Kilo Class

by Patrick Robinson

  Boomer did not know what additional shore defenses the Taiwanese might have, but he took the view that his surveillance project had to be conducted with unerring care. He had specific orders to shoot only in accordance with the international rights of self-defense, and to remain undetected. He proposed to carry out these instructions to the letter.

  However, the Commanding Officer of Columbia shared none of the general cheerfulness that was apparent in the rest of the crew. When they came within a hundred miles of Kerguelen he proposed to change their mind-set drastically. Until then he was perfectly happy for the videos to run, and for Abe Dickson to overbid his hand with reckless disregard for the conventions of the game…a criticism Admiral Arnold Morgan all too obviously leveled at Boomer himself.

  Fort Meade, Maryland. On October 26 Admiral George Morris made his morning report by telephone to the NSA’s office in the White House. His statement was the same as it had been yesterday, and the day before. As it had been every day since October 15, when the satellite’s photograph shot at 1500 local had shown K-10 missing from its berth in Canton.

  “Not a sign of the damned thing, sir. If it’s been running at nine knots it could be nearly twenty-five hundred miles from base now. And it could have headed in any direction—back to the north or anywhere else. Beats the hell out of me.”

  “And me, George. Of course it might just be circling Taiwan, or even on patrol up around South Korea…that’s the whole trouble with the little bastard…you can’t see it, and you sure as hell can’t hear it at its low speed. Who knows? Let me know if anything shows up. I don’t like that little sonofabitch out there on the loose.”

  Columbia cleared the Australian Antarctic Rise at 2100 on the night of November 2 and came steaming in toward Kerguelen, from the east, at 0100 on November 5. Seven hours later, a hundred miles off the Courbet Peninsula, still running at six hundred feet, the Commanding Officer addressed the ship’s company over the public address system.

  “This is the Captain speaking, and as you all know we will soon be approaching the island of Kerguelen. I want to alert everyone that I do not regard this search-and-find operation as strictly routine and without danger.

  “A couple of years ago a Woods Hole oceanic research ship vanished with all hands around the island of Kerguelen, our present destination.

  “Some of you may have read the reports of the tragedy, in which twenty-nine people were lost. In my view the Cuttyhunk was attacked. And it may have been attacked by some foreign Navy patrol craft, which was here to protect the guys we’re trying to locate. In short, it may also try to attack us, and we don’t know if it is carrying any antisubmarine kit, depth charges, or mortars, but if I was in charge of protecting something here in these narrow seaways, I sure as hell would be!”

  That received a predictable burst of laughter. But the Captain continued, “Let’s face it, guys, no one is a match for us. We’re the best, and we’re in the best ship. But my orders are specific—we’re here to search and locate and report. We’re not here to attack anything.

  “So let’s just get our heads straight. We might be in dangerous waters, so we need to stay in peak form…keep our eyes and ears open at all time. Let’s conduct this search like the professionals I know we all are. We are not here to attack, except in the event of a clear and obviously aggressive action against us—one which we judge to be ‘them or us.’ Because there is always only one answer to that—not us.”

  Everyone liked that. “That’s it. Let’s get to it.” The CO concluded, “The search begins at 0800, first light. I intend to take nothing for granted. We don’t know who or where our enemy may be. But we sure as hell want to see him before he sees us. That’s all.”

  Columbia slipped through the cold dark waters beneath a howling Antarctic gale and came to periscope depth, nine miles off the high granite headland of Cape George, the southeastern tip of the Island. With the wind out of the northwest, there was some lee farther inshore, but not out here, and the US submarine wallowed in the big swells with thirty feet between trough and crest.

  “Can’t see much in this,” growled Boomer. “Who has the conn?…Okay remain at PD…continuous visual IR and ESM lookout. I’m gonna survey the south coastline…we’ll probably have to go in closer to see anything…bottom’s about three hundred feet here…watch the fathometer…don’t go inside two hundred feet and don’t trust the chart—it’s old, and probably suspect.”

