Kilo Class (1998)

by Patrick Robinson

  “When your aims are achieved, clear area immediately and report. Further action, in event your success, still under consideration.”

  151200OCT. China’s newest Kilo Class submarine left Canton and ran fair down the Pearl River for fifty miles, past the twin cities of Kowloon and Macau, which stand on opposite banks guarding the huge Chinese estuary. Beyond the myriad of tiny islands that litter the hectic expanse of the South China Sea, the Kilo dived and headed east, making nine knots. It would take her three and a half days to clear the northern point of the Philippines, before turning south for the distant Lombok Strait and then Kerguelen. Captain Kan Yu-fang was in command.

  151936OCT. USS Columbia headed south down the long, historic waters of Pearl Harbor. On the bridge, wearing his dark blue jacket against the evening chill, Commander Boomer Dunning stood next to the navigator, Lieutenant Wingate, and his XO, Lieutenant Commander Krause. They had a long, long journey in front of them—11,700 miles. The nuclear boat would run at around 550 miles a day. They would be oblivious to the very worst the Southern Ocean could throw at them. The waters they would travel would be cold and deep, but calm—more than three hundred feet below the surface. Lee O’Brien had the reactor running perfectly and Columbia was in top condition. Had he not been in such bad shape with the President’s National Security Adviser, Boomer would have been at ease with the world. He knew that the NSA would not have instructed Admiral Mulligan to forward that withering, coded judgment unless he had been absolutely furious. Boomer felt somewhat defenseless about the whole incident; it was all true. He could have hit the fucking Typhoon. God, wouldn’t that have been awful? Trust Morgan to comprehend with slicing clarity Boomer’s derelictions.

  The incident was still manifest in the minds of everyone concerned. There had even been a satellite signal from SUBLANT 15 minutes before they left, informing the Commanding Officer, personally, that K-10 had cleared its berth in Canton and was heading along the Pearl River. Destination unknown.

  Despite his jacket Boomer shivered as Columbia shook off the Hawaiian Islands and pressed on down the Pacific. At 2030 he cleared the bridge with his two officers and took the submarine down, where she would stay—all the way down the east coast of Australia, around Tasmania, and along the Southern Ocean to the frozen hellhole of an island he had once visited, under more agreeable circumstances.

  God knows what I’ll find, he thought. “I just better do exactly as they say, and no more. My career’s probably shot anyway. And I may not make Captain. I just don’t really wanna return to New London as a civilian.”

  The Chinese Intelligence Service pressured their field officers in Taipei for more and more information. It trickled through slowly to the office of General Fang Wei. By October 24 there was no longer any doubt—the Taiwanese were developing a nuclear capability somewhere among the three hundred islands of the Kerguelen archipelago.

  The General met with Admiral Zhang at Naval Headquarters in Beijing and aligned him with the latest information, some of which dealt with secret deliveries to the submarine base of heavily guarded containers from two of Taiwan’s nuclear power stations. It was plainly uranium.

  Zhang spent another two hours studying the detailed chart of Kerguelen, compiled under the supervision of the Royal Navy’s hydrographer, Rear Admiral Sir David Haslam. At 1630 he drafted a signal for his friend and colleague Admiral Zu Jicai in the south. It ordered him to transmit the following message to the Kilo:

  Locate and destroy Taiwanese laboratory/factory on Kerguelen. Avoid southeast area near French weather station at Port-aux-Français (49.21N 70.11E) on southern coast of Courbet Peninsula. West coast also unlikely, high coastal terrain and unprotected from prevailing Antarctic weather.

  Most likely area big bays to the northeast—Gulf of Choiseul, Rhodes Bay, and Gulf of Baleiniers. Possible ex-French nuclear submarine reactor power source could assist detection. Use whatever means necessary to complete destruction of Taiwanese facility.

