Blue, deep and featureless, the twilight of five hundred feet down.
The sound of a Propeller. Materializing out of the blue limbo is the enormous but sleek form of an Ohio-class SSBN ballistic missile submarine.
The U.S.S. MONTANA.
In the attack centre, darkened to womb-red, the crew's faces shine with sweat in the glow of their instruments. The skipper and his EXEC crowd around Barnes, the sonar man.
"Sixty knots? No way, Barnes... the reds don't have anything that fast." The captain snorts.
"Checked it twice, skipper. It's a real unique signature. No cavitations, no reactor noise...doesn't even sound like screws." Barnes defended himself.
He puts the signal onto a speaker and everyone in the attack room listens to the intruder's acoustic signature, a strange THRUMMING. The captain studies the electronic position board, a graphic representation of the contours of the steep-walled canyon, a symbol for the Montana, and converging with it, an amorphous trace, representing the bogey.
"What the hell is it?" the captain asks with wonder.
"I'll tell you what it's not, it's not one of ours." The Exec says.
"Sir!" Barnes suddenly barks with alarm "Contact changing heading to two-one-four, diving. Speed eighty knots! Eighty knots!"
"Eighty knots..." the Exec repeats.
Barnes says with confidence "Still diving, depth nine hundred feet. Port clearance to cliff wall, one hundred fifty feet."
"Still diving, depth nine hundred feet." Frank calls out "Port clearance to cliff wall, one hundred fifty feet.
Tension builds in the attack room as the Montana surges to intercept the intruder. The exec tensely watches the vector-graphic readout for the side-scan sonar array. The sub is running uncomfortably close to the cliff walls.
In a low tone, the Exec says to his Captain "It's getting tight in here".
"We can still give him a haircut. Helm, come right to oh six niner, down five degrees" the Captain barks.
"Coming right to oh six niner, sir. Down five degrees." The Helmsman calls out.
Their Navigator chimes on "Port side clearance one hundred twenty feet narrowing to seventy-five. Sir, we have a proximity warning light."
"That's too damn close! We've gotta back off" the Exec warns.
Barnes shakes his head "Range to contact, two hundred. Contact junked to bearing two six oh and accelerated to... one hundred thirty knots, sir!"
The Exec is really freaked now "Nothing goes one thirty!"
Suddenly the control room lights dim almost to blackness.
We see only the effect, not the source, as a large diffuse light passes rapidly under the sub's hull. Moments later a shockwave, like an underwater sonic boom, impacts the sub, slamming it sideways.
The bride crew are knocked off their feet, as the ship is buffeted.
"Turbulence! We're in its wake!" the Exec cries with alarm.
SIRENS.
Everyone shouting at once.
The power flickers low.
"Helm, all stop!" the Captain commands "Full right rudder!"
"All stop. Full right rudder. Hydraulic failure. Planes are not responding, sir!"
Power returns in time for the sonarman to get a glimpse at the side-scan display... AS THE SHEER CLIFF WALL LOOM BEFORE THEM.
"Hydraulics restored, sir."
The cliff wall materializes out of the blue limbo off the port bow with nightmarish slow-motion. The sub slams into it with horrific force, scraping along and bouncing off. One tail stabilizer is sheared off and the big screw prangs the wall with an earsplitting K-K-KWANG!
With the outer tube-doors torn off, seawater slams in, busting the inner hatches. Two-foot thick columns of water, like fire-hoses of the gods, blast into the room. Everything vanishes instantly in white spray.
Everyone is hurled off his feet. The planesman flights to recover control of the yoke.
The Captain tries to recover his vessel "Collision alarm! Collision alarm! Lighten her up, Charlie!"
"The torpedo room is flooded, sir!"
"Blow all tanks! Blow everything!" the Captain roars.
The Helmsman calls out "Passing twelve hundred feet..."
"Blowing main tanks!"
"Twelve hundred fifty feet..." the Helmsman calls.
The great sub is being hauled down by the mass of its flooded bow section, its flanks rushing past us like a freight train headed for Hell.
The command crew fights futility for control, everyone shouting and terrified.
"Main forward tanks ruptured!" the Exec cries out.
The Helmsman calls "Passing thirteen hundred feet..."
"Too deep to pump auxiliaries!" the Exec warns his Captains.
