Nimitz Class

by Patrick Robinson

  The CO handed over control of the ship to his Executive Officer, Lieutenant Commander Mike Krause, another New Englander from Vermont, and went below to chat with the newly arrived official guest from the Pentagon.

  As they talked, Lieutenant Commander Krause turned Columbia north, to make a wide easterly sweep around the Virgin Islands and Anguilla. By nightfall they would be out in deep Atlantic water, three and three-quarter miles below the keel, all through the Puerto Rican Trench, the submarine running swiftly four hundred feet under the surface.

  Boomer Dunning and Bill Baldridge had much to discuss. They sat in the captain’s tiny cabin, where the submarine commander expressed misgivings about taking out an enemy nobody knew, or had even seen, far less found guilty of anything.

  Bill Baldridge set Boomer straight on that one in short order. “Have no doubts, sir,” he said, agreeably recognizing the seniority of the commanding officer, despite the exalted circles he usually moved in these days. “We have spent weeks and weeks ensuring that there was only one submarine in all of this world which could have taken out the Thomas Jefferson. Every other underwater boat capable of moving forward, above, or below the surface was checked out, over and over.

  “The carrier was sunk by Russian Kilo 630—even the head of Russian Naval Intelligence recognizes that. It was ‘hired’ by the Iraqis for a huge bundle of cash—we think probably 10 million dollars payable to the captain. Most of the money is probably on board now. We even found out which of the old Saddam Hussein accounts it came from in Geneva. We even know how it got to Sevastopol a couple of days before the Kilo sailed. We have pieced it all together bit by bit. The tip-off, informing us where the Kilo will show up, came from an impeccable source.

  “Sir, we do not want to waste much energy worrying about the Kilo’s guilt. We know what it did, and we know the man who commanded it. He’s our problem. He’s an Iraqi, but he operated for years as a submarine officer in the Israeli Navy. He was trained by the Royal Navy in Scotland. He had the Brits’ greatest-ever submariner for a Teacher, and he was the best potential submarine commander that Teacher ever instructed.”

  “Jesus,” said Commander Dunning. “How the hell do you know all this?”

  “By some fluke I’ve been involved right from the start. I was called in originally as a nuclear weapons expert—from there I just never got away from it. But I was proud to do the job. I expect you know my brother Jack was killed in the carrier.”

  “I did, Bill. And I was really sorry to hear that. I met Jack a few times. Just a super guy. And one hell of an officer by all accounts.”

  “Left a big gap in our lives,” said Bill.

  “Did you ever talk to the Teacher about this bastard?”

  “Sure did. For hours at a time. I also got quite a bit of advice from him about the area where we’re headed. He was the submarine sonar officer when the Royal Navy sank the General Belgrano, south of the Falklands twenty years ago. I doubt you need any advice, but he did suggest a few things you might find helpful. I tried to write it all down on the plane from London to Miami, but I was so tired I just fell asleep. I’ll get to it in the next couple of days.”

  “That’d be great. If we’re fighting some kind of a submarine genius we’d better be well coached, I guess.”

  “He may be a genius,” said Bill. “The first thing he did after leaving Sevastopol was to transit the Bosporus underwater.”

  “You’re kidding me? No one’s ever done that, have they?”

  “They have now. Matter of fact it’s getting to be a regular occurrence. Did it myself earlier this week!”

  Bill explained the insistence of the President that someone complete that journey before he would order the U.S. Navy into action against the submarine. “That was before we got the tip-off from the Mossad, and at that time I guess we were looking at a huge expenditure for such a search, over possibly months and months. If, in the end, we found nothing, the President was not anxious to be accused of wasting billions on a scenario that was known to be impossible.”

  “So he sent you guys to make the transit from the Black Sea in a nuclear?”

  “No. We used a Royal Navy diesel, with a British crew, which included the retired admiral who taught the Iraqi.”

  “Was it easy?”

  “It was for a long way. Then it got really tricky. We were almost killed twice in ten minutes. Both times I thought it was all over. I noticed that when we finally got through the second trauma of being mowed down by a twenty-thousand-tonner, the XO’s hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t light a cigarette ten minutes later.”