  They steamed through the grim, gray day and again came to periscope depth. Boomer could see the towering, forbidding southeastern coastline of Kerguelen. The weather had improved and the sea was calmer in the lee, but the light was poor and the sky overcast. The sun had not yet lit up the granite cliffs of the great curved hook of Cape George.

  Peering through the periscope, Boomer took a few seconds to acclimatize himself to the sullen, hostile magnificence of this dreadful place. It was a feeling he had not encountered since last he stared at the rock face of Kerguelen seven months ago. And he remembered it well. He shuddered and handed the periscope to the watch officer.

  While the weather held, his plan was to move quietly westward along the southern coastline at periscope depth. They would run at five knots, using passive sonar with a constant IR and ESM watch. At this latitude there would be eight hours of daylight between 0800 and 1600. Boomer would search all night, using his infrared, picking up not so much light as heat. And heat was probably his best chance. He decided to spend forty-eight hours on the south coast, which was more than seventy miles long. Then turn north up the forbidding eighty-mile-long windward west coast, beyond Cap Bourbon.

  The south yielded nothing. Except the French Met Station. And all through the two days and two nights, Columbia rolled and pitched through the water like a stranded whale in the mountainous seas. They broke more cups and plates in the wardroom than they had all year as the submarine struggled through conditions for which she was not best designed. Twice they lost trim and broached to the surface, and Boomer finally ordered them to seven knots, which gave them better control.

  Mike Krause noted that even the names of places were in tune with their mission: Cape Challenger, Savage Bay, plus a succession of deep fjords, guarded by heavy, heaving swells at the entrances, powerful enough, said Lieutenant Wingate, to capsize an oil tanker.

  At the end of the second run along the south coast, Boomer considered the task well and truly completed. They had observed nothing of any interest, and the CO had not even seen a fjord or a bay through which he would care to navigate—the Bay of Swains, Larose Bay, and the twelve-mile-long fjord of Baie de la Table looked to him lethal. “If the Taiwanese were hiding in one of those, they deserved their fucking atom bomb or whatever it was,” thought Boomer. “Poor bastards’ll never get out alive.”

  At dawn on November 7, Boomer turned Columbia north off Cap Bourbon. In Mike Krause’s opinion, the chart was showing one of the most treacherous coastlines in the world—strewn with jagged islands upon which survival was out of the question. They were strewn with craggy uneven rocks, just above and below the surface. Strewn no doubt with the skeletons of ships and their masters, who over the centuries had run out of luck in weather conditions that were usually frightful.

  They steamed past the Îsle de l’Ouest, staring in awe at the snowcapped 2,200-foot Peak Philippe d’Orleans, which rose up over the western headland of the island, six miles from the mainland. Lieutenant Wingate informed the CO they should remain at least seven miles from the shore for the next twenty miles because of the treacherous rocky shoal that lies three miles off the entrance to the Baie de Bénodet and the Baie de l’Africain. Full of submerged rocks, its foul ground extended for over two miles.

  As Columbia passed by in a force six westerly, leaving the shoal safely to starboard, Boomer could see through the periscope the huge swells become white breakers, driven shoreward before the wind, thundering into the shallow waters of the ridge, three miles offshore. “Holy shit,” said the CO. “What a place
. You couldn’t hold a surface ship in that water…you’d just get driven onto the rocks.”

  So another day and another night passed in their slow, tortuous journey, searching for a place that could never be—a place inhabited by human beings and a place where natural life was unthinkable, unless you were a seagull or a penguin. But the job had to be done, and Boomer, laboriously and doggedly, did it.

  At the end of the light on November 8, they passed the Îles Nuageuses, the Cloudy Islands, right off the northwest point. But no shelter awaited them there, and Boomer turned away to starboard, to the deeper water near the huge rock Captain Cook had named Bligh’s Cap. As always, the Global Positioning System provided precise navigational data, and Boomer knew that without it, the entire search would have been a nightmare.

  Then, on a new, dark, gale-swept morning, they headed southeast for Cap Aubert in the event that the Taiwanese had set up shop in a cave or a tunnel facing due north.

  By midday it was growing dark, and Boomer Dunning elicited a groan from Lieutenant Commander Dickson, who was manning the periscope, by observing that he was probably the first man in history to be looking for a tunnel at the end of the light.