"All back full!" the Captain yells "All back full!"
The Helmsman is struggling "Answering all back full. Passing thirteen hundred fifty feet... fourteen hundred... fourteen fifty..."
The Captain locks eyes with the Exec amid the din "We're losing her. Launch the buoy!"
The Exec opens the door to a small box and punches a button. A red light comes on. The Captain takes a deep breath.
A tiny transmitter is ejected from the sub's hell and begins its long ascent to the surface. A second later the sub slams down like a piledriver onto a ledge, tearing open its pressure hull.
There are just flashes and impressions, as...
Seawater blasts down the corridors -
Explodes across the control room, hurling men like dolls -
Floods the cavernous missile bay in seconds -
Bursts through hatches into the reactor room -
Blasts men from their spots in a micro-second.
In the cobalt twilight we see the Montana slide down the sea cliff, its hull SCREECHING like the death agonies of some marine dinosaur. Descending in an avalanche of silt, it finally disappears into the blackness below... a blackness which continues almost straight down, 20,000 feet to the bottom of the Cayman Trough. The abyss.
Above, in the world, the Caribbean rolling gray under a stormy sky. The Montana's emergency buoy pops to the surface, transmitting.
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.
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20 MILES AWAY
Three massive Navy Sea King helicopters thundering along.
They barrel toward a lone civilian ship... an ugly but very sophisticated deep-sea drilling support ship, the BENTHIC EXPLORER.
It is a twin-hulled monstrosity with a central opening in its deck, around which crouch enormous cranes, winches and other arcane equipment.
The first Sea King settles onto the helipad, disgorging a contingent of Naval officers, technicians, and a squad of armed seamen. A pantomime in the rotorwash, we see the Benthic Petroleum "company man" Kirkhill greeting Commodore DeMarco, the on-scene commander.
The bridge is state-of-the-art, with computers and sophisticated navigation and communications gear, looking like mission control with its bank of video monitors. The Drilling Operations Supervisor, Leland McBride, and Bendix, the crew chief, watch the invaders swarming the deck below.
"Does not look good at all." McBride says flatly to the room.
Divers are working in total blackness around some sort of installation on the bottom of the ocean. They move through the harsh floodlights in dreamlike slow motion, looking like space-suited figures with their helmets and umbilical hoses.
"No light from the surface. How deep are they?" DeMarco asks.
"Seventeen hundred feet." McBride answers.
The Navy contingent is crowding the control room. DeMarco is hardcore military, brusque and efficient. Kirkhill is a small man with pinched features, wearing a shirt and tie, which on a drill ship means company man and/or dickhead.
"I need them to go to over two thousand." DeMarco demands.
"They can do it." Kirkhill says confidently, then turns to McBride "Get Harkness on the line."
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.
.
1700 FEET BELOW. A submersible oil-drilling platform, TORCHWOOD II, an island of light in the vast blackness. Its main framework connects two "tri-modules" consisting of three cylinders each. These contain living and work areas in a pressurized environment. An umbilical cable, thick as a man's thigh, runs up from the oil rig into the darkness, to the Benthic Explorer at the surface. In a bubble-like dome port window we see the rig foreman, or "toolpusher," JACK HARKNESS. He's talking (via headset) with two divers working outside... 'John Hart, and Lew 'BIRD-DOG' Eugene.
"Hey, you guys are milking that job." Jskc is accusing them.
"That's cause we love freezin' our butts off out here sooo much, boss." John drawls.
Jack turns from the window and crosses the drill floor. The working heart of the rig. The drill crew, in hardhats and mud-splastered overalls, tend the massive spinning turn-table in the centre of the
chamber. The semi-automated system requires only five men to operate. The others are Lupton Harris, Dwight Perry, Jammer Willis, and Tommy Ray Dietz. Jack hears his names called above the din by Jammer, a massive roughneck/diver who stands a good head taller than the rest.
Jammer was yelling "Jack! Owen's on the bitch-box. It's a call
from topside. That new company man."
"Kirkhill?" Jack snorts "That guy doesn't know his butt from
a rathole. Hey, Perry!"
One of the roustabouts, a wiry Texan, turns to him.
"Do me a favor and square away the mud hose and those cable slings. This place is starting to look like my apartment."