  “But this Iraqi did it?”

  “Yessir. He did. Then they lost a man overboard in the Greek islands, and he turned out to be a member of the ship’s company of Kilo 630. We heard them accelerate in the Gibraltar Strait on exactly the right date for a submarine moving at eight knots through the Med. Then one of our mail aircraft spotted a ‘feather’ in the Indian Ocean, again on exactly consistent time and date for a submarine making a couple of hundred miles a day.

  “We picked them up very briefly on sonar near the Battle Group. Sent up choppers, laid down a sonar buoy. But he never crossed it. The next day the Jefferson was hit.”

  “Jesus. This guy is really something, right? He actually got through the Bosporus submerged, and got through all of the billion-dollar defenses of a U.S. Battle Group, and vaporized an aircraft carrier?”

  “Correct, sir. He really is something.”

  “Well, Bill, I guess it’s critical we get down there before that Kilo. We want to be waiting right on that position. There’s no doubt in your mind that if we find a Russian-built Kilo down there, it’s gotta be the one?”

  “Commander, I know there is not one Russian-built Kilo on either SUBLANT’s or SUBPAC’s boards within three thousand miles of the Falkland Islands in any direction. Except the one we seek. The Russians are helping us. They have confirmed all other Kilos are at home. The only Kilo that’s going to come rolling past us is Number 630, driven by an Iraqi.”

  “That at least puts my mind at rest. I don’t much want to face my maker one day having dispatched sixty innocent men to their deaths. Meanwhile our rules are pretty simple. We have been cleared to shoot only at a positive ident Kilo. Once we have a good trace on his engines, and we’re dead sure he’s a single-shaft, five-blader, we just have to check the surface to make sure he’s not a Japanese trawler or something. At that point he’s a positive ident. And right after that, he’s a dead positive ident.”

  “That’s it, sir. Sounds easy, right? And I think it would be—but for this homicidal Iraqi maniac at the helm.”

  Commander Dunning laughed. “I’ll tell you something else. No one would ever believe that we were once parked in the middle of nowhere, waiting to shoot live weapons at a passing submarine which exists only as a result of a weird letter from Cairo.”

  “Yeah. That one would be hard to imagine. But we’re correct here. And when you think about it, it is the natural place to go, South America. If you’re on the run. Nazis, train robbers, and God knows who else have headed there after the crime. And, if you were heading across the South Atlantic from the Indian Ocean, you would pass right by the Falkland Islands.”

  “You think we’re going to find that Kilo, Bill?”

  “Yessir. Yes, I do. I think the information we received is golden. I’m told it may have cost the Israeli agent his life. I didn’t ask questions. Some things you just don’t much want to know.”

  For the next five days Columbia rushed along the northern coastline of Brazil, running deep, southeast, all the way down the Guiana Basin, putting six hundred miles behind her every time the sun rose out of the east. It was a sun the crew never once saw rise or set; and, the further south they ran, the fiercer the rays became on the glaring tropical waters above them. But where the Americans traveled there was only darkness, pitch-black water being split apart by the onrushing black hull of the nuclear attack submarine from Norfolk.r />
  At 1900 on Tuesday evening, September 17, Columbia crossed the equator. Three hundred miles later she was somewhere off Cape São Roque, on Brazil’s huge jutting eastern headland. Right there Commander Dunning and Lieutenant David Wingate altered course to due south, for the sixteen-hundred-mile run down to the bright waters off Rio and São Paulo, great South American cities which Columbia would leave eight hundred miles off her starboard beam.

  The only man who ever saw the daylight, albeit for just fleeting seconds, was the CO himself. Every twelve hours he slowed the submarine down and slid up to periscope depth for the routine fast-passage procedure—checking the satellite for messages. Boomer Dunning would order the radio mast raised. The comms room would “suck it right off the satellite” in the merest seconds, and the CO would order Columbia deep again, back into the endless darkness, barreling on south, to meet the rogue Kilo, which had caused such universal agony in the USA.

