“Affirmative! You bet!” Keith had taken his hand away from his mouth. He was letting everyone in the control room hear. “Our heading’s two-eight-three on the grid. We’re steady, not drifting. Been like this since we stopped coasting. That was quite a ride you took us for just before the line broke, by the way. We coasted for nearly twenty minutes! I’ll start briefing our people right away. Be ready for you as soon as you can get alongside!” There was a pause, then Keith said, his voice again muffled, “You sure you can do this okay? That’s taking a big risk with another sub to bring it alongside in midocean submerged like this!”
“We’ll worry about that, Keith! Don’t you bother! The water’s still, here under all that ice, and we’ll come up real slow and easy, until we’re floating against the ice too. It’s worth a few scratches and dents if we touch. Go and get your crew lined up. Four men at a time will take a while, and the scuba men will have to be changed off, too.”
Tired as they were, Buck Williams’ crew showed their professionalism by the way they handled their submarine. Buck positioned her exactly where he wanted her, assisted by periscope angles, Schultz on the sonar, and even an extraordinary solution done on the torpedo date computer — which, however, came too late for use except as a check. Then Tom Clancy and his diving control group caused her to rise slowly and gently, adjusting for gradually reducing salinity of the water as he did so. The Cushing’s underwater television camera, with its lights, illuminated the entire scene and enabled Keith to help by coaching Buck.
When it was finally necessary for Buck to house his periscopes for fear of striking the ice, the two submarines were on nearly opposite headings, bows overlapping by some fifty feet and twenty feet apart. Manta, because of her smaller size and the missile submarine’s down angle, came to rest with her deck about ten feet higher than the Cushing’s, but that was of little moment. As soon as all relative motion ceased, the hatches on the two submarines opened, and a black-rubber-suited figure with silver tanks on his back appeared on the deck of each. Each man had a line attached to his middle, which he clipped to the safety track on desk, and another on the large deck wrench he carried. Someone inside the open hatches of each ship was assisting, and after some difficulty, in both cases an extra man had to swim out to assist with the cleats. In their condition of near weightlessness it was impossible for a single person to place sufficient leverage on the wrench, a situation anticipated by the experienced divers.
Then a heavy line was brought out from the Cushing, fine four-inch white nylon, weightless in water and strong. The eye spliced into one end was looped around the opened cleat in Manta’s forecastle, the standing part snubbed securely and then belayed to the one on Cushing’s rounded bow. Buck had maneuvered the Manta so that the two escape hatches were virtually abeam of each other. Then one of the Manta divers carried a sack of scuba equipment over to the Cushing and handed it into the open hatch.
“Our men say two will be enough to monitor the transfers,” said Keith. “That will give us more suits, and we’ll be able to transfer more men per group.”
“Maybe, but we still have to carry back the empties to you. The extra scubamen can stand by, over here, and we’ll shift them when they get tired. Let’s start with three monitors,” said Richardson. It was a conservative decision he was later to regret deeply.
Slowly, seven men at a time, the transfer began. Seven men, with their tanks, filled the Manta’s escape chamber to capacity, or nearly so. Then it was necessary to close the outer door, quickly release the pressure, and open the lower door into her forward torpedo room. The procedure was speeded by permitting great quantities of water to dump into the room instead of the more tidy, but slower method of draining it through the drain valve, and aboard Manta there were many hands available to strip the newcomers of their scuba equipment, bundle it hurriedly into sacks and prepare it for the return journey to the Cushing.
The water was cold, several degrees below the freezing point of fresh water, but not uncomfortable with the suits on, the Cushing men said. Not, certainly, in comparison with the discomfort in store for them otherwise! The regular scubamen, trained and aware of what to expect, said only that it was “not too bad.” Enthusiasm for the work they were doing, frequent forced rest stops inside a relatively warm rescue chamber while the next transfer was being readied or suits being switched around made it easy, they said. Whenever feasible, they took another turn on the rope stretched between the two ships, to keep it taut and to prove that moderate effort, extended over a reasonable period, could actually move something as big as a submarine.
Rich finally had to order the divers to shift their jobs after an hour in the water. This was the limiting time according to the instruction manual, and he also had them stop pulling on the line between the ships. Manta had rigged in her bow planes, so there was no danger to them from possible contact with Cushing, but there was no need to force the two ships to touch when things were going so well.
But seven men per transfer, opening and shutting hatches, and changing equipment for each group, took time. One hundred twenty-seven men, Cushing’s actual complement counting her skipper, would take eighteen trips, with one man left over. At ten minutes per group, the fastest time achieved, eighteen transfers would take three hours. A nineteenth transfer would be necessary for the one man still aboard the Cushing. Richardson knew well who would be that last man.
Nor would he ever be able to forget the sinking feeling in his chest when one of the resting scubamen reported the Cushing to be higher in the water, her bow now conveniently level with the Manta. This could only mean that she was no longer able to maintain the down angle Keith had programmed to reduce the water pressure, and hence the force of the leak, in the damaged compartment!
Eleven transfers had been made. On the UQC Rich told Keith to hurry, that he would authorize eight men per trip, with only two monitoring topside. Keith’s voice told him what he was afraid to hear: the ship would not last more than half an hour longer.
Then more disaster. Two of the scuba tanks ran out of compressed air. They were recharged immediately, but it took time. Then one of the mouthpieces, too anxiously taken from one of the transferees, dropped and was damaged. Unusable. More time lost.
“Boss,” said Keith over the underwater telephone, “we have a full outfit of regular escape breathing gear, with hoods. If we leave off the tanks, we might be able to reduce the suiting-up time.”
“Try it with half of the men!” The stratagem was successful, the men with the hoods being helped by the others, and the next time all but two used hoods instead of tanks. But now Cushing was floating with a noticeable up-angle, and its gradual increase could be seen by the scubamen topside.
“We can’t hold her, boss! Depth’s increasing! I’m going to let out a group without waiting for the wet suits!” Richardson and Williams, without the underwater TV, could only imagine the scantily clad men, wearing nothing but their regular clothing, a breathing bag with oxygen, and a yellow, Plexiglas-faced hood over their heads, being herded out of the Cushing’s airlock. The scubamen would help them to the now tightly stretched nylon line which was beginning to take some of the negative buoyancy of the missile submarine, and along it into Manta’s airlock. The change in procedure caught the operating crew in Manta’s torpedo room as they were opening the lower escape chamber hatch, getting the previous group out of the chamber. The instructions received only minutes before had been to bundle the suits quickly into sacks, forgetting the tanks, and give them immediately to the waiting scubaman, who would take them back into the airlock. Not till then would the lower hatch be closed. Of course, the upper one could not be opened for the same period. A small confusion, quickly straightened out — but at the expense of another vital minute or two.