“LAN Technician, open the battery breaker.”
The Petty Officer repeated back the order, then headed to lower level, where the battery was located. Shortly thereafter, the Control Room went dark. There was no electronic life aboard the submarine, not even a solitary indicating light. Molitor flicked on his battle lantern, and a bright shaft of light pierced the darkness.
Tolbert reached up and retrieved a second lantern. As he debated where to head next, he realized he had lost track of time. He turned on his lantern and checked his watch. It was 0855 Greenwich Mean Time. North Dakota’s next report was due in five minutes.
16
In the U.S. Navy compound off Terminal Road, Petty Officer Second Class Vince Harms sat at his console in the Communication Center. It was approaching 4 a.m., but as usual, the message traffic was brisk this time of day. With submarines synchronizing their day to Greenwich Mean Time, it was almost 0900 on every American submarine on deployment. The workday had begun, and those authorized to transmit had uploaded their radio messages.
Harms checked the printout listing the submarines due to report in during his watch. It was only a few minutes before North Dakota’s deadline, but Harms wasn’t worried. She was on a northern run, and submarine crews in trail often pushed it to the limit as they waited for an opportune time to come to periscope depth and transmit, without losing contact of their adversary.
He busied himself with additional message traffic, then checked the message queue again at exactly 0900. No message from North Dakota. He waited another minute to be sure, then looked around the Communication Center, spotting Chief Marc Arsenault, the supervisor during tonight’s mid-watch, standing behind another radioman on duty.
“Chief,” Harms called out. Chief Arsenault looked over as the junior radioman added, “We’ve got an issue. North Dakota is overdue.”
The Chief stopped behind Harms and examined the printout by his console, then glanced at the time displayed on the Communication Center wall.
“Yep,” Arsenault replied, “we got a problem. Draft a message to North Dakota, directing her to report in ASAP, and a SUBLOOK message for all commands. I’ll brief the Watch Officer and get authority to release.”
Later that afternoon, sitting at his desk in COMSUBLANT’s headquarters, Vice Admiral Bob Tayman waited impatiently for word from North Dakota. She was now twelve hours overdue. It wasn’t the first time a submarine had failed to report in, the crew engrossed with the tactical situation, unaware the clock had struck midnight and they had turned into a pumpkin. However, the probability that something had happened to North Dakota was increasing with each passing hour.
A SUBLOOK had been issued, but the timeline to implement SUBMISS procedures wasn’t written in stone. It was a judgment call, depending on the situation. Twelve additional hours would normally be enough time to convince him something had gone wrong. But North Dakota had gone under the ice, and her ability to transmit would be affected by the availability of open leads or polynyas, or ice thin enough to surface through. Still, North Dakota’s commanding officer would have taken that into account.
If he initiated SUBMISS procedures, he would expend millions of dollars in the effort, perhaps for nothing more than a false alarm. However, if North Dakota was in distress, there was no time to waste. His head hurt as he thought about the implications — a submarine sunk under the polar ice cap. How would they find it? The 406 MHz transmission from their emergency SEPIRB buoys wouldn’t penetrate the ice.
There was a knock on the door and Tayman acknowledged. Captain Rick Current, his chief of staff, entered. It was the end of the day and time to make a decision.
Tayman gave the order. “Initiate SUBMISS procedures for North Dakota.”
17
It was mid-afternoon in San Diego as Commander Ned Steel leaned back in his chair, taking a break from reviewing the paperwork in his inbox. Steel was the commanding officer of the Navy’s Undersea Rescue Command, located on the western shore of North Island, across the water from Naval Base Point Loma, home to Squadron ELEVEN’s fast attack submarines.
Steel’s second-story window overlooked the test pool, a twenty-by-fifty-foot pool used to train pilots for the Atmospheric Diving Suit, and Steel took a moment to observe the latest training dive as the launch system lowered the suit into the water. Built from forged aluminum with sealed rotary joints, and attached to an umbilical for power and communications, it could descend to two thousand feet.
Because the inside of the ADS was maintained at normal surface pressure, it wasn’t a diving suit at all. It was actually a deep submergence vehicle, operated by the pilot inside the contraption. Maneuvered by two thruster packs and with a light and camera on one shoulder and a sonar transducer on the other, the ADS’s primary mission was to determine the condition of a sunken submarine and clear off any debris from the hatch area so the rescue vehicle could mate.
As the command’s name implied, rescuing a distressed submarine’s crew was what the Undersea Rescue Command was all about. Although the ADS could investigate a sunken submarine, the rescue effort fell to the Submarine Rescue System. Steel’s eyes shifted to the SRS, staged not far from the test pool. The SRS consisted of three main components: the Pressurized Rescue Module, the Launch and Recovery System, and two hyperbaric decompression chambers.
Steel’s BlackBerry vibrated at the same time his personal cell phone and desk phone rang. He checked his BlackBerry as the two phones continued ringing. It was a text message from the Squadron ELEVEN Operations Center. Steel answered his desk phone and, as expected, heard an automated message. A SUBMISS message had been sent. He turned to his computer, where another prompt was displayed on screen. He pulled up his email, and the unclassified message was at the top of his inbox.
Steel read the message quickly, and as he finished, his XO and lead contractor arrived. Lieutenant Commander Marlin Crider and Peter Tarbottom had their cell phones in hand. Tarbottom was an Australian expatriate who made America his home when he joined Phoenix International twenty years ago. The fifty-year-old with the colorful language was the senior supervisor for the contingent of contractor personnel supporting the Undersea Rescue Command.
“What are the details?” Steel’s XO asked.
“North Dakota is twelve hours overdue.”
“All right,” Tarbottom said as he interlocked his fingers and cracked his knuckles. “I’ll get the men packing. What port will we be loading out from?”
“I don’t think we’ll be loading out from a port,” Steel said, as he tried sorting through the implications of North Dakota’s location.
“What do you mean?” Tarbottom asked. “We have to load onto a ship somewhere.”
“I don’t think a ship is going to take us where we need to go.”
“And where might that be?”
“North Dakota is under the polar ice cap.”
“Aw, crikey!” Tarbottom exclaimed. “Under the ice?”
Tarbottom had summarized the problems facing them in one succinct question. Could the ADS and SRS function in subfreezing temperatures? How would they get the equipment onto the ice cap? Five C-5s or fifteen C-17s were required to transport the equipment to an airport, where it would be trucked to a nearby port and loaded aboard an awaiting ship. However, there was no ship that could transport the equipment to the rescue location and serve as a base of operations.