  All through the headlong rush of the voyage to the Falklands, officers quietly caught up with their paperwork, sailors who had completed their watch played cards and watched videos. Bill Baldridge sat writing his long, detailed report of the Bosporus transit. Sometimes he and Commander Dunning dined together, while Lieutenant Commander Krause took the ship. It did not much matter how hard they tried to vary the conversation, it always came back to the Kilo, the difficulty of sonar-listening near the Burdwood Bank, and the nerve-racking possibility that the Iraqi commander, Benjamin Adnam, would hear them first.

  At 2300 on the night of September 20 they altered course off São Paulo to two-one-five, for the final southwesterly journey down the coast, which would take them past Uruguay and along the vast Atlantic expanse of Argentina. Commander Dunning headed Columbia another hundred miles further east in order to pass the Rio Grande Ridge in deeper water. And from there it was a straight four-day run down to the Falkland Islands.

  They arrived off the eastern coast of the islands in the small hours of the morning of September 24, one day early. Commander Dunning stayed east and deep as he passed the British territory, for whose few people Margaret Thatcher had been prepared to fight a war to the death in 1982.

  “There’s a lot of people I don’t really care much about upsetting,” said Commander Dunning. “But I’d sure hate the Brits to get really pissed off at me, if I was creeping around their island in a submarine without telling ’em. Those guys are fucking dangerous. I’m staying well clear.”

  Bill Baldridge, who was sharing a pot of coffee with him at the time, chuckled. “They know precisely where you are, sir. They’ve been working with us on this almost since the start. They identified Adnam for us.”

  “Just don’t want any misunderstandings,” said Boomer, laughing.

  And now for the first time, he ordered a decrease in speed. They headed south, running at only fifteen knots standard across the sixty-mile expanse of the western end of the Burdwood Bank. For the sonar team, the noise of the shallow water was heightened to a point where everyone understood the impossibility of finding anything over those fish-laden shoals.

  It took them four hours to make the crossing. Commander Dunning came to periscope depth twice, once to take a look at the weather, which was awful, foggy and windy at the same time, with big South Atlantic swells heaving in from the turbulent southwest, where the Atlantic and the Pacific first meet, right off the stark, tormented rock-face of Cape Horn. The second time was to access the comms satellite.

  The crew now deployed the towed-array, the great electronic tail the submarine towed behind—weightless in the water—while on patrol, enabling her sonars to “see” everything in all directions, except the thin triangular cone of water right astern.

  This “blind” spot was dealt with in a strictly routine way. Every few hours, but with careful irregularity, the submarine made a turn to port, or to starboard, to check the stern-arc’s clear. If anything should be stalking her, the sonars picked it up very quickly. They called it “clearing the baffles.”

  With the passive-sonar array strung out behind her, Columbia swung east, running quietly at seven knots, with the giant underwater cliffs of the Burdwood Bank ranged along her port side. Commander Dunning, who now had a copy of Admiral MacLean’s recommendations on his desk, planned to run the whole length of the bank, then set up patrol in the dark shadow of those cliffs. Awaiting the arrival of the Russian Kilo.

  In the mid-afternoon of September 24, he once more accessed the satellite to report his own position and receive any new orders or information. There was one signal. It told them Springfield was on patrol at the eastern entrance to the Magellan Strait. She was 120 miles due east of Cape Virgenes, the jagged headland which separates the coastline of Argentina, allowing free international passage through the strait.

  Charlotte was right on the fifty-fourth parallel north of Cape San Juan, guarding any northeastern approach to the waters off Tierra del Fuego. Asheville was in deep water twenty miles southeast of Cape Horn. All three U.S. submarines were on station in case Columbia should fail. There was no way Kilo 630 was going to round the tip of South America in one piece.

  But the real tension at this stage of the operation was in Columbia, whose CO anticipated the Kilo was probably one day east of the bank now, running at around seven knots, coming up only to snorkel occasionally, to recharge her huge, vitally important battery.

