Kilo Class

by Patrick Robinson

  They accessed the satellite and passed on their position, course, and speed to SUBLANT. “Package retrieved successfully.” Then they “sucked” the messages to them off the satellite, the principal one being SUBLANT’s ice report for the far end of their polar journey, which dealt with conditions in the waters which lie south of the Canada Basin, beyond the permanent limit of the Arctic ice. Right here, opposite Point Barrow in northern Alaska, Columbia would face a 125-mile run across the desperate, frozen wastes of the Beaufort Sea before edging southwest into the equally dangerous Chukchi Sea.

  The variable here is the quality of the summer. If it were warm, Columbia would run into clear water with ice floes floating around occasionally. But if the summer should be bad, with serious heavy ice still there through July, Columbia would face an eighty-mile journey across a half-frozen Beaufort, waters that would force her to stay dived, waters that shelve up treacherously…three thousand meters…then two thousand…then one thousand…then two hundred as they reach the Beaufort Shelf, which protects the northern coastline of Alaska. This short stretch can be a submariner’s horror.

  The news was not good. Boomer could see Mike Krause and Dave Wingate going over the report. Both men were frowning. Boomer too was anxious because of the closeness of the big floes that surrounded the submarine right now. He ordered the ship dived again, and the planesman leveled her out at six hundred feet. Columbia continued to head due north, at high speed, running directly at the ice cap—millions of tons of snarling, frozen ocean that would imprison them for three days. The lives of every man in the submarine were entirely dependent upon the huge, sweetly running GE PWR S6G nuclear reactor.

  With the ship settled on her course, Boomer joined his XO and requested the news from the ice report. “It’s no use pretending, sir,” the Lieutenant Commander from Vermont said. “Conditions in the Beaufort over the far side are on the lousy side of average. Winter stayed too long this year, and the summer has hardly existed. The last hundred miles in toward Point Barrow are the problem. There’s drifting pack ice for the first fifty miles. And it’s not much better for the next twenty or thirty. As you know, sir, that’s when we run into the shoals. There’s no way we can make reasonable speed on the surface, and we don’t want to surface anyway…if we do have to surface, will there be enough clear water for us to keep going?

  “Right here there’s only two hundred feet…what we don’t need is a big pressure ridge, which will force us down to clear the sail from the ice, only to ground the hull on the bottom. Should keep it interesting.”

  Boomer smiled despite the clear and obvious problems that lay ahead. “We’ll just have to play it by ear, and hope to God things are a bit better when we arrive.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  At 2200, on August 24, just north of the 81st parallel, Columbia crossed the permanent ice shelf northeast of Greenland. Six hundred feet under the surface, she passed across the unseen frontier that ends the North Atlantic, and entered the waters of the Arctic Ocean. When next she surfaced she would be in the Pacific Ocean, on the far side of the world.

  As midnight approached, Columbia’s quarry, the two Kilos bound for Shanghai, were a thousand miles to the east, making ten knots on the surface of the Barents Sea in their nine-ship Russian convoy. At 2355 the Kilos were forty-two miles northwest of the headland of the great jutting Russian island of Novaya Zemlya.

  As he headed due north in a straight line under the pole, Boomer was already 250 miles closer to the Bering Strait, where they were all headed. The American was steaming forward at more than double the speed of the Sino-Soviet convoy. If Columbia’s reactor stayed healthy, and the ice cover allowed, the race would be no contest.

  Commander Dunning went to the maneuvering control room at 0030 to visit Lieutenant Commander Lee O’Brien. Boomer found the Chief Engineer on this watch himself, accompanied by his three-man team, including an electrician, and his chief mechanic, Earl Connard, who was at the reactor control panel. O’Brien was concentrating on catching any emergency and monitoring the power—power that sprang from the fission of ancient uranium atoms.

  Lieutenant Commander O’Brien looked up when the Captain walked in. “Hi, sir,” he said cheerfully. “We’re chugging along pretty good right now. Tell the truth, she’s never run better. Dead smooth. Nothing to report.”

  “Good job, Lee,” said Boomer. “We got a ton of depth right here…no objection if we wind her up to thirty knots?”