  With the weather building ominously to the northwest, they ran on past Cap d’Estaing for another five miles, swung wide around the shoals, and ducked down the fifteen-mile-long fjord of Baie de Recques, where the water was a couple of hundred feet deep and relatively calm, sheltered from the weather.

  The storm raged for the rest of the day and all night, with great blizzards of snow and sleet slashing across the water. Tucked right in the lee of the north shore, Columbia hardly noticed it. The following morning, November 10, they emerged to a brighter day, and Boomer elected to make a seventy-mile journey east-southeast right out beyond the kelp beds, which extend to Cape Sandwich on the distant easterly limit of the island. From there he would drive slowly back, working around the islands of the Golfe des Baleiniers and Baie de Rhodes, before arriving close to Cox’s Rock.

  This was the landmark in his mind, the black sea-swept hunk of granite he and Bill Baldridge had been able to see at the seaward end of Gramont when Bill had spotted the periscope. That was the only real signpost he had, and the latest communication from SUBLANT suggested that the Taiwanese Hai Lung 793 might show up in these waters in a week’s time.

  This would give him ample time to make a thorough search of the archipelago in the heart of Kerguelen, and to get back into position to observe the incoming Taiwanese by November 18. This time, of course, he would not need to see the Dutch-built submarine’s periscope to know it was present. The sonar system in Columbia would pick up the noise of hull 793 in a heartbeat. Or less.

  And so, for almost a week, Boomer and his team groped around the windswept waterways to the northeast. They stayed at PD and spent much time avoiding kelp beds and making sure they stayed clear of rocks. David Wingate seemed to be glued to his charts. They crept back and forth down the Baie de Rhodes, traversed the short channel up to the mouth of Baie de Londres. They circumnavigated Howe Island, and Gramont, both ways. But they heard not a sound. The only good news was a satellite signal from SUBLANT, which informed the Commanding Officer that Columbia would not be reporting to the Arabian Gulf and would be returning to New London at the conclusion of the Kerguelen patrol, on November 19. Christmas at home, thank God, Boomer thought. And a unique circumnavigation of the world, too. Though they could never claim it.

  At dusk on a bright November 16, Boomer ordered them to a position two miles north of where he and Bill Baldridge had seen the periscope from the deck of Yonder, in the Gulf of Choiseul. If the Hai Lung should show up, they had a fair-to-middling chance of locating it, but it was not an ideal position for a watchful submarine. The inner waters of this relatively narrow bay, surrounded by land from the north-northwest all the way south and back to the northeast, were a real headache for a sonar operator. So was the relatively shallow water—six hundred feet max—not to mention the constant threat of a rough sea.

  Lieutenant Commander Krause did not like it, and Boomer felt very uneasy. That evening he and Jerry Curran spent much time discussing the problem until finally the CO said bluntly, “You know, Jerry, if that Dutch sonofabitch came sneaking through here at night, in a sea, we might never see her, and we might not even hear her. She could just go right by and we’d never know…there has to be a better way.”

  “I know it’s a pain in the ass, sir, but I think we should get right out of here, a hundred and fifty or so miles back out to the northeast, beyond the big shoal area, where there’s deeper, quieter water and we can probably pick up an incoming snorkeling submarine as far out as the second convergence, thirty miles plus. It’s hopeless right here, too noisy, too shallow, and too confining. If we can get a decent distance offshore, in the open sea, the Hai Lung has much less chance of getting past us, if he’s on a direct course from Bali, which of course he must be. And if he is snorkeling, which he is quite likely to be.”

  “You’re right, Jerry…we’ll move our operational area right now. We’ll be in good shape before midnight and we’ll follow the Taiwan boat right in, soon as she goes by.”

  “Make your speed eight knots…steer 000. Abe, I want you to go on up here for twelve miles, then come right to 060, out to the two-hundred-meter line.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Columbia cleared Choiseul Bay at 2106 and headed back up the track northeast, back along the route they knew the Hai Lung must follow if it were bound for the same spot where Boomer and Bill had observed the periscope the previous February.