  Commander Dunning and his team reached the eastern end of the bank shortly after 0030 on September 25. They were reasonably sure they had not passed the Kilo, and they knew that if they were too late, it would almost certainly be picked up and caught by one of their three colleagues. Dunning turned his boat back to the west.

  Bill Baldridge had an implicit belief in the validity of the tip-off from Cairo, and did not expect the Kilo to be there before the date and time stated, 1200, September 25, on latitude 54.40S, longtitude60.00W. Right where they now ran, slowly through the dark water.

  The bells of the watch came and went. All through that night and morning, the great electronic ear of the passive sonar swept, unseen, through the icy depths, aimed always into the silence of the deep, away from the racket of the bank itself. The daily “weapons check” report came and went again.

  Every six hours they reported the self-noise check on the array. And Columbia lay in wait, with the noise of the bank behind her, holding what was once called in days of sail, the “weather gauge.”

  When, they all wondered, would the rogue Kilo come sliding eerily out of the deep Southern Ocean? Whenever that was, the Americans had their cover. The submarine running west would be forced to aim his sonars at the noisiest part of the ocean, which obscures, eclipses, and ultimately camouflages the noise of another submarine.

  Boomer Dunning and Bill Baldridge, now together as underwater comrades-in-arms, knew that every advantage was with them in this grim and deadly game of hide-and-seek.

  Noon came and went on Wednesday, September 25. It came and went too, on September 26. Still nothing. The afternoon wore on, and no sound of a softly turning single-shafted five-blader was detected by the sonar room. All through the evening they remained on full alert. The watch changed at midnight. At 0400, Captain Dunning came once more to periscope depth to access the satellite. No messages. All four of the U.S. submarines, in their separate waters, waited alone for the missing Kilo. But it was Columbia which stood bang in the middle of the offensive line.

  Men came on duty for the second watch of the night as Boomer Dunning ordered his submarine deep again, into ice-cold seas in which nothing stirred.

  At 0600 there was a glimmer of activity in the sonar room. Chief Petty Officer Skip Gowans was muttering that he might have heard a very slight rise in the background noise, “just an increase in the level, could been a rain shower, just swishing on the surface. But I thought it was something…give me a few minutes.”

  Lieutenant Commander Jerry Curran was standing right next to him, and at 0604, the chief spoke again. “I have a rise in the level,” he said. “
It’s hard to explain unless it’s the weather.”

  At 0614 an electric charge shot through the submarine…“Captain—sonar…I have faint engine lines coming up on the array. Relative 92. Alter to 135 to resolve ambiguity, please. They fit the sample, sir.”

  “Sonar—Captain…I’ll be right there.”

  Lieutenant Commander Curran crossed the room to the “water-fall” screen on which it was now clear that there were definite engine lines. The computer had already compared them with the Kilo engine sample built into the system. “They fit, sir, no doubt.”

  Boomer Dunning stepped into the room. “Nothing else on this watch?” he said.

  “Nossir, nothing except that zoo up on the bank.”

  “What’s the range?”

  “Not close, sir. Could even be first convergence. The bearing hasn’t moved. I assume she’s coming dead toward.”

  Commander Dunning stepped back outside and talked to Baldridge. “What would your admiral do right here, Bill?”

  “He said to keep moving back off-track to the north, trying to get the bank in behind us, for more noise cover, just in case the Kilo goes completely quiet on us.”

  “Right now he’s snorkeling, on course west, making a lot of noise, for that boat. But we’ll head north as you suggest.”

  Forty minutes passed with agonizing slowness. Bill heard the next call from the sonar room.

  “Solution looks good, sir. He’s still way out to the east, still coming our way. Still snorkeling, not cavitating. So he’s less than nine knots.”

  “One and two tubes ready, sir…we’re about three thousand yards to one side of the Kilo’s predicted track.”

  “Okay,” said Boomer Dunning quietly, as if even the sound of his voice would betray their presence. “I’m going to hold it right here, dead slow…then let him go by, and fire from his stern arcs, so he has zero chance of picking up the firing transient.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Meantime I want to get the best picture I can of his masts at CPA. ‘Posident,’ they said. ‘Posident’ they shall have.”