Ice Station Nautilus by Rick Campbell Page B

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
    NORTH ISLAND, CALIFORNIA
    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