and even Seattle to Tokyo. So there is a constant stream of large and not-so-large ships moving in virtual lock-step along the entire route. The three westward paths merge just south of the Aleutians, although some of the shipping passes through the Aleutian Chain into the Bering Sea before crossing back south on its final leg. Did I mention that it's two-way traffic?
To complicate things further, fishing and crabbing fleets from Southeast Alaska swarm up into the Bering Sea, so that at any time — if you are a regular surface ship — you might have between five and fifteen radar contacts to keep track of.
It's different on a submarine, of course. Normally, subs don't deploy any radar, and since subs are supposed to be stealthy, they use sonar only for listening. That's what Sonar Techs do — what I used to do way back in my enlisted days, and the way it was done on this patrol in the early 1970s. So imagine two listening consoles set up at the front of a darkened room, each manned by a Sonar Tech wearing a padded headset. Each has a six-inch hand wheel that drives a pointer around a scale marked off in degrees. Each Sonar Tech is assigned one of the compass halves. A tech moves his pointer slowly from the bow to the stern on his side, covering 180 degrees, listening carefully for any sound over the all-pervasive background murmur of a living ocean. Each identified sound is designated as contact alpha-one, two, three, etc., and the next day bravo, the next, charlie, and so on, and Control is notified of the designation, its bearing, and the direction it is drifting (left or right). The tech uses a grease pencil to mark the bearing of the target directly on his dial, and Control marks a large clear plastic display. As the target bearings move down the side, the tech keeps track of them, reporting them to Control from time to time. As a target moves across the bow or stern, the tech passes it to the other tech.