  “Nossir. That’ll be fine. Sooner we get out of this frozen rat trap the better, right?”

  “That’s my view, Lee. Come up and have a cup of coffee when you’re off watch.”

  Boomer went down two decks to the big bank of machinery that forms part of the ship’s air-purification system. He found engineman Cy Burman at work with a wrench and spanner, making an adjustment to the carbon dioxide scrubber. This is Navy jargon for the wide gray bank of purifiers that controls and keeps down the levels of carbon dioxide, the lethal, insidious gas that would wipe out the entire crew, if anything more than 4 percent is permitted into the air supply. Boomer watched Cy working and reflected that at this moment, as at all times, the man in command of this bank of machines held the lives of everyone in his hands. He stopped and chatted for a few moments, but sensed that the engineman was edgy.

  “Not a major problem, Cy?” he asked.

  “Nossir. Not even a problem…just a small adjustment I’d like to make…no one’s gonna even notice. But while we’re down here, without much prospect of fresh air, I want this thing at maximum efficiency.”

  Less than a hundred miles into the pack, the tension throughout the ship was obvious. Up in the conn, he found the watch crew working quietly together, checking that Columbia held to her course and depth as she raced under the heavy ice.

  From the far side of the compartment housing the navigation systems, Boomer could see the long trace of the fathometer sounding regularly off the ocean floor far, far below. The smooth line of the soundings was a comfort, providing no sense of the deep lonely echoes, bouncing back through ice-cold water, which fell away to a thinly charted ocean bottom almost three miles below the keel.

  The hunched figure of young Wingate could just be seen through the light of the operational area. Right beside him, Boomer could see the yeoman tending the ice detector, waiting for a polynya, watching the stylus rapidly tracing the shape of the forty-foot-thick ice ceiling that stretched with cruel and jagged indifference 480 feet above Columbia’s sail.

  Boomer walked over and joined them, stared at the swiftly moving stylus, and asked, “How’s it going?”

  “Pretty regular, sir, at about forty feet thick,” replied the yeoman. “But fifteen miles back it suddenly went crazy, and drew a huge downward indent, like some kind of a stalactite…must have been nearly a hundred feet deep into the water.”

  “Pressure ridge,” said Boomer. “We have to be really quick on those…not at this depth, because none of ’em are six hundred feet deep. But they can stretch down a hundred and twenty feet, and you really don’t want to hit one of those sonsabitches. They not only look damned ugly, they’re as hard as fucking concrete.”

  “I’ve never been exactly certain what causes them, sir,” Lieutenant Wingate said.

  “Oh, just the pressure of the ice. You imagine two vast floes, millions and millions of tons, crushing into each other from different directions because of wind or current…it just forces the huge ridges downward, and those ridges are our enemy until we reach the north coast of Alaska. When you see a big downward pattern on this little machine, we’re coming up to one of them.”

  “Yessir. By the way, do we expect to see icebergs?”

  “Not really. Not up here. The pack ice above us is too closely rammed together. If you go up in an aircraft above the cap, it looks like a kind of patchwork, a huge pattern, made up of hundreds of big floating jigsaw pieces, some of ’em miles across. They are crammed close but not necessarily joined, not in one solid stretch.
They are separate, and they drift and float, grinding into each other, right up there over our heads, right now. Icebergs are different—they are vast hunks that break off from the land ice shelves, or even off the edge of the polar ice pack…but you don’t find ’em right here because they can’t break off and float. You may get ’em down toward the Bering Strait, lying deep, right where we’re going.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Through the bright northern night, Columbia ran due north up the Lena Trough. By 0700 Lieutenant Wingate had plotted them up over the Morris Jesup Plateau, where the bottom comes sweeping upward for almost a mile and a half, the depth changing steadily from 11,000 feet to only 3,500 feet, until the great underwater plateau provides its unmistakable landmark. Dave Wingate’s fathometer worked steadily as the echoes sounded off the relatively shallow bottom.

