Operation Ivy Bells

Chapter Two-2

Six-hundred feet. Harry pointed to the thread. It showed a distinct catenary; it looked like it had dipped by at least an inch or so. I shivered as I thought about the immense pressure squeezing the round hull of the PTC.

Nine-hundred feet. We slowed our descent, and crept to the one-thousand foot mark. The thread had dipped nearly a foot.

By now it was pretty cold inside the PTC. Water temperature outside was just over thirty degrees, and it wasn’t much warmer inside.

“Harry,” I said, “turn on the hot water. It’s going to be wet in here anyway.”

“PTC, Control.” It was Chief Struthers. “That isn’t according to procedure…”

“Can it!” I heard Harmon’s ringing voice in the background.

“PTC, Control, disregard my last.”

We did, and the hot water flowing into my suit felt wonderful – almost as good as…well, you get the point.

Just then there was a slight pop, and the hatch moved off its seal. I reached down and pulled it completely open, assisted by the counter spring. The opening looked like a perfect mirror. Bill stuck his finger into the water.

“Damn! That’s cold!” he said, jerking his hand back. Tinny laughter floated from the wall-mounted speaker.

“Can it!” Harmon was a slave driver.

“Okay – Mac and Harry, suit up.”

No “PTC, Control,” I thought. The Chief’s loosening up. I helped Harry with his Mark 14 diver’s hat. Shortly I could hear his rasping breathing over the electronic filters in my earplug. Bill assisted me, and a couple minutes later I gave Harry the thumbs-up.

“You ready, Pal?”

“Yeah.”

It was much more difficult to understand him through the breathing noise and the helium talk. We donned our fins.

“Control, Red Diver.” That was me.

“Control, aye.”

“Control, Green Diver.” Harry.

“Control, aye.”

“Control, Standby.” Bill.

Then we cross-checked with each other. Bill made a final check of our come-home bottles, and I stepped through the hatch, blithely unaware of the giant squids that were hanging out just beyond our visibility limit.

Following the coordinated giant squid attack, Master Chief Harmon brought the PTC to the surface in record time, ready to be hoisted aboard Elk River. Before we left the water, divers inspected us for any leaks, looking for telltale bubbles. Following their all clear, we were hoisted up and shortly found ourselves inside the chamber, our backs being pounded by Jimmy and Whitey.

Master Chief Harmon came on the circuit. “It looks like you guys were attacked by a group of Humboldt Squid. Pretty unusual. They’re normally found off the coast of Baja, ‘bout a hundred miles south of here. Never seen ’em here, ever.”

Franklin spoke up. “The Doc decided to cancel the second dive for this cycle. You guys get some sleep, and tomorrow Bill will descend with Jimmy and Whitey. We’ll winch into a slightly different spot. I don’t think the squid will bother you again.” He paused. “This was just one of those flukes.”

The three of us stripped out of our suits while we tried to explain to Jimmy and Whitey what had happened down there. Harry did most of the talking, backed up by Bill. From time to time, he would look to me for confirmation. He showed them his suit shoulder and my left wrist, while I sipped hot coffee that Control had just sent in through the Medical Lock. It tasted like s**t – I mean, it didn’t have any taste at all, more like a cup of hot water. At a thousand feet you really can’t taste anything except sweet, sour, and very spicy. Might as well eat cardboard and drink water.

“They was coordinating their attack,” Harry said. “It was like they was herding us.” He grinned at his friends. “Ain’t never seen anything like it, that’s for damn sure!”

The next morning, Bill climbed back into the PTC followed by Jimmy and Whitey. The dive was routine – they were pretty nervous, but the squid stayed away. They were cold and tired by the time the PTC returned to the surface. It took them about ten microseconds to bed down in the chamber. Struthers had set up a three-hour watch rotation for our three-day decompression, so they had several hours to catch up on their sleep, while Harry and I took the first two watches.

We played a lot of cards, watched several movies, and ate more cardboard. You cannot imagine how long three days in a small chamber can seem, when there is absolutely no way to go anywhere. I discovered something interesting during our decompression. Each of us had subconsciously staked out a personal territory. When you were in your territory, the others left you alone. Mine was located so that I had a clear view of the atmosphere monitoring gauges in the chamber. I didn’t do this on purpose; I must have done it subconsciously.

We had arrived at a pressure equivalent of 150 feet, which meant that our bodies were at still at 183 feet of pressure, since we were keeping one atmosphere ahead of our saturation level. Harry was in the outer lock brushing his teeth. Normally we kept the lock door completely open, but we had slung it nearly closed in order to set up the viewing screen for a movie.

One of the guys had been producing a lot of methane, if you get my drift. The chamber had become rather…uncomfortable.

“Fer Chrissake,” Whitey yelled in his high-pitched helium speech. “Give us a vent! I’m gonna choke to death.” He glowered at Jimmy, whom he suspected of being the culprit.

“Roger that.” Chief Struthers was back on duty.

Our gas mix at 150 feet normally would be just under five percent oxygen. Do the math; it works out to the same amount of oxygen as twenty-one percent on the surface. I know it sounds screwy, but that’s how it works. Anyway, we were on an enriched oxygen mix to facilitate flushing helium from our systems. Chief Struthers opened two valves, one to add gas to the chamber and one to vent gas from the chamber. His job was to make sure the pressure remained the same, and to ensure that our breathing mix percentages didn’t change either.

