Ice Station Nautilus (22 page)

Falcon
could gain access to a submarine pressurized up to five atmospheres absolute due to flooding. Although five ATAs corresponded to a depth of only 132 feet, oxygen toxicity became a problem above five atmospheres, and the crew would die before the SRDRS could arrive on scene. The next component, the Launch and Recovery System, was being assembled, and they would test it momentarily.

The last major component was the Surface Decompression System, which included two hyperbaric chambers that could hold thirty-four persons each: thirty-two rescued sailors plus two attendants to assist personnel during the decompression process. The SRS was the first American system capable of rescuing an entire crew from a pressurized submarine.

Peter Tarbottom approached the group, stopping beside Steel. “We’re ready to outboard unmanned.”

Steel led everyone toward the LARS as he explained, “This is the first test of the system to see if it will operate in the Arctic.”

Before the giant A-frame could be extended over the ocean, or in this case over the hole in the ice yet to be created, they had to solve the problem of what to attach the LARS to so the contraption didn’t topple over when it tried to outboard the PRM. It was normally bolted to supports welded to a ship’s deck, but there was no ship here. So they bolted the LARS directly to the ice. Or rather, through the ice. Holes had been drilled in the ice underneath each LARS mount, and NAVSEA had manufactured long bolts with spring-loaded flanges on the end, essentially giant hollow-wall anchors, which had been inserted through the ice cap. They had just tightened the last bolt and finished connecting the LARS electrical and hydraulic systems.

Steel gave the order and the A-frame’s two lift winches began retracting their cables attached to the top of the PRM. The PRM rose slowly in the air, and when it reached the top of the A-frame, two bayonet spikes snapped into the A-frame, locking the PRM in place. Two massive pistons on each side of the LARS tilted the A-frame outboard until the PRM was extended over the ice. All eyes shifted between the PRM, swaying gently in the air at the top of the A-frame, to the base of the LARS. It remained firmly affixed to the ice.

The bayonet spikes were retracted, and the lift winches slowly lowered the PRM. When the PRM was only a few feet from the ice, Tarbottom’s men stopped the descent, and after a ten-minute hold time, the Australian joined Steel and the rest of the group.

“So far, so good,” he said. “We’re ready to inboard.”

Commander Steel issued a second order, and the winches lifted the twenty-ton submersible upward, then the pistons on each side of the LARS pivoted the PRM back to the inboard position. The evolution was completed flawlessly, and Christine could sense the tension ease as the men congratulated each other.

Steel continued his explanation of the Submarine Rescue System. With the PRM in the inboard position, the hatch on the end of the submersible mated with what looked like a man-sized hamster habitrail. A pressurized flexible manway connected the PRM to the two-story deck transfer lock, which had three exits, one to each of the decompression chambers through additional habitrail tunnels, and a deck access so the PRM could be provisioned between dives.

Tarbottom stopped beside Commander Steel. “The only thing left is the final assembly of the Transfer Under Pressure system”—Tarbottom pointed to the habitrail—“and everything should be squared away by nightfall.”

Steel and Tarbottom seemed pleased with their efforts, but Christine’s eyes went to the patch of ice the PRM had been suspended over. Being able to inboard and outboard was great, but what good would it do them without a hole in the ice?

“What’s the plan for the ice hole?”

Tarbottom and Steel looked to Verbeck, who answered, “That’s my department. We’ve got lots of experience cutting holes in the ice to retrieve torpedoes. Those holes are only three feet wide, while we need a thirty-foot-wide hole for
Falcon,
but the same process should work. We just need the right equipment, which will arrive soon.”

The radio in Verbeck’s pocket squawked, then called his name. It was the polar bear watch on the west side of the ice station. Something peculiar had appeared on the horizon.

Verbeck bid farewell to Commander Steel and Tarbottom, then led Christine, Brackman, and Berman to the west edge of the camp. The polar bear watch was examining something through his binoculars. He handed them to Verbeck, who scanned the horizon.

“That’s interesting,” he said, then handed the binoculars to Christine.

