The Navy came up with something called SubSafe, which was supposed to limit the number of openings to sea pressure in a submarine, and to make it safer in many different ways. While this was going on, a guy named John Craven, Doctor John Craven, came up with a fantastic idea. John had been intimately involved in the search for the Thresher and Scorpion. In fact, he was personally responsible for finding the Scorpion. He was The Man. He had the attention of the Powers-that-Be in D.C. He knew that the Soviets had laid underwater communications cables between their Siberian missile testing facilities through the Sea of Okhotsk due west of the Aleutian Islands to their big naval base at Petropavlovsk Kamchatskiy, and south to Vladivostok. The cables lay in water between 400 and 1,000 feet deep.
Craven's idea was audacious, to say the least. Since Congress and the public had developed such a keen interest in rescuing downed submariners (pronounced submarine-ers for all you non-bubbleheads), he proposed to create a modern submarine rescue program, replete with a couple of new state-of-the-art catamaran motherships that would carry the little DSRVs that could latch onto a downed submarine and rescue the personnel trapped inside. Furthermore, he proposed to modify several nuclear submarines to act as alternative motherships for these little subs. Never mind that most nuclear submarines operated in waters that were deeper than their crush depth. If a sub went down, it would be like Scorpion, with the Engine Room imploding right through the sub to the Reactor Compartment amidships. Never mind that the DSRVs could not actually operate to the depths of the waters in which the nukes normally operated.
Here is the brilliance of Craven's idea. All this was an elaborate front. And I do mean elaborate. The guys running the Pigeon and Ortolan, and the submarine motherships, had no idea what was really happening. They bought into the cover hook, line, and sinker. In fact, so had I until my fateful meeting with Dan.
Anyway, the real purpose for the entire operation was to create a genuine excuse for a submarine to put to sea with a DSRV attached to its rear deck. And this really happened regularly, to the tune of carefully orchestrated PR fanfare. What also happened, however, was that another DSRV-equipped submarine put to sea occasionally, except that this DSRV really was a saturation diving chamber designed to look like a DSRV.
The job of these guys was no more and no less than to retrieve pieces of Soviet missile warheads from the ocean bottom at the splash zone of their test site in the Sea of Okhotsk, and to tap into the Soviet underwater communications cables snaking along the bottom through that area.
It was super secret. Nobody knew about it except for a very select few, including the President, SecDef, SecNav, one admiral, Craven, the very small contingent at SUBDEVGRUONE, part of the submarine crew, and the divers. Let me tell you, that's secret like nothing I had ever experienced.
No wonder I had to wait a year on the Pigeon while they checked every day of my life before I joined the program. No wonder Dan made me sign my life away before telling me about it. Hot dang, I thought, this was some scam!
I looked up from the paper. Nestled against the pier, two subs, the USS Halibut and a modern fast attack nuke, were just visible as the tide peaked.
The fast attack was moored against the pier just ahead of Halibut. It lay low in the water, its bulbous bow dipping below the surface just a few yards forward of its sail structure. Bow planes protruded from the sail, creating two temporary platforms replete with lifelines. Its featureless after-deck disappeared below the water a couple of dozen yards behind the sail, and the rudder and tail structure protruded from the mirrored water surface several yards further back. Nothing on its deck distinguished it in any fashion. It obviously was designed to move sleekly through the ocean realm. It looked like the deadly killer it was.
As submarines go, Halibut was nothing to look at. Her forward deck was flat, in contrast to the sleek curved deck of the fast attack moored ahead of her. Her bow was sharply outlined, like that of a destroyer, but a little more soft and rounded — more like World War II subs. Her prow was designed to cut the water instead of push it aside. A line of louvers just above the waterline ran down both sides from the bow two thirds of the way back to where the after deck dipped abruptly into the water. Bow planes were folded against the bow just ahead of the louvers. The sail protruded from the deck amidships as a narrow, featureless slab. About one-third of the way back from the bow, a hump rose from the deck, like a huge shark's mouth, a clam-shell opening into the pressure hull below that could handle large objects like the obsolete air-breathing Regulus guided missiles for which it was designed as the launch platform.
A sailor in dress whites, armed with a regulation .45 cal. semi-automatic pistol stood guard where a brow stretched across the gap between sub and pier. He stood at a small podium that held a logbook. A second armed sailor patrolled the length of the deck. They had noted my presence on the pier, but both paid significantly more attention to the waters on the outboard side of the sub.
Far back on the deck, just ahead of where it dropped into the water, what appeared to be a DSRV, but was actually a double-lock saturation diving chamber, was mounted to the deck, so that it looked to be held in place with clamps. In fact, it was firmly welded to the Halibut's deck. Prominently painted on its side were the letters: DSRV-1. This saturation diving chamber, called the Can by everybody, was forty-nine feet long and eight feet wide. The forward thirty feet, the inner lock, contained two stacked bunks with a total of four beds, a table for eating and recreational activities like cards or chess, and a pressure hatch into the six-and-a-half foot transfer trunk leading to the sub. The transfer trunk had another pressure hatch on the submarine end. It was used to lock into and out of the inner lock from the sub. The inner lock was separated from the outer lock by a bulkhead penetrated by a pressure hatch. The outer lock contained a toilet, sink, and a pressure hatch in the deck to the outside. It also contained the divers' hot-water suits and other equipment, and their coiled umbilicals suspended on hooks.
I folded the paper and tucked it under my arm, swung my seabag over my shoulder, and walked toward Halibut. As I approached the brow the guard saluted and challenged me.
"May I help you, Sir?"
"Request permission to come aboard. I'm Lieutenant McDowell." I returned the salute.
I stepped onto the brow and turned right to salute the flag flying on the stern.
"Your papers, Sir."
He made an entry in his log and then stepped back to a comm box temporarily mounted on the side of the sail.
"Control… topside."
"Control… aye."
"I got El-Tee McDowell here, Senior Chief."
"Roger that. COB'll be right up." Meaning Chief of the Boat — the senior enlisted man on the sub — he pronounced the word like corn on the cob.
A head wearing a fore-n-aft cap and sporting a well-groomed red handlebar mustache popped above the forward part of the sail followed by a khakis clad master chief petty officer who stepped over the edge of the sail and climbed down the ladder to the deck. His weathered, craggy face broke into a friendly grin. He saluted and then held out his hand.