The process was pretty noisy and was supposed to take about ten minutes. Whitey lay down on the deck by the inlet pipe, breathed deeply and smiled with a sigh of relief.

“That’s more like it,” he squeaked.

At this depth we had removed our mikes and ear plugs since, with a bit of effort, we could understand each other without the descrambling that was necessary at a thousand feet.

Bill was standing in the middle of the sleeping area, elbows on the two upper racks supporting himself. The surveillance camera was aimed at the back of his head, but Struthers wasn’t worried since we were about to sit down to watch a movie. Jimmy was sitting on the deck leaning against the bulkhead across from me to my right, and as I said, Harry was brushing his teeth in the outer lock; Whitey was on the deck enjoying the fresh air.

Five minutes passed. That was when I began to notice something funny. I don’t mean ha-ha funny, either. The oxygen gauge which had been hovering near twenty percent ever since we reached 150 feet (oxygen enriched – remember), looked like it was near zero. Which explains why I didn’t react immediately. I was about to pass out for lack of oxygen.

I got up and crossed over to the gauge and peered at it intensely. Sure ‘nough, it read near zero. I stumbled back to my territory, alarms going off in my befuddled brain. Then it hit me. The other guys were unconscious. Struthers couldn’t see us because Bill was wedged between the bunks, and his head still blocked the camera. I tried to reach the emergency alarm button, but it seemed to recede away as I reached for it.

The last thing I remember is yelling “Petty Officer Blackwell!” Blackwell was Harry’s last name. “This is an order! Hit the emergency alarm!”

I barely heard the raucous Claxton as I slipped into oblivion.

A million years later (they told me it actually was less than a minute) I slowly regained consciousness, bleary and befuddled, my head cradled in Harry’s arms. I was wearing an Emergency Air Breathing (EAB) mask.

“Come on, Mac, goddammit, wake up! Wake up, dammit!”

I shook my head and struggled to my knees. The chamber was dark except for light streaming through the four ports. The Claxton still bellowed. Harry grabbed another EAB and slapped it on Whitey. I got Jimmy. And then Harry lowered Bill to the deck and I masked him too.

I saw Franklin’s worried face peering through one of the ports, and the doc’s at the second. I picked up a sound-powered phone handset and held it out toward Franklin. He grabbed the set attached to the outside of the chamber.

“What the f**k!” he yelled.

“You idiots flushed us with pure helium,” I squeaked back. “Pure f*****g helium!”

I dropped the handset and checked my guys. Whitey was still unconscious, but thank God, he was breathing. Jimmy and Bill were beginning to move about.

I grabbed the sound-powered handset again.

“Get the f*****g Doc in here now!” f**k the protocol. I slammed and dogged the inner lock door. I was pissed. Those bastards had nearly killed us.

Get the whole picture: the inner lock was unsealed. There was no way in hell anybody was coming inside the chamber without full decompression, which would have killed us in an instant. If that door had not been partially shut so that some oxygen remained in the outer lock with Harry…sheese, can you believe it? I heard the lock cycle and the outer door shut behind Doc Lemwell. Then the rush of gas as he pressed down rapidly. I undogged the inner door and glanced at the oxygen gauge. It read thirty percent.

I grabbed the sound-powered handset and spun the ringer. “Our Oh-two is thirty percent!” I squeaked. “I want Struthers off the panel, Now!”

The inner door popped as it swung open.

“Give me the Master Chief,” I demanded.

Doc Lemwell ducked into the chamber and went straight to the still unconscious Whitey. He reached up and set the EAB manifold to pure oxygen.

“Careful, Doc,” I admonished, pointing to the depth gauge. Lemwell nodded.

“Harmon.” The Master Chief’s voice was crisp and clear.

“Master Chief,” I answered, “Please run the panel until we surface. Check with Franklin, but just do it, okay?”

“Sure thing, Mac.” There was a long pause. “We’ll talk when you surface.”

“Roger that, Master Chief.” I hung up the handset and turned my attention to the Doc.

Whitey’s eyes were finally open. He didn’t look too bright, but then he never did, except when a chick was in his sights.

“We got five more hours, Doc, give or take. You gonna stay with us or go topside?” I wasn’t convinced that we were out of trouble yet.

We had gone off our profile and breathed pure helium at 150 feet for two, three minutes at least. The Master Chief and Franklin would get us back on our decompression profile; I wasn’t sweating that. But I was worried about one of us bending on the way up – Whitey especially. He had gotten the biggest helium hit.

“I’m a house call kind of Doc. I’ll hang around.”

Bill whooped and Jimmy laughed. Harry looked at me earnestly and Whitey just stared.

Like I said, that old Mark 2 nearly nailed me – us.

Whitey was okay by the time we surfaced. I practically kissed the Master Chief when my feet hit Elk River’s deck. It turned out he was the one who got a handle on the situation and saved our asses. We all graduated.

Chief Struthers want back to whatever he did before he nearly killed us. I felt a bit sorry for the guy, but diving to a thousand feet leaves no room for error. You don’t get second chances, at least not very often.

Oh yeah. They gave me a medal for my “heroism” in the DDC. Heroism, my ass. I should have figured things out in twenty seconds, not three f*****g minutes. The Master Chief should have gotten the medal, but he insisted I was the guy. Turned out they almost fired him for not supervising Struthers closely enough, but I threatened to resign if they did anything to him.

I was the hero, so they did what I asked.