Perry chuckles and sets to the task cheerfully. Jack exits, ducking his head through a low watertight hatch.
Jack tromps down the narrow corridor, his work boots gonging on steel.
Owen's voice can be heard "JACK, PICK UP THE TOPSIDE LINE URGENT."
"I'm coming. Keep your pantyhose on." Jack said as he enters his office, a tiny cubicle with stacks of paperwork, dust-gathering tech manuals and water stained Penthouse fold-outs.
He picks up the phone... punches down a line. "Harkness here. Kirkhill? What's going on? (pause) I am calm. I'm a calm person. Is there some reason why I shouldn't be calm?"
Jack's expression is darkening, as he listens.
.
..
.
The control module is a long narrow cabin like the inside of a Winnebago, packed with instrumentation. At the end is a small bay with multiple viewports. Outside, at a 'Christmas tree' pipe installation, a lone diver can be seen welding. He is accompanied by a large submersible, Flatbed, and by a Remotely Operated Vehicle, or ROV, called Little Geek. Little Geek is an underwater robot which operated on the end of a cable-like a control Tether.
It has a single video 'eye' in front, by which the operator pilots the little machine. The rig's ROV pilots is OWEN Harper, who stands by the window twiddling his joysticks and drinking coffee. His pet white rat, Janet, crawls contentedly around his shoulders. The door BANGS open.
Owen jumps, slops his coffee. Jack strides in. Not calm.
"Son of a bitch." Jack snarls.
He kicks a chair out of the way and slams his palm down on a switch marked Diver Recall. A Siren, blasting through the water from a big hydrophone loudspeaker. "All divers. Drop what you're doing. Everybody out of the pool."
Flatbed's pilot, Toshiko Sato, can be clearly seen behind a bubble canopy. She is a no-nonsense lady who holds her own in the mostly male environment by being one of the best submersible drivers in the business. She controls a hydraulic manipulator arm, assisting the diver, Arliss 'SONNY' Dawson, in his work. Little Geek hovers around them like a tiny helicopter. Toshiko moves the Flatbed arm to Sonny and hands him the pipe.
"Here you go, hon'." Toshiko croons.
"Just in time, sugar." Sonny says in that camp way that tells us their affection was platonic.
They react to Jack's recall, looking toward him up in the control module.
"Dammit, we just got out here." Toshiko sighs.
"There was a time when I would have asked why." Sonny agrees.
Toshiko makes a grab for his butt with the manipulator claw, which he narrowly avoids.
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.
.
Flatbed moves underneath the rig, a few feet above the seafloor, with Sonny riding on its top deck. It passes under a lit opening and rises toward the surface of the water in the chamber above. Little Geek follows like an obedient dog.
The opening in the sub-bay is called the moonpool, and Torchwood's submersibles are launched through it. From inside the sub-bay it looks just like a swimming pool.
Flatbed surfaces, nearly filling it. The chamber also contains CAB ONE, a similar submersible. Jammer, Perry, and some of the other drill-room boys are helping the divers out of the water. The water at this depth is only about six degrees above freezing, and these folks are cold and prune-fingered.
Eugene pulls off his demand-helmet, revealing a round, boyish face. "What's goin' on? How come we got recalled?"
"Hell if I know." Sonny shrugs back as Toshiko jumps 'ashore' from Flatbed's broad deck and joins them. John is unzipping his bulky dry-suit.
John says with authority "Just follow standard procedure, will ya... flog the dog till somebody tells us what's happening."
Jammer yells "Hey, John, I'll sell you my October Penthouse for twenty bucks."
"Save you money, darlin'..." Toshiko laughs "the pages are all stuck together by now."
Jack enters, approaching the group.
"What's goin' on, Boss?" Jammer demands.
"Folks, I've just been told to shut down the hole and prepare to move the rig." Jack informs them with open annoyance.
"She-hit." Sonny groans.
Jack holds his hands up as he orders "We're being asked to cooperate in a matter of national security. Now you know exactly as much as I do. So just get your gear off and get up to control. There's some kind of briefing in ten minutes."
The whole rig crew is somehow jammed into the room for the video briefing.