  Right there, above the Jesup heights, the navigator spoke to the Captain, and Boomer ordered a course change that would swing them away from their due north bearing. “Conn…Captain…come left slow to 330, maintain speed twenty-five, depth six hundred.” His words would steer Columbia on a course two hundred miles south of the Pole, angling left to 270 across the 86th parallel, in water that would run ten thousand feet deep, but which would avoid the confusion of longitude roulette.

  Boomer decided to run all day at twenty-five knots, and to begin searching for a polynya sometime after 2300. That way he could put Columbia on the surface around midnight in broad daylight, pass the PCS, and take any signal update from SUBLANT. He went over to the navigation room to check their likely position at that time, and was pleased to see they would be right above Hall Knoll, well past the direct line of the North Pole and running very firmly south, instead of north.

  He also decided to get some sleep. At 0800 he handed the ship over to his XO, whose forenoon watch was just beginning. The Captain had been up throughout the night and slept soundly in his bunk for five hours, awakening in time for lunch, which he ordered especially—a bowl of minestrone soup, a rare sirloin steak, salad, and a mountain of french fries, which his wife would undoubtedly have confiscated at birth.

  Boomer grinned privately at his brilliance in outwitting her and sprinkled the fries liberally with salt, another item Jo would have whisked from his hands before as much as a grain hit the plate. Come to think of it, Jo would not have been crazy about the thick blue-cheese dressing that flowed across the salad. There were not many reasons why Boomer was ever glad to be separated from his wife, but right here, in the banquet spread before him, was one of them. It was a fifteen-minute respite from his devotion to her. Commander Boomer chewed luxuriously. Still grinning.

  By 1530, at the halfway point between the Morris Jesup Plateau and Hall Knoll, Dave Wingate had plotted them at their closest point to the North Pole, which lay more than two hundred miles directly off their starboard beam. Right now the gyro-compasses were working perfectly as Columbia crossed the limit of her northern journey. Three hundred miles off their port beam were the northern boundaries of the Queen Elizabeth Islands, the vast snowbound archipelago that sits atop the northernmost coastline of Canada. From here Columbia would be running southward, 550 feet beneath the ice pack.

  The temperature inside the ship was a steady 71 degrees. Inside Columbia, cocooned against the unsurvivable conditions that surrounded them, the living was pleasant, if not easy. Everyone worked in shirtsleeves, and movies were being shown almost continuously in the crew’s mess hall. Above them an Arctic storm was raging. They lacked only one small comfort…the ability to surface at will. Every man knew they were imprisoned by deep pack ice. If their ship faltered, Columbia would quickly become a tomb—unless Boomer and Mike Krause could crash her through the gigantic granite-hard ceiling of ice that held her captive. All through the afternoon they ran on, down to Hall Knoll, above ocean valleys ten thousand feet deep. They were in the middle of it now, way past any point of return. If the reactor were to fail terminally, they could not even make it on the battery to the edge of the pack ice—the distances were simply too great. The crew were aware of the risks, but they tried to conduct themselves as if the situation were normal. But the strain and pressure would not evaporate entirely. Columbia was quieter than usual. It was as if both she, and her crew, were traversing these silent, rarely traveled waters with a still, small voice inside them, warning over and over, “Beware! Beware!”

  From time to time, the sonar had revealed stretches of open water, and there were occasions when the moving ice mass above was plainly breaking up. Some of the floes looked to be around twenty feet across, with small dark channels in between. But as the evening of August 25 wore on, the pack ice seemed to tighten. Dave Wingate and Mike Krause had not seen any sign of a polynya for three hours.

  At 2300 the officer of the deck ordered a five-knot reduction in speed, and the navigator’s assistant went on special alert for the bright light of an Arctic lake. For more than a half hour there was nothing. There was a light blue tint to the water, which suggested the entire ice layer was thinner—though thinner still meant the ice could be as much as ten feet thick. Columbia had run for long hours under drifting chunks as deep as fifty and sixty feet.

  They passed a pressure ridge that cleaved almost a hundred feet down into the water. Boomer ordered the submarine to run at reduced speed nearer the surface, at depth 250 feet and fifteen knots. Forty-five minutes later, Lieutenant Commander Krause was watching the TV monitors when he spotted the bright clear light of a narrow polynya through the ice. He judged it to be a couple of hundred yards long. “That might do…MARK THE PLOT,” he called. “But we have to take it real steady, and be ready to submerge real quick.”

