Kilo Class

“And if we want to stay alive, we better make absolutely certain every member of this crew operates right at the top of his game,” said Boomer. “We got a great ship, the best there is. It’s a privilege to serve in her, for all of us. But this time, we’re gonna have to earn that privilege the hard way.”

On August 6 Admiral Zhang Yushu picked up the secure internal telephone in his office at Xiamen. It was late afternoon, and Admiral Zu Jicai, on the line from the South Sea Fleet Headquarters in Zhanjiang, spoke slowly and deliberately. “We have them, sir. Picked them up at 1425…8.30 south 115.50 east, up at the north end of the Lombok Strait. Must be hull number seven nine four, departed Suao July twenty-third. The ACINT located her making seven and a half knots southwesterly, submerged. She was right on time, sir, two weeks out, with three weeks to run. That will put her in Heard Island, or the McDonalds, or Kerguelen, twenty-one days from now. We assess she must be heading for one of those three places. Nowhere else fits her sailing pattern so well.”

“Thank you, Jicai. Leave it with me for a while, will you? I’d like to study the charts. I’ll call you back at around 1830.”

The Chinese Commander in Chief walked across to his chart drawer and pulled out the big blue, white, and buff-colored ocean map, compiled by the Royal Australian Navy. On the lower right side it showed the sprawling West Coast of Australia itself. Six hundred miles northwest of the Great Sandy Desert it showed the Lombok Strait. Admiral Zhang traced his finger expertly southwest over the contours of the vast waters south of the Strait, muttering to himself all the while. “Right here…over the Java Trench in ten thousand feet of water…then over the Wharton Basin, where it’s close to eighteen thousand feet deep…on southwest…past the East Indiaman Ridge, where it’s still nine thousand feet deep…then just press on southwest all the way to the islands. The Hai Lung makes two hundred miles a day…the distance is…let’s see…forty-four hundred miles…that puts her off the McDonalds twenty-one days from now…as the good Jicai said, right on time.”

And now the Admiral abandoned his charts and walked back to his desk, where there awaited him a new volume of the Antarctic Pilot, the Royal Navy publication that charts the entire coast of the Antarctic and “all islands southward of the usual route of vessels.”

He turned first to the great sloping plateau of the main McDonald Island, located at 53.03N, 72.35E. It was an odd-looking rock, three-quarters of a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide, rising from 30 meters above sea level to 120—a great slab of granite at an awkward angle. Tall, stark, frozen, with no hiding place. “If the Taiwanese are burrowed inside that rock making a hydrogen bomb, my name’s Chiang Kai-shek,” growled Admiral Zhang.

He turned the page to the ten-mile-by-five-mile volcanic rock of Heard Island, with its huge circular mountain, Big Ben, located at 53.06S, 73.31E. The Admiral did not think much of that as a site for a secret nuclear facility either. For starters the place was covered in permanent ice throughout the year, but worse, there were frequent reports that the nine-thousand-foot cone of Mawson’s Peak was belching smoke. “If I was about to make an atomic bomb,” he muttered, “I would not do it in the foothills of a volcano threatening to erupt.”

His sailor’s eye, skimming through the reports compiled by the Royal Navy’s hydrographers, also noted that landing anywhere on the steep and unforgiving Heard Island would be a nightmare, except in the calmest of weather. “Forget about that place,” he concluded. “That leaves Kerguelen…and when I think about it, it has to be Kerguelen…the place is comparatively large, full of coves, fjords, landing sites, anchorages, steep-sided bays to lee of the worst weather, and a thousand places to hide. The Pilot even suggests German warships were in there during World War II.”

Admiral Zhang pondered his problem for a while and then decided, “You could search for a hundred years all over that jagged Kerguelen coastline, and you might never find what you were looking for. Unless the factory you were after was being powered by the reactor of a nuclear submarine…our own submarine might find that…the new Kilo with the latest Russian sonar would be even more likely…I am certain of that.”