  Except for her daily communications routine at periscope depth, Columbia ran deep at around twenty knots all the way. By October 18 Boomer had covered 1,600 miles and was almost across the Central Pacific Basin. The submarine passed the Fiji Islands on October 21, and three days later entered Australia’s Tasman Sea. By noon on October 26 she was off Hobart, Tasmania, on latitude forty-five degrees, south of the big hotel on Storm Bay where Boomer and Bill Baldridge had delivered Yonder on the last day of February.

  Ahead of them was 3,500 miles of the Southern Ocean, which in late October was subject to wild swings in weather patterns, often culminating in raging gales and mountainous seas. All of which Columbia would treat with supreme indifference.

  The Black Ops submarine ran swiftly westward on the Great Circle route toward Kerguelen. The atmosphere was relaxed, as it had been ever since they burst clear of the Arctic pack ice. They had survived the submariner’s nightmare of being trapped under the water, and for most of them, this routine search of a desolate island was kid’s stuff. They were not going to shoot anyone, and no one was going to shoot them. They could slide up to the surface whenever they wished. The weather might be god-awful, but all weather is sublime compared to being trapped under the ice. Life in the nuclear hunter-killer was more relaxed than it had been at any time since they had left New London almost twelve weeks ago.

  They had renewed their supply of videos at Pearl, everyone was tanned and fit, and Lieutenant Commander Curran, in partnership with Dave Wingate, was in the process of winning a long-running contract bridge tournament, in which all other contestants were like lambs to the slaughter. “Jerry’s got fucking X-ray eyes,” was the verdict of Lee O’Brien, the mathematician of the engine room, who found it incomprehensible that anyone could count the cards, as they were played, more accurately than he could.

  The only other serious bridge player in the entire crew was Chief Spike Chapman, the highly trained ship’s systems boss, who worked long hours at the console that controls every mechanical and electrical function in the submarine, except for propulsion. He could count the cards and he could play well, but his regular partner, Lieutenant Commander Abe Dickson, tended to bid rashly, and even as a guest in the wardroom, Chief Chapman was occasionally heard to sigh, “Jesus Christ, Abe, sir…couldn’t we play it safe…just once?” His barely controlled exasperation caused everyone to fall about laughing, as the Deck Officer set off up the mountain of seven hearts before finding out that three would have been a more realistic contract.

  The Commanding Officer was not a bridge player. Which was just as well because Boomer had been very self-absorbed throughout the journey, not really at all like his usual self. His closest officers in the crew were slightly baffled by this, but then, none of them had read the communication from Admiral Arnold Morgan.

  But there was something more on the mind of Commander Dunning. And it was a feeling of general unease about Kerguelen. He was the only man on board who had been there, and he was the only man on board who had taken a serious interest in the mysterious disappearance of the Cuttyhunk. Boomer was normally rock solid in his judgments, and he never mislaid a truly salient fact. With regard to the disappearance of the Cuttyhunk, Boomer had concluded, there was just such a fact, and he had recorded it—the last satellite message of radio operator Dick Elkins: “MAYDAY…MAYDAY…MAYDAY!!…Cuttyhunk 49 south 69…UNDER ATTACK…Japanese…”

  As far as Boomer was concerned this meant Cuttyhunk had most definitely come under attack, otherwise the radio operator would not have dreamed of sending such a highly charged communication. The fact that the signal had ended with such brick-wall finality was compounded by the undisputed fact that the entire ship’s company plus even the ship itself, plus all of the scientists, had vanished.

  It was obvious to Boomer that Elkins’s Japanese were plainly Taiwanese, the group for whom he now searched. They had clearly attacked the Cuttyhunk with some fairly heavy-duty hardware. Their motive was equally conspicuous in Boomer’s mind: simple fear of dis
covery. The Woods Hole research ship had certainly posed no military threat.

  If the Taiwanese had not hesitated to open fire on US citizens and either sink or confiscate their ship, they would not hesitate to open fire on Columbia. And he already knew they had submarines in the area; he and Bill Baldridge had seen one with their own eyes.

  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 ext
ended 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.