Aboard USS Holo Kai, off the Coast of the Hawaiian Islands

[Deep Glider 7 looks more like a twin fuselage aircraft than a minisub. I lie on my stomach in the starboard hull, looking out through a thick, transparent nose cone. My pilot, Master Chief Petty Officer Michael Choi, waves at me from the port hull. Choi is one of the “old-timers,” possibly the most experienced diver in the U.S. Navy’s Deep Submergence Combat Corps (DSCC). His gray temples and weathered crow’s-feet clash violently with his almost adolescent enthusiasm. As the mother ship lowers us into the choppy Pacific, I detect a trace of “surfer dude” bleeding through Choi’s otherwise neutral accent.]

My war never ended. If anything, you could say it’s still escalating. Every month we expand our operations and improve our material and human assets. They say there are still somewhere between twenty and thirty million of them, still washing up on beaches, or getting snagged in fishermen’s nets. You can’t work an offshore oil rig or repair a transatlantic cable without running into a swarm. That’s what this dive is about: trying to find them, track them, and predict their movements so maybe we can have some advance warning.

[We hit the whitecaps with a jarring thud. Choi grins, checks his instruments, and shifts the channels on his radio from me to the mother ship. The water before my observation dome froths white for a second, then gives way to light blue as we submerge.]

You’re not going to ask me about scuba gear or titanium shark suits, are you, because that crap’s got nothing to do with my war? Spear guns and bang sticks and zombie river nets … I can’t help you with any of that. If you want civilians, talk to civilians.

But the military did use those methods.

Only for brown water ops, and almost exclusively by army pukes. Personally, I’ve never worn a mesh suit or a scuba rig… well… at least not in combat. My war was strictly ADS. Atmospheric Diving Suit. Kind of like a space suit and a suit of armor all rolled into one. The technology actually goes back a couple hundred years, when some guy invented a barrel with a faceplate and arm holes. After that you had stuff like the Tritonia and the Neufeldt-Kuhnke. They looked like something out of an old 1950s sci-fi movie, “Robby the Robot” and shit. It all kinda fell by the wayside when … do you really care about all this?

Yes, please…

Well, that sort of technology fell by the wayside when scuba was invented. It only made a comeback when divers had to go deep, real deep, to work on offshore oil rigs. You see… the deeper you go, the greater the pressure; the greater the pressure, the more dangerous it is for scuba or similar mixed-gas rigs. You’ve got to spend days, sometimes weeks, in a decompression chamber, and if, for some reason, you have to shoot up to the surface… you get the bends, gas bubbles in the blood, in the brain… and we’re not even talking about long-term health hazards like bone necrosis, soaking your body with shit nature never intended to be there.

[He pauses to check his instruments.]

The safest way to dive, to go deeper, to stay down longer, was to enclose your whole body in a bubble of surface pressure.

[He gestures to the compartments around us.]

Just like we are now-safe, protected, still on the surface as far as our bodies’ concerned. That’s what an ADS does, its depth and duration only limited by armor and life support.

So it’s like a personal submarine?

“Submersible.” A submarine can stay down for years, maintaining its own power, making its own air. A submersible can only make short duration dives, like World War II subs or what we’re in now.

[The water begins to darken, deepening to a purplish ink.]

The very nature of an ADS, the fact that it’s really just a suit of armor, makes it ideal for blue and black water combat. I’m not knocking soft suits, you know, shark or other mesh rigs. They’ve got ten times the maneuverability, the speed, the agility, but they’re strictly shallow water at best, and if for some reason a couple of those fuckers get ahold of you… I’ve seen mesh divers with broken arms, broken ribs, three with broken necks. Drowning… if your air line was punctured or the regulator’s ripped out of your mouth. Even in a hard helmet on a mesh-lined dry suit, all they’d have to do is hold you down, let your air run out. I’ve seen too many guys go out that way, or else try to race for the surface and let an embolism finish what Zack started.

Did that happen a lot to mesh suit divers?

Sometimes, especially in the beginning, but it never happened to us. There was no risk of physical danger. Both your body and your life support are encased in a cast-aluminum or high-strength composite shell. Most models’ joints are steel or titanium. No matter which way Zack turned your arms, even it he managed to get a solid grip, which is hard considering how smooth and round everything is, it was physically impossible to break off a limb. If for some reason you need to jet up to the surface, just jettison your ballast or your thruster pack, if you had one … all suits are positively buoyant. They pop right up like a cork. The only risk might be if Zack were clinging to you during the ascent. A couple times I’ve had buddies surface with uninvited passengers hanging on for dear life … or undeath. [Chuckles.]

Balloon ascents almost never happened in combat. Most ADS models have forty-eight hours emergency life support. No matter how many Gs dog-piled you, no matter if a hunk of debris came crumbling down or your leg got snagged in an underwater cable, you could sit tight, snug and safe, and just wait for the cavalry. No one ever dives alone, and I think the longest any ADS diver has ever had to cool his heels was six hours. There were times, more than I can count on my fingers, where one of us would get snagged, report it, then follow up by saying that there was no immediate danger, and that the rest of the team should assist only after accomplishing their mission.

You say ADS models. Was there more than one type?

We had a bunch: civilian, military, old, new… well. . . relatively new. We couldn’t build any wartime models, so we had to work with what was already available. Some of the older ones dated back to the seventies, the JIMs and SAMs. I’m really glad I never had to operate any of those. They only had universal joints and portholes instead of a face bowl, at least on the early JIMs. I knew one guy, from the British Special Boat Service. He had these mondo blood blisters all along his inner thighs from where the JIM’s leg joints pinched his skin. Kick-ass divers, the SBS, but I’d never swap jobs with them.

We had three basic U.S. Navy models: the Hardsuit 1200, the 2000, and the Mark 1 Exosuit. That was my baby, the exo. You wanna talk about sci-fi, this thing looked like it was made to fight giant space termites. It was much slimmer than either of the two hardsuits, and light enough that you could even swim. That was the major advantage over the hardsuit, actually over all other ADS systems. To be able to operate above your enemy, even without a power sled or thruster packs, that more than made up for the fact that you couldn’t scratch your itches. The hardsuits were big enough to allow your arms to he pulled into the central cavity to allow you to operate secondary equipment.

What kind of equipment?

Lights, video, side scanning sonar. The hardsuits were full-service units, exos were the bargain basement. You didn’t have to worry about a lot of readouts and machinery. You didn’t have any of the distractions or the multitasking of the hardsuits. The exo was sleek and simple, allowing you to focus on your weapon and the field in front of you.

What kind of weapons did you use?