They took Columbia’s nuclear reactor critical at 0800 on the morning of August 7. The big dock lights alongside had burned until the sun had risen out of the Atlantic. Deep in the engine room Lieutenant Commander Lee O’Brien was watching the power level of the reactor come up to self-sustaining as they gently bumped the rods out…until the nuclear power plant was ready to drive Columbia’s two mighty thirty-five-thousand-horsepower turbines. Lee O’Brien worked in the most threatening part of the ship. But he knew, like his number two, Chief Rick Ames, that outside the heavily shielded reactor room there was less radiation than Boomer Dunning would have encountered strolling along the beach in Cotuit.

Shortly after 0800 O’Brien and Ames hit their first snag — an electronics fault in the automatic reactor shutdown control. It was not a serious problem in itself, but the repair would involve shutting down the reactor, replacing the defective board, testing it, then reinitiating the whole reactor start-up process. Columbia’s sailing time of 1400 was shot.

Lee O’Brien looked calm, but those who knew him well were aware that the big Boston Irishman was on edge. He hated an equipment failure near the plant, even when it represented only the tiniest crack in their Columbia’s safety defenses. He hated telling the CO that his equipment had failed. In his eyes that was the same as admitting he had failed. It was this near-fanatical attention to detail and zealous sense of responsibility that made him one of the most trusted men in the ship.

Lee O’Brien told the CO he recommended they delay departure for four hours, and clear New London at 1830. Boomer agreed, left the engine room, and headed to the wardroom for a cup of coffee. Except for the engineers the delay left the crew with little to do but wait. They would write letters home, but since this operation was Black, they would not be mailed by the Navy until the mission was completed, aborted, or failed.

After lunch Boomer retired to his cabin for half an hour. The room was small and Spartan, containing just his bunk, a few drawers, a small wardrobe, a desk and chair, and washing facilities, which folded into the bulkhead. It was the only private place in the entire ship — a miniature office with a bed. The commanding officer was not a man for undue sentiment as his wife knew all too well, and he had never before written a last-minute message to Jo. He had always considered that to be an action which might tempt providence, and he did not understand sailors who drafted out their wills in the hours before departure, but he knew many did. Nonetheless he took a piece of writing paper and an envelope from his attache case and with the utmost sadness sat down and wrote in the brief terse sentences of his trade the language of which he knew no other.

My darling Jo. If you are reading this, it means that our great love has ended the only way it ever could. We have always understood the realities of my career, and as you know I have always been prepared to die in the service of our country. I go to meet my Maker with a clear conscience, and my courage high.

I am not very good with words, but I want you to know that I spoke to Dad’s lawyers today and that everything is in order for you and the girls. You have no worries. The house in Cotuit is yours, and the Trust is in place.

Just to say again, I love you. Think of me often, darling Jo. You were always on my mind. Boomer.

He sealed the note in an envelope, and addressed it in block capitals, TO BE DELIVERED TO MRS. JO DUNNING IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH. He carefully signed it, Commander Cale Dunning, USS COLUMBIA.

He then left the ship and walked across to the executive offices and deposited the letter. The Navy clerk nodded and filed it. Boomer did not see the nineteen-year-old salute him as he walked out of the door and strode out to take command of the US Navy’s Black Ops submarine. It was just 1600.

Back on board he decided to address the crew on the internal broadcast system at 1730, one hour before departure. He made a few notes, then briefly visited Lee O’Brien. The reactor was back on line and the secondary systems were in the final stages of warming through. There were no further problems.

At 1710, Lieutenant Commander Krause alerted the crew that the Captain wished to speak to everyone before departure. At 1730 the deep baritone voice of Boomer Dunning ran through the ship’s intercom system.

“This is the Captain. We are heading out on an important mission today. It begins now, and it will take us across the Atlantic into the GIUK Gap. I know that most of you were with me earlier this year when we carried out an operation against two submarines that had been judged by the President and the Pentagon to be potential enemies of the United States. As you know we prefer to kill the archer rather than the arrow, which is why we