We still had the webbing we had used to bring back the missile nosecone parts, and would use that rig to hold the larger pod tightly against our keel during the transit.
I knew my guys were itching to find out how they would move the pod from the sub to the cable. I was prepared to ask the right questions, but Jenkins addressed the subject without prompting.
"You divers," he said, addressing the group since he didn't know who was a diver, "normally use air-filled lift bags to support underwater loads. Our engineers have designed special bags that will be filled with helium, giving significant extra lift. They are outfitted with adjustable automatic regulators to maintain a specified height over bottom."
He went on to explain, with the help of an illustration, that each bag came with its own helium supply good for three bag fills. He went into the problem a bit further. Seawater weighs about 64 pounds per cubic foot. Since the pod weighed 12,000 pounds, we needed to support 6,000 pounds at each end, which could be done with a bag containing 93 cubic feet of gas. This is the equivalent of a round balloon about six feet in diameter, or a normally-shaped lift bag about ten feet high.
Jenkins showed an illustration of the twenty-foot long pod suspended by bags at each end that stretched up some twenty feet above the pod, inflated to about the length of the divers swimming alongside the pod.
"Should something go wrong," Jenkins said, "the bags are designed to dump gas quickly to stop an ascent to the surface. The rate of dump is also controlled to prevent the pod from crashing to the sea floor." He paused, anticipating the obvious question. "We tested the mechanisms in every conceivable scenario. They worked flawlessly."
I interrupted the presentation. "Mr. Jenkins, who did these tests, and where were they carried out?"
"The initial testing was done at the Bethesda weapons test tank," he answered.
I knew the tank. It was 100 feet deep and about forty feet wide — sufficient for preliminary testing, but not deep enough to test the system under operational conditions. I told him so.
"You're, correct," Jenkins said. "We shipped a unit to San Diego and tested it from the Elk River, using the open-water training dive for the current class of saturation divers. They worked in six-hundred feet of water off Point Loma." Jenkins smiled with satisfaction. "They tried everything, but they couldn't break it."
"Bet we can," Ski muttered under his breath.
Ham glowered at him.
"Did you work with any surface wave action?" I asked Jenkins, adding, "We experienced twenty-foot waves while emplacing the first pod."
Jenkins whistled. "Not really," he said candidly. We chose a mild weather day."
"Those twenty-foot waves," the Skipper said pointedly to Jenkins, "snapped one of my anchor cables. We're talking about significant vertical surge, even at six-hundred feet." He paused to let that information sink in. "Can your automatic system accommodate a vertical surge of fifteen feet without initiating abort procedures?"
"I don't know," Jenkins said. "We never tested for that."
The Skipper looked at me. "Mac…?"
I thought while the rest of the room stayed quiet. As I pictured the situation in my mind I had a glimmering of an idea.
"The problem is," I said, "that if a deep surge gets picked up by the sensors, as the bag rises and expands, the sensor dumps gas. The bag descends, and the sensor puts more gas in the bag, and before you know it, all the gas is gone and the pod is stranded on the bottom." I paused. "The trick is to keep the pod near the bottom in the first place."
I stood up and approached the drawing with a pencil. I drew a large weight on the bottom under the pod, and attached it to the center of the pod with a line. "Add this weight," I said, "and adjust the bag lifts to compensate for the extra weight. Keep the weight inches off the bottom. Keep the pod oriented in the direction of wave motion, and adjust the sensitivity of the sensor to the probable vertical surge. If one end of the pod lifts, the mechanism will dump gas, setting the weight on the bottom. My guys will then manually adjust the gas fills to level the pod and keep it in position until the surge cycle passes."
Jenkins looked at my scribbled modification to his professionally produced illustration. "It might work," he said after several seconds of silence. "It just might work."
"Does anyone else have something to add?" the Skipper asked.
No one spoke up.
"Okay, that's it then." The Skipper stood up and left the Wardroom.
The rest of us milled around for a few minutes, looking at the drawing and talking about the incredible speed with which NSA came up with the pod, and their significant lapse in failing to test under bad weather conditions. My personal take was simple. They had limited time, and something got left out. We discovered it, and seemed to have a working solution. Implement it and move on. I explained my position to Ham, and he concurred.
"We'll set it free," he said, "and keep it under control. We shut that Whiskey down. A twelve-thousand-pound sausage will be a piece of cake!"
Along with the pod from NSA, SubDevGru sent another umbilical. Not that we expected to use another in the manner of the first that we expended with the Whiskey, but I didn't want to be out there without a backup. They also sent us several spare oxygen and helium tanks, and a fresh set of CO2 absorbent cartridges for our rigs.
We spent the next day stowing the gas and equipment, and running a complete check on the system. Not that we thought anything was wrong, but there were no repair facilities in the Sea of Okhotsk.
The following day the entire crew pitched in loading oxygen candles. As I mentioned earlier, Halibut was one of the first generation nukes. All the current models make oxygen by distilling seawater and then electrolyzing the fresh water to produce oxygen. We did it the old fashioned way — with oxygen candles. These are canisters containing a mixture of sodium chlorate and iron pellets. When they are ignited, they produce about 150 man-hours of oxygen each. Do the math. If we're submerged for three months with a crew of 150 men, we need about 240 thousand man-hours of oxygen. That's 2,400 canisters. That's just under thirty candles per day. To be safe, we load out at that number — thirty per day. Then, as an added safety measure, we double that, so we actually load around 5,000 fifty-pound canisters. Do the math again. If we load four candles per minute, the task will take about twenty hours.
Actually, we set up two lines, one into the Bat Cave and one into the Engine Room, and we passed a continuous stream of candles down both lines, so that we loaded about fifteen to twenty candles per minute. That still added up to more than four hours of hard work for the entire crew. You gotta love Treadwell, the company that developed the oxygen generator that has replaced oxygen candles in all our submarines.
While we were in dry dock, we got a fresh coat of paint over our entire exterior, and the crew painted out the entire interior, compartment by compartment. That's a total of about two days work, and a couple of days to get rid of the smell inside. While the paint fumes dissipated, we took on stores, loading every kind of fresh food, fruits, vegetables, tubers — we were in the tropics, after all. And frozen goods — you name it, we probably had at least one crew's meal of it, maybe more if Chief Hurst had his way. Cedric had already bribed every source of special food items on the island with some of his remarkable bread. Part of me could hardly wait to get underway again, just to have some of that good stuff.