Several uniformed sailors were out and about. One saluted as he stepped into the narrow street to pass me.
"G'morning, Sir!"
I saluted back, and watched him hurry up the street. The warm summer sun glistened off his white trousers and short-sleeved white shirt. He was medium sized, but well built, and he walked with a swagger. Over his left shirt pocket, he sported several ribbons, and above them a silver First-class Divers Pin. He turned toward the building labeled: Submarine Development Group One — Headquarters.
My destination.
I followed him up the broad entrance stairway through the door and paused to let my eyes adjust. He stepped around a desk, passed through a swinging gate in a light oak railing, and flashed his ID to an armed Marine guarding an ordinary looking door in the opposite wall. The Marine punched a code in an unobtrusive keypad mounted to the wall beside the door.
A soft click, and the door swung inward, revealing an office with several desks and a hallway leading back into the building. The sailor stepped through the door, and it swung closed behind him. He obviously was part of the operation behind that door. The Marine resumed his parade-rest stance before the door.
"May I help you, Sir?"
The Yeoman Second Class looked up at me from his desk as the door closed. I removed my sunglasses and handed him my orders.
"Oh, Lieutenant McDowell. We've been expecting you."
I handed him the envelope containing my records. I had just completed forty-eight weeks of deep sea diver training, and was reporting for duty at the U.S. Navy Saturation Diving School.
It was a dream come true. As a boy growing up in Germany, I had thrilled at exploits of the deep-diving bathyscaphe Trieste and its successor in plumbing the deepest depths of the world's oceans. The names Alvin and Sea Cliff were as familiar to me as the Starship USS Enterprise (yeah, I was a Trekkie, of sorts). And I practically lived in Sealab with Alan Shepard.
So here I was, ex-Sonar Tech, ex-sub sailor, just another surface puke — but I was about to join the ranks of the elite corps of saturation divers. This was heady stuff.
The class work was easy, not so much because I was smart, but because I had covered this material one way or the other either in the previous year in diving school, or while getting my degree in marine physics. My classmates were all enlisted types, but one hell of a group of sharp guys. Without a degree in anything, most of them had no trouble at all keeping up with me.
We spent most mornings in class and most afternoons either working out, gaining hands-on experience with the Mark 2 Mod 0 Deep Diving System on the venerable support vessel USS Elk River moored next to the submarine piers, or both.
We had to learn the diving system inside and out; every valve, switch, pipe, and wire. It's not particularly difficult to do, but it does take time. The system consists of a thirty-foot-long pressure chamber called the Deck Decompression Chamber or DDC that contains a lock for entrance and egress, a small lock for passing in food or medical supplies, four bunks, lavatory facilities, and emergency equipment. The Personnel Transfer Capsule or PTC mates to the DDC and can transfer a maximum of four divers to the underwater working site. The umbilical that supports the PTC and supplies communications and power is called the SPCC — Strength-Power-Communications Cable.
I said the guys were able to keep up with me in the classroom work. I should have also noted that I barely kept up with them in physical training. Where did these guys come from? I thought I was in good shape — after all, I had just completed forty-eight weeks of some of the most difficult physical training I had ever undertaken. These guys didn't break a sweat after three miles running with full gear. They got my attention.
Training lasted twelve weeks. I ate, slept, dreamed, talked, thought Mark 2. By the tenth week I had that system nailed. And that's when it — the system, not the giant squid — nearly nailed me.
We were out on a local practice site, about eleven-hundred feet deep, basically a hole in the ocean bottom a couple of miles off Point Loma. The idea was that we would anchor over this hole, cinched into a four-point moor. For you landlubbers, you anchor four large buoys to the corners of a rectangle, roughly centered over your spot — in our case the hole. Then you cinch your vessel to each of the buoys, and loosen and tighten the lines until you are directly over the hole. Anyway, we would saturate to one-thousand feet and then lower down near the bottom for some real time experience.
Okay — more details for you non-divers. Even if you're reading this in the International Space Station, the air you're breathing is about twenty-one percent oxygen and seventy-nine percent nitrogen. As you dive, your equipment supplies you with compressed air that matches the pressure of your surroundings, and this increases by about one atmosphere's worth every thirty-three feet. So at a thousand feet, air enters your lungs at about thirty atmospheres or 450 pounds per square inch or psi, as we call it.
It turns out that normal air becomes toxic under too much pressure, because oxygen itself starts becoming toxic when you breathe in more than about twice the amount you would get breathing pure oxygen at the surface. This happens at about two-hundred feet. The other problem is that nitrogen becomes narcotic at about the same depth. This can be a pretty lethal combination: you're breathing potentially poisonous gas and are so narced you don't know what to do about it.
We solved this problem by reducing the total amount of oxygen in the breathing gas mix so that the actual amount is about the equivalent of the twenty-one percent we breathe on the surface, and we replaced the nitrogen with helium. This made us sound funny, but we didn't get narced.
Now back to you non-diver, non-space station types. Sitting there, your body is saturated with all the nitrogen it can hold. Your cells, bones, everything, have all the nitrogen possible. If you dive to say thirty-three feet (one atmosphere, remember), and stay there long enough, you will become saturated at thirty-three feet. If you stay at a hundred feet, five-hundred feet, same thing — stay long enough, and you saturate; you can't take up any more nitrogen, or helium if you are diving deeper than about one-hundred-twenty feet.
Now here's the kicker. If you are saturated to thirty-three feet you can come right to the surface without suffering any consequences. But, if you saturate at forty feet, you cannot come shallower than about seven feet without suffering the bends, when dissolved gases in your body come out of solution to form bubbles; and let me tell you, you don't want the bends. They hurt like hell, and they can kill you! Point is, you can tolerate a one atmosphere difference between your higher body saturation level and the ambient pressure. No more — just one atmosphere, thirty-three feet.
Anyway, the ship was in the moor over the hole, and five of us were in lockdown inside the Mark 2 DDC, pressurizing to one-thousand feet. It took several hours, but we finally "arrived." At this depth, even though we were still inside the DDC, we could only communicate with each other by using a descrambler. You talk into a throat mike, a computer lowers the frequency and does other cool things, and you and everyone else hears you through earplugs. Frankly, we were so tired and our muscles and bones ached so much that we just went to sleep. To hell with talking.
Reveille came early. Since this was the first time for any of us, we were pretty excited. Rank has its privilege, so Harry and Bill, the two senior non-coms, and I climbed into our hot-water suits while we munched on breakfast bars.