Once again I took off my tanks, only this time I also took off my weight belt and my satchel with the gear in it. I tied it all off to a short length of rope to keep it close to me but allowing me room to maneuver. Then I dropped the rest of the rope down so that the Old Man could tie off to it. The idea was that I would pull him up and along once I got to the other side. It was like mountain climbing. The first guy would free climb and put in pitons for the next guy to use — something I learned to do in the Ranger course. That was the plan, anyway. But first, I had to get to the other side.
I started to ease my way up the serpentine impeller. It was tight and cramped. I had to let my air tanks dangle to free up my hands, but I had only so much air hose from the tanks to my mouth. I had to bite down hard on the mouthpiece to keep the tanks in tow, which tired my jaw quickly. It was as if I was dragging the tanks with my mouth, which was exactly what I was doing.
The cold water was starting to affect my motor skills, and I felt my feet and fingers getting stiff. I had to bend myself around the shaft, which would be hard to do warm, let alone in this numbing cold. But the water was acting as a cushion that let my natural buoyancy move me along and upward. The impeller was just big enough to allow me to wrap around it and, with significant effort, work my way up and through it. I had to push and pull myself up as best I could. If I had more fear of small spaces, this would have been my undoing. I was underwater, breathing from a hose, and I had nowhere to go but up a spiral shaft.
Despite the cold, I could feel myself sweating. The myth of the Green Berets was that we weren’t afraid of anything. I knew better. The Green Beret training could be counted on to find a man’s weak spots, and every man had them. But rather than destroy him with that, the knowledge was used to help him find ways to overcome them. Once you did that, you became a very capable and dangerous warrior. A brave man isn’t the one who knows no fear. A brave man is the one who knows fear but continues on in spite of it.
A few minutes later, the pump impeller opened to yet another gloomy, wide space. I’d made it through! I did what they said couldn’t be done. However, I was still underwater, it was still cold and dark, and I was running low on air. But I was through. And for the briefest of moments, I let myself feel damn good about that. Now the Old Man needed to get through the impeller as soon as possible, and he’d need both his hands to do that.
I put my tanks back on and secured my equipment to my belt. I then gave two quick tugs on the rope to signal that it was okay for the Old Man to move next.
I didn’t have much to secure myself to, so I couldn’t provide a lot of pull on the rope. All I could do was to pull gently and hope it was enough. As I lay there in the dark, watery, potential grave, I gave in to a moment of regret again at having brought him along. It wasn’t that I didn’t want him here, but that I felt I’d put him in jeopardy and that wasn’t a good thing to do. But the decision had been made, and I needed to stop re-hashing it.
I put a strain on the rope to help the Old Man up and through the pump impeller. Just then the rope stopped moving. My heart missed a beat, thinking the Old Man got wedged in there somewhere. But then it went lose again, and a couple of minutes later, I saw a head peek up out of the impeller. I had to give the Old Man credit. None of this was easy. I was impressed with his abilities. I’d have to tell him that next chance I got.
Once we were both up, we took some precious, not to be wasted, time and got all our gear accounted for. We swam on for another thirty feet and then surfaced. It felt like we were on a beach, coming out of the water. We were now in the tunnel — and behind schedule. Our air was depleting rapidly. I flashed my light around and, despite being out of the water, resisted taking off my mouthpiece. I had to remember that there was no breathable air in there. The tunnel was pitch black and empty but I heard a distinctive noise, which was unsettling. I looked around and couldn’t see anything that would be making the eerie sound. I didn’t know if something was coming my way, but it sounded like it. I stood still for a moment, debating what to do, but nothing came. The sound was constant and was not varying. It then occurred to me that there was still a circulating water pump running, and the sound I heard was the flow in the other tunnel. It was good to know, but I just hadn’t been expecting it.
The tunnel itself was a huge rectangular space. The sides, top, and floor were coated with some kind of plastic epoxy paint that was supposed to be slippery so barnacles and mollusks couldn’t cling to it or grow on it. The coating must have worked well, because there wasn’t much growth — at least on the floor of the tunnel. The down side to this modern miracle was that it made the floor very slippery to us, too. But with our fins off, our rubber boots gave us some good footing. That was a good thing, because we needed to get to the condenser water box — somewhere up ahead of us — and out.
There was some air in the tunnel because the operators had opened a vacuum breaker to allow the water to run back out when the pump was secured. But it wasn’t a lot of air for a space this size, and the odds of it being particularly breathable air were slim. Decay from the barnacles and other sea life would make what little air there was putrid in short order. It wasn’t something I wanted to have to find out. So we kept our regulators on and in our mouths, grabbed only the equipment we needed now, and headed up toward the water-box and our next challenge.
The tunnel was several hundred feet long, with an incline of ten percent or so, making it a difficult climb. The weight of our gear was more than I’d expected, and carrying it was slowing us down. We’d lost the buoyancy the water provided. Tick, tock.
Several long minutes later we emerged at a ninety-degree bend in the tunnel, where it turned and headed straight up and into what I assumed was the condenser water-box. We’d made it. But I saw no light other than what my flashlight provided. I looked up and scanned the overhead. I could see a wall of small-diameter tubes through which the saltwater was forced when the circulator was running. On either side of this water-box was a hatch, some twenty feet up. Much to my chagrin, neither hatch was open — and there was no hand wheel on either. They were just round, smooth surfaces. There was no way they could be opened from the inside. It was never anticipated there would be people on the inside with the hatch shut.
A ladder was attached to the wall underneath each hatch. This must be used during maintenance periods to allow people to get out of the tunnel through the water box. We’d have to climb up one of these ladders to get out, but there was no point in doing that just yet. Hanging onto the slippery ladder waiting for the hatch to be opened would only cause more exertion for us, and oxygen was a precious commodity right now. Besides that, I didn’t know which hatch would be opened. So we opted to stay down below, conserve our strength and energy, and hope someone would open a hatch soon.
Time was running out. More accurately, our air was running out. The Old Man’s breathing was becoming labored. This had been far more of an exertion for him than for me. I checked his regulator and saw he was well into the red zone and had only a minute or two of air left. I had about five minutes left on mine. We would have to buddy breathe if necessary. That would draw down our air reserves even faster.
My watch read 0158. I looked up at the two hatches that remained firmly locked in place.