  He then alerted the CO—“We have a possible polynya, sir.”

  Boomer arrived in the conn. “ALL STOP!” he ordered. “Turning back, slowing down for a second look.”

  Columbia made a careful Williamson turn, and Boomer ordered the planesman to head upward slowly, to 150 feet. Boomer ordered the periscope up with fifty feet above the sail, and decided to take a look around himself. What he saw was chilling. Columbia was nearly stationary just under a narrow inverted crevasse—terrifying craggy stalactites of ice, twenty feet thick, jutted down in almost every direction. If she ascended vertically, she might make it through unscathed. One deviation from the vertical, and she would crunch into the ice pilings that guarded the polynya.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Boomer. “Flood her down NOW…we’re outta here.”

  Columbia returned to the safety of the deep and accelerated away. Midnight came and they were still looking for a place to surface. At 0106 Mike Krause saw it—a yawning bright light, which seemed to suggest a polynya with only thin ice on the surface. It was a long open channel, dark blue and a hundred feet wide. Columbia slid right past, even though she was making less than fifteen knots. The helmsman executed another Williamson to bring her back to the polynya as they slowed. It took ten minutes to maneuver her right back under the polynya. Ten difficult minutes before Boomer Dunning commanded, “All Stop…Rudder and planes amidships…check all masts fully lowered…we’re going for a vertical ascent.”

  The ship’s buoyancy was adjusted and the Black Ops submarine began to rise very slowly. The XO had taken over the diving officer’s stand, and the Officer of the Deck, Lieutenant Commander Abe Dickson, stood back ready to help, and to learn from Mike Krause.

  Columbia kept rising. The XO called out the depth, and Boomer checked the TV monitor. He stared into it and was again shocked by the number of twenty-foot-long ice lances jutting down toward him at the south end of the polynya. He called out for Mike Krause to keep the submarine slowly rising. What really concerned him was that he could not discern ripples on the surface water; the picture seemed hard and smooth. Columbia was going to have to bust through the ice. The question was, how thick was it?

  Mike Krause took a look at the TV and said he thought it must be thin, the light seemed so bright. But there was no doubt the polynya had a firm ice crust to i
t, maybe five feet below the surface.

  And then, despite their slow ascent, they hit the overhead ice with a shuddering impact. They smashed it all right, but at what cost?

  Boomer ordered the main ballast tanks blown as Columbia shouldered her way out of the ocean into a trackless twilight of a snowscape at exactly 0127. As they burst upward into the air, blocks of flat ice from the base of the polynya slithered off Columbia’s hull, sliding down and crashing back into the water that now surrounded her. The sail’s ice detector was nonoperational, and it had been so since they slammed into the crust. The XO guessed they’d somehow clobbered the upward-looking fathometer when they had used the sail as a battering ram. “Guess it was a bit thicker than we thought,” he growled. “Christ knows what’s the matter with this…but at least up here we can check it.”

  Boomer ordered the main ballast tanks to full buoyancy before he led Abe Dickson up the ladder, through the two hatches, and out into the Arctic daylight. The air was frigid, and a light wind out of the north wafted across the American submarine with teeth like iced razor blades. Everything was white, flat, and endless. The light was not as bright as it had seemed 150 feet below the ice pack, but the snow was a dazzling white, and Boomer could see for miles.

  Within moments a team of technicians arrived topside to check the fathometer. It took them only a few minutes to ascertain that the transducer had broken upon impact. There were two spares on board. The repair would be carried out in extreme conditions; none of the men would work for more than twenty minutes in these temperatures, crouched on top of the sail, handling tools so cold they could stick to a mechanic’s flesh. The technicians measured the temperature at thirty degrees below zero. They’d need a heat gun to blow hot air while they vulcanized the leads to make a watertight seal after they had completed the electrical joints. Boomer was quite surprised to discover that he was shivering violently after only eight minutes outside, even in his Arctic jacket, pants, hat, and gloves. He ordered everyone below to get fully kitted against the cold.