She surveyed the flat, white landscape, moving slowly to the right until an object appeared. She adjusted the optics and a black, rectangular shape came into focus. She had an idea of what it was, but handed the binoculars to Brackman for him to confirm. It took him a few seconds to locate the object and a few more to come to a conclusion.

“It’s a submarine sail,” he said.

There were only two American submarines under the ice cap, and they were both hovering beneath Christine’s feet. The submarine in the distance was Russian.

56

ICE CAMP BARNEO

Julius Raila stepped from the warm galley after lunch, pulling the hood of his parka over his head as he headed toward the sound of metal crunching into ice. It wasn’t long before he reached the five-by-fifteen-meter-wide ice hole, with an excavator on each side of the oval depression, breaking apart chunks of ice and lifting them to the surface in their buckets.

As Raila stopped beside the hole, one of the four excavators swiveled around and lowered its bucket onto the ice cap. In the subzero temperatures, metal became brittle, and half of the bucket’s teeth had broken off. It was only a minute before a cargo transporter headed toward the excavator with a replacement bucket. They had worked out the kinks in the process, and a new bucket would be installed and the excavator back in operation in an hour. Still, that was another hour lost, and at least one other excavator would break down in the meantime. This was their seventh bucket replacement today, and it was just past noon. Raila peered over the edge into the ice hole. They had been at it for over a day and were only halfway through. At the current pace, they would be too late to save the men in
Dolgoruky
’s Compartment One.

However, AS-34 Priz was ready. It had been easy to transport the submersible onto the polar ice cap, and Raila decided to forgo installing the handling equipment at Camp Barneo. Since Priz was an autonomous vehicle with no attachments to the surface, they would simply use an MI-26 heavy-lift helicopter to lower the submersible through the ice hole. A hole that was taking far too long to dig.

Raila turned to the west, toward the American ice camp. He was confounded by the American approach. From the edge of Ice Camp Barneo, Spetsnaz soldiers kept watch on the American ice camp activity. The American rescue system was much more complex than Russia’s Priz class submersible, and while he understood the Americans’ focus on assembling the equipment, he didn’t understand their failure to tackle the most difficult challenge. They hadn’t started digging an ice hole, and there were no excavators standing by, either.

As Raila wondered what their plan was, the faint sound of helicopter rotors greeted his ears and several gray specks appeared to the southwest. He watched as two U.S. Navy Super Stallion helicopters towed a large spiderlike contraption, while a third Super Stallion carried a giant metal ring. He scratched his beard, wondering what the Americans were up to.

57

ICE STATION NAUTILUS

Christine was seated at a table in the galley with Brackman, Verbeck, and Berman savoring hot chicken noodle soup when she heard the beat of the heavy-lift helicopters. Verbeck stepped from the galley for a look, and Christine and the other two men followed. She spotted several specks in the clear blue sky, growing slowly into three CH-53E Super Stallions. Two of the helicopters carried an oval structure about forty feet wide and eighty feet long, with sixteen giant legs dangling from the perimeter, while the third helicopter transported a large metal ring about thirty feet in diameter.

Verbeck led Christine and the others to the east side of the camp, where the first two Super Stallions slowed to a hover, gently landing the spiderlike object next to the submarine rescue equipment. The third helicopter deposited the large metal ring onto the ice next to the Launch and Recovery System. Men and equipment converged on the ring, which was six inches thick and had several threaded ports on top, evenly spaced along its circumference.

A snowmobile towing a cart pulled up, and men extracted six-foot-tall metal poles, screwing one into each threaded port until there were ten poles evenly spaced around the ring, sticking straight up into the air. Four more snowmobiles approached, each one dragging a sled with a metal contraption on it, and after the snowmobiles pulled to a halt, men attached two hoses from each machine to additional ports in the metal ring. It took only ten minutes to hook everything up, then one of the men approached Verbeck.

“We’re ready to go,” he said.

Verbeck took a moment to introduce the man. “Ms. O’Connor, this is Paul Leone, the senior ice pilot at the Arctic Submarine Lab. He’s my right-hand man here at the camp.”

