Kilo Class

Arnold Morgan left Fort Meade in a hurry, taking the satellite photographs with him. He headed straight to the helicopter pad and strapped himself into the big US Marines Super Cobra that had been sequestered for his own personal use. The pilot had been ordered into the air from the Marines Air Station at Quantico, Virginia, and told to fly twenty-five miles up the Potomac to the White House grounds to pick up the President’s National Security Adviser. The Quantico station chief, responding to the great man himself, had his Ready-Duty chopper up and flying inside nine minutes. The pilot was now on the move again, for the third time that morning, lifting off from Fort Meade while Admiral Morgan sat glowering behind him, alone in the sixteen-seat helicopter. “Step on it, willya,” Morgan muttered.

The chopper arrived at the Norfolk headquarters of the US Navy in less than twenty minutes. A staff car awaited its arrival. Arnold Morgan strode into the Black Ops Cell at SUBLANT at 1410 precisely. Admiral Dixon waited alone, attended by just his Flag Lieutenant. The CNO was expected any moment.

“We’re in the crap right here,” said the NSA.

“I guessed as much by your phone call. What’s happened?”

“K-9 and K-10 have sailed under a four-ship escort plus a big missile submarine, an icebreaker, and a replenishment ship. They’ve made a break for it along the northern Siberian coast. Right now they’re headed due east at eight knots. They are not going anywhere near the North Atlantic, and Columbia cannot catch them. We’re at least twelve hundred miles behind, and as you well know, pursuit would be impossible up there in shallow waters, close to the ice edge.”

“Damn,” said Admiral Dixon. “That puts us right behind the power curve.”

“Sure does. I checked out the possibility of sending Columbia the other way, via the Panama Canal and then north up the Pacific. But it would take three weeks minimum. I’m assessing the Kilos will be through the Bering Strait in thirteen or fourteen days…here…take a look at these photographs…satellite picked ’em up about a hundred miles east of Murmansk.”

“Hmmmm. There’s the two Kilos on the surface. What’s that? A goddamned Typhoon? Look at the size of that baby!”

“I’ve looked. It’s a Typhoon all right. Still the biggest submarine ever built, right?”

“Christ, Arnie, that’s no submarine escort. They’d’a used an Akula.”

“No. I agree. They must be making an interfleet transfer from the Northern to the Pacific, and just held up the journey for a few days, so it could travel with the convoy.”

“And how about these surface warships? They’re major escorts by any standard. What’s the name of the big guy out in front?”

“That’s the Admiral Chabanenko, a nine-thousand-ton guided missile destroyer.”

“How about these two? They look a lot the same?”

“Right. Two Udaloy Type Ones. We think the Admiral Levchenko, and the Admiral Kharlamov. Similar in size, both with a hot ASW capability. All based in the Northern Fleet, going on a very special long journey.”

“And this one here, in the rear?”

“Guided-missile frigate, the Nepristupny, a four-thousand-ton improved Krivak, probably their most effective small ASW ship class.”

“Jesus. And how about this fucking thing out in front?”

“Giant icebreaker, the Ural, can smash its way through just about anything.”

“Christ. They’re not joking, are they? They really want those Kilos to reach Shanghai, wouldn’t you say?”

“They sure do. But what really pisses me off is that I should have anticipated this. They often send convoys along the northeast passage at this time of year. And what a goddamned obvious ploy…and it never crossed my mind they would do anything except run down the Atlantic with a big escort. I think I might be going soft. That bastard Rankov.”

Admiral Dixon smiled despite the seriousness of the situation. He walked to the chart drawer and pulled up the big Royal Navy hydrographer’s four-foot-wide blue-yellow-and-gray map of the Arctic region. He spread it on his sloping chart desk and measured the distance from Murmansk to the Bering Strait — just less than three thousand miles. “If they make a couple of hundred miles a day at eight knots it’s going to take them exactly two weeks,” he said.

“And if Columbia set off now at flank speed she’d gain a lot of ground…” He paused and measured again. “But not enough,” he concluded. “He’d have to run north to lay up with them across the Bear Island Trough…then the Russians, with that damned great icebreaker, will angle even farther north, to the edge of the pack ice, passing the tip of this long island right here, what’s it called?…Novaya Zemlya…then there into the Kara Sea…and, Christ! It gets really shallow in there…then they’ll angle into Siberia to get into the easier shore ice. Right there Boomer’d be in deep shit, there’s no way he’d catch them…the goddamned water’s only a hundred and fifty feet deep up by the Severnayas, and if he was going fast he’d be leaving a big wake on the surface.”

“Looks damned narrow up there, too.”

“Sure does. And up toward the northern ice edge it will be very difficult. You can’t see the fucking stuff on sonar. And all the time the ice is grinding and snarling and fucking you about. If you put your periscope up, there’s a good chance it’ll get bent by a chunk of ice.

“See this, Arnie. Right after Severnay it gets even more lousy — more shallow, and covered by ice. Right there, Columbia would be well behind the eight ball, strapped for speed. More or less powerless, probably with no idea where the Kilos were, except from us, with the next choke point the far side of the Bering Strait.”

He was about to go on when the door swung open and Admiral Mulligan walked into the room. “Okay, gentlemen. Lay it on me. Give me the bad news,” he said, seeing the concerned faces of his two colleagues.

Admiral Dixon outlined the situation as Joe Mulligan moved over to the chart desk where the SUBLANT commander had already marked up significant points of depth and ice. He studied it carefully. “You’re right, I’m afraid. There’s no way Columbia could run fast enough for long enough to catch them up there. That part of the ocean is a damned nightmare along the edge of the pack ice…you can’t see, you can’t hear, and it’s so shallow you can’t run away if you get caught. Where are the Kilos now? Right here…yes. The situation is nearly hopeless.”

“Nearly, sir?” said the submarine chief, with exaggerated deference, knowing perfectly well what was coming.

“There is a way out of this…I think we might have to ask Commander Dunning and his team to make a trans-polar run, straight under the North Pole…dive the boat in the Atlantic, and come out in the Pacific.”

The three men were silent for a moment. As exsubmariners they were well acquainted with the complexities of these trans-polar runs. They had been made by nuclear submarines in the past, but rarely. And some had failed, stopped by the ice and shallow water in the northern approaches to the Bering Strait. There is, of course, no land at the North Pole — nothing for a submarine to hit. The Arctic is just a vast floating ice cap. The ocean beneath it is twelve thousand feet deep in some places, but a whole lot less in others.

One of the original explorers likened the picture to a twelve-foot-high room. “The ceiling is the base of the ice cap…the floor, the ocean bed. Now imagine a matchstick suspended six inches from the ceiling…that’s the nuclear submarine running dived right across the top of the world.”

The Arctic Circle is nothing like the Antarctic, which is a continent. Land. Valleys and mountains. The Arctic does not exist except as shifting, floating ice, under which is mostly very deep water.

Admiral Mulligan spoke again. “We’ve done a lot of work up there over the years…much of it still based on the first polar transit underwater by a US nuclear boat more than forty years ago… Nautilus, commanded by Andy Anderson. The trouble is you need time to prepare for these journeys, and Columbia’s got none.”

“What’s the timing factor?” asked Admiral Morgan.

“Lemme see…Boomer makes twenty knots all the way under the ice, across the north of Greenland, Iceland, and Alaska…could arrive Point Barrow in northern Alaska seven and a half days from right now. The Russians cannot make better than ten knots on the surface in those conditions. They should get to