DeMarco is on the main monitor, with his aides and Kirkhill visible "At 09:22 local time this morning, an American nuclear submarine, the USS Montana, with 156 men aboard, went down 22 miles from here. There has been no contact with the sub since then. The cause of the incident is not known."
The reactions of the various drill crew members... shocked, hushed, curious.
DeMarco continues to speak "Your Company has authorized the Navy's use of his facility for a rescue operation. The code name is Operation Salvor."
"You want us to search for the sub?" Toshiko asks.
"No." he answers "We know where it is. But she's in 2000 feet of water and we can't reach her. We need divers to enter the sub and search for survivors, if any."
Jack's scowl has been deepening since DeMarco started to talk. "Don't you guys have your own stuff for this type of thing?"
By the time we get our rescue submersible here the storm front will be right on us. But you can get your rig in under the storm and be on- site in fifteen hours. That makes you our best option right now.
Owen, born suspicious and recently graduated to paranoid, leans forward "Why should we risk our butts on a job like this?"
Kirkhill answers "I have been authorized to offer you all special-duty bonuses equivalent to three times normal dive pay."
John blurts out "Hell, for triple time I'd crawl through razor blades and shower off with lime juice."
"I'm here to tell ya', you could set me on fire and call me names." Eugene nods.
"Look, I don't know what kind of a deal you guys worked out with the company, but my people are not qualified for this... they're oil workers." Jack says, still not convinced about this.
DeMarco continues to speak like Jack just didn't "A four-man SEAL team will transfer down to you to supervise the operation."
Jack is angry now as he snarls "You can send down whoever you like, but I'm the toolpusher on this rig, and when it comes to the
safety of these people, there's me... then there's God. Understand? If things get dicey, I'm pulling the plug."
Kirkhill nods as he agrees " I think we're all on the same wavelength, Harkness. Now let's get the wellhead uncoupled, shall we?"
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.
.
Jack stands beside the hatchway as the others file out toward their tasks.
"When Ianto finds out about this, it's not gonna be a pretty sight." Jammer hisses to Toshiko.
"They're going to have to shoot him with a tranquilizer gun." Toshiko snorts, "Wish we could see it."
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.
A single Navy Sea King churns through the rain under massive thunderheads. The sea below is whipped by the storm.
Four pairs of black military size twelves line up, and... a pair of Oxfords with bright red socked ankles.
A four-man team of Navy SEALs. And a slender man in his early thirties. he's attractive, if a bit hardened, dressed conservatively in a suit and tie. Meet Ianto. Project Engineer for Torchwood. He's a pain in the ass, but you'll like him.
Eventually.
He's holding on grimly, sitting crammed in with the SEALs and a bunch of gear, getting tossed around by the storm. The SEALs are dressed alike in black fatigues. They are muscular, finely-tuned and extremely dangerous special-forces types. The leader of the SEAL team, Lieutenant Saxon, makes his way forward to the cockpit.
The pilot is white-knuckling his stick, trying to hold the great beast of a helicopter in position. Through the windshield, the deck of the Benthic Explorer can be seen below, pitching in a violent sea.
The pilot yells "No way I'm putting her down. I shouldn't even be flying in this shit."
"Just hold it over the deck." Saxon replies calmly.
Saxon goes back to the crew deck, moving easily in the bucking craft. He nods to the others SEALs, Monk Davison, and Schoenick. In the open side door, Davison clips a 100 foot nylon rope to the airframe and throws out the coil. One by one the shoulder the gear-bags, grab the rope, and step out. Ianto stands swaying in the chopper door, watching the SEALs fast-roping to the deck. One, two, three.
Saxon looks at him. "You want to be on that ship, there's only one way it's going to happen".
He's sure Ianto won't go for it. It's his certainty that gets him. Ianto sets his jaw. Then grabs the rope and slides down.
Swinging wildly in the wind like a human pendulum, Ianto fast-ropes forty feet to the deck. he steps away an instant before Saxon hits behind him.
Ianto crosses the rain swept deck with athletic strides not waiting for the men to follow him. His trousers are soaked in the short time it takes to cross the expanse. An air-crewman in the chopper lowers two additional equipment cases using the rescue sling. The SEALs catch them as they swing radically across the deck. The Navy chopper banks and seems to scurry away before the mounting storm.
Ianto does not need permission to come aboard.
This is his fucking boat!