Verbeck continued, explaining the plan. “As I mentioned earlier, we cut holes in the ice to recover exercise torpedoes after their run, but we don’t dig a hole, we melt one. Those contraptions are melters.” He pointed to the equipment pulled by the four snowmobiles. “They heat water and pump it through the metal ring. The water heats the metal, which melts the ice.”

The ice pilot ordered the four melters fired up, and a moment later hot water started running through the metal ring. The ice beneath the ring began melting, and a man stationed at each of the ten poles pressed the ring downward. As the ice melted, the ring sank slowly into the ice. The poles became shorter as the ring descended, until only a foot of each pole extended above the ice.

Leone shouted a command and the men stopped pushing the ring downward. Each man retrieved a second six-foot-long pole from the cart, then screwed it into the end of the first, extending the pole another six feet skyward. After another command from Leone, the men pushed down again. A few minutes later, with only two feet of pole remaining, the men lurched forward as the resistance eased, and the thirty-foot-diameter section of ice popped up half a foot. Christine finally realized what they were doing. They had created a giant ice cork, and all they had to do now was lift it out of the way.

Verbeck explained that lifting the ice cork was the real challenge. For a three-foot-wide torpedo-sized hole, they drilled a hole in the center of the cork and dropped a hollow-wall anchor through the hole, then lifted it manually using a tripod and chain fall. However, a three-foot-wide ice cork weighed only a few thousand pounds. The thirty-foot-wide ice cork they had created weighed over two hundred tons. It would take a dozen Super Stallions to lift the ice cork, and connecting that many helicopters to the ice plug was asking for trouble.

Instead, Verbeck asked NAVSEA to construct the spiderlike contraption, a sixteen-leg monstrosity rising twenty feet into the air. The thick metal legs bent ninety degrees at the top, in toward the middle of the oval, where they connected to a central section with tracks running its length. A flanged anchor, its edges folded up, hung from one end of the central section.

The two Super Stallions placed one end of the oval structure around the ice plug, with the metal legs positioned around its perimeter and the flanged anchor over the center of the ice cork. The tow cables were released and the Super Stallions landed in the distance while men climbed onto the ice plug and began drilling a two-foot-wide hole in the center. When they finished, the flanged anchor at the top of the contraption, which was connected to a thick metal cable, was lowered through the hole and the flanges were released.

“Cross your fingers,” Verbeck said, “and pray we don’t end up with a pile of metal parts.”

Slowly, the cable retracted, lifting the ice plug until it cleared the surface, then the ice plug moved along the center track to the other end of the contraption, where it was lowered onto the polar ice cap. The effort had taken only two hours, and Christine was staring at a thirty-foot-diameter Arctic swimming pool, through which the PRM could be lowered.

The two Super Stallions moved in again, moving the contraption aside, clearing the way to outboard the PRM over the ice hole. On the other side of the hole, personnel from the Undersea Rescue Command were hooking up a pilot in an Atmospheric Diving Suit to its launch and recovery system. The ADS would be sent down first, to inspect
Dolgoruky
’s hatches.

It wasn’t long before the ADS was suspended over the ice hole, then began its descent. Christine watched the pilot, his face visible through the bulbous glass vision dome of the ADS helmet, disappear into the cold Arctic waters.

58

ICE CAMP BARNEO

Captain First Rank Josef Klokov had watched in curious fascination, finally deciphering the American plan. It had taken them two hours to accomplish what would take Julius Raila’s men over two days. He looked at the half-finished ice hole they’d been digging. Russia had lost the race, which meant Klokov’s men would intervene.

The Spetsnaz unit’s Executive Officer, Captain Second Rank Gleb Leonov, approached with Julius Raila in tow. The discussion was short. Raila was relieved
Dolgoruky
’s crew would be rescued in time, but Klokov sensed his pride was damaged. Russia would have to rely on another country to rescue their crew. Klokov didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was how long until the Americans commenced rescue operations. Raila explained they would be ready shortly after dark.

Klokov excused Raila, who left to inspect the ice hole. They would continue their efforts in case something went wrong with the American rescue. Klokov turned to his Executive Officer.