  The Americans reached their patrol area, just south of the forty-seventh parallel at seventy-two degrees east and waited, for a patient twenty-four hours. The trouble was, the Hai Lung did not show up, and they patrolled slowly all through November 17, the sonar men silently watching the screens and listening.

  That evening was scheduled to be their next to last in the Kerguelen area, and Boomer knew he would soon have to access the satellite, report their plan, and request permission to leave on November 20.

  But at 2224 on November 17, a charge of excitement shot through the ship. Boomer was in the navigation area when a sudden voice from the sonar room stopped him dead. It was the sonar officer, Lieutenant Bobby Ramsden. “We’re getting something, sir,…slight rise in the background level…it’s difficult to explain…but I don’t believe it’s weather.”

  A few minutes went by. With Boomer now in the sonar room with Lieutenant Commander Curran, the young sonar Lieutenant spoke again. “Faint engine lines coming up. Relative ninety-two. Alter to one hundred thirty-five to resolve ambiguity.”

  Columbia slewed around. Ten minutes later, the bearing was resolved at 053. The “waterfall” screen was now showing definite engine lines. The computer was flashing the information through its brain, comparing the lines to the bank of examples they carried. Jerry Curran was monitoring three screens simultaneously, and when he spoke, a bolt of electrified emotion shot clean up Boomer Dunning’s spine.

  “Hell, sir, this is a Russian…the computer says right here we got the engines of a goddamned Kilo.”

  “The computer doesn’t know its ass from its elbow,” commented the Commanding Officer, softly. “It’s K-10.”

  “Might I ask with due respect how we know that, sir,” asked Lieutenant Commander Krause, who had just materialized, as he was prone to do at critical moments.

  “You sure can,” said Boomer. “Because that’s the only one it could be…no other nation which owns a Kilo, except China, has the remotest interest in being anywhere near Kerguelen. If it did, Fort Meade would know.

  “Besides ourselves, China is the only nation truly exercised by Taiwanese activity. They own four Kilos now. And Fort Meade knows where three of them are…two in Zhanjiang, and one in Shanghai. The fourth, K-10, is missing according to our latest satellite. It left Canton on October 15, three days after the Hai Lung. But it was a bit nearer, and it’s a bit faster…trust me, Mike,
the engine lines on that screen are the lines of K-10.” And then he grinned and added, “The one that got away.”

  “What now, sir?”

  “We stay clear, watch him from a safe distance. He might know something we don’t. But the Hai Lung is still our first objective.”

  This was the first sign of life Columbia had encountered since passing a tramp steamer in the Tasman Sea three weeks previously. Every eye in the control center was focused on the computer screens.

  Commander Dunning, who had watched and waited patiently for so many days, was standing next to the periscope, and he snapped out his first urgent command since the Kurils. “Come left 350. I wanna stay ten thousand yards off track.”

  “Three-five-zero, aye.”

  Lieutenant Commander Curran spoke next. “This, sir, looks like a little task for our new sonar tracking system.”

  “Oh yeah…the one where we blunder around disguised as a porpoise.”

  Lieutenant Commander Curran laughed. “Yessir, that’s the one. And I do understand your skepticism, but it’ll work. I’ve seen the trials. We can ping the intruder on active sonar for as long as we wish, and he’s never gonna know we’re here.”

  “Of course, if it doesn’t work,” replied Boomer, “we might be a bit too dead to know whether it worked or not.”

  “Sir, it won’t malfunction. It’s just regular active sonar, but when it pings the Kilo they’ll think it’s a porpoise singing, or a shrimp farting, or a whale copulating…we can vary the sound all the time. Honestly this thing is one big miracle. It’s designed for active tracking…it’s perfect for us right now. Just so long as we don’t use it regular or too often.”

  Commander Dunning, who was accustomed to believing that active sonar alerts your enemy, shook his head. “I guess so, Jerry. But don’t be wrong, for Christ’s sake. Something tells me the Chinese in K-10 are likely to be trigger-happy, and I’d prefer them not to open fire right back down the beam of the fucking singing porpoise.”