Kilo Class

and twenty miles in the Beaufort Sea. If it’s been a warm summer there will be less than one-tenth of the usual ice-covering a hundred miles north of Point Barrow. We’ll still be in a thousand meters of water — and even the biggest pressure ridge in the overhead ice won’t reach down more than a hundred feet from the surface.

“So we’re fine. But, if it’s been a cold summer we may get very open pack ice, one-tenth cover, right down to Point Barrow itself, which means we’ll have to stay submerged. Then, if the conditions below are simply appalling we will have to surface. I’ve been up there when it’s been bad, damned great lumps of ice wallowing around all over the place, and thick fog. You can’t see on the surface and it’s too dangerous underneath.”

“I don’t want to go on the surface at all, unless I can’t help it,” said Boomer. “Still the ice report from SUBLANT will tell us a lot about that before we start. And anyway, we can probably gut it out for a day or so, the ice should clear a few more miles to the southwest, and it is daylight, all the time.”

Lieutenant Wingate wanted more information on the freshwater lakes that stud the Arctic ice cap, especially in summer. They are known by the Russian word polynya, and any submarine trying to get a GPS fix or to communicate while under the ice cap must find one — which can be quite bewildering, as they vary in size from just a few feet wide, to quite large expanses of water hundreds of yards across.

“How do you find them?” the navigator asked.

“With the greatest difficulty,” Lieutenant Commander Krause answered.

“During a crossing like ours, which will be quite fast and stretch over three days, we would expect to see probably half a dozen,” he continued. “The only way to see them is by the light, which is much duller when it’s filtered through several feet of pack ice. But at the polynya the ice is very thin, and the light comes through brightly. Basically we are looking for a bright light in the wilderness directly above. We should be able to see it on the sail TV.”

“Say it’s still a couple of feet thick,” the navigator said. “How do we get through it?”

“We rise vertically and hit it, with the sail…hard.”

“Will the ice break?”

“If it’s thin enough. Then we just pop up into an Arctic lake and take a look around. Get some fresh air.”

“How about if we misjudge it, and the ice is too thick?”

“That’s inclined to be bad news. You kind of bounce off the ceiling a little, and hope to God you don’t damage anything.”

“Jesus…that means you might damage the periscope or a mast…and you’re still trapped.”

“We don’t go up with any mast raised,” said Boomer. “They are all safely lowered, but…yes, Dave…we are stuck below the ice cap until we find thinner ice cover…another polynya. But don’t forget, we do have the upward fathometer, which gives us some idea of the thickness.”

“Guess we’re always looking for the bright spots, correct?”

Mike Krause smiled. “That’s us, Dave. Always looking for the bright spots.”

The Captain reentered the conversation. “When you’re trapped under the polar cap,” said Boomer, “your real problems are apt to be avoidable…and by that I mean fire, radiation, steam leaks, planes control, etc. And, of course, a reactor scram.

“The worst of these is probably a scram…a shutdown of the reactor. The tough part is restarting the damn thing, because right there you’re on battery, which doesn’t last long. There’s just about enough juice for one try at rapid recovery. But if the battery gets exhausted before you can get the reactor moving again, then you gotta run the generators to recharge…and for that we need air…the one item we don’t have. Not without a polynya.”

“So we need to record the position of every one we pass?” said Lieutenant Wingate.

“Just that,” said the XO.

“And that’s my dilemma,” said the CO. “Do I leave the reactor scrammed, and run for the last polynya on battery, or do I risk everything on one throw, using all of our battery power to restart the reactor. It’s a tough one, if it happens. If I get it wrong, we’re dead.”

“Shit!” said the navigator.

“But,” said Boomer, “a far more likely occurrence is fire, or major steam leak. That’s when you really have to get into the fresh air. And right now we should get everyone activated…checking this baby from top to bottom for even the slightest possibility of that kind of trouble. Check, and double-check.”

Columbia continued on its northward course, arriving west of Jan Mayen in the small hours of the morning of August 24. Dave Wingate brought them to the drop point, 72N 10W at 0400, and the Captain ordered the ship to periscope depth to report their position to SUBLANT. The submarine then went deep again. She would begin transmitting at 0550—ten minutes before the US maritime patrol aircraft was scheduled to arrive with their package,

They returned to PD, raised the UHF aerial, and transmitted on Channel 31 pausing for ten seconds every minute to listen for the MPA homing in on the signal. At 0558, they received a reply: “This is Bluebird One-Five…request yellow smoke.”

Boomer ordered it instantly, and way out on the horizon the American aircraft came thundering in at 350 miles per hour, just a hundred feet above the water, reducing the area over which its radio could be intercepted.

The navigator, sitting right next to the pilot, spotted the dense smoke now billowing off the surface of the water. “Okay…Bluebird One-Five…MARK DROP…Now! Now! NOW!..Columbia… over.”

The big waterproof package, stuffed with everything the submarine had requested, hurtled through the air and crashed into the ocean right into the middle of the yellow smoke.

“Bluebird…this is Blackbird…thank you…roger and out.”

The MPA banked hard to starboard and climbed away to the south, back toward the US Icelandic base. The submarine surfaced gently, water cascading off the casing. The deck team hooked the package adroitly. They were back below, with the hatch shut, inside two minutes. And once more Boomer Dunning took the black hunter-killer beneath the long dark swells of the North Atlantic.

They worked all through the day and for most of the night preparing their instruments for the 1,500-mile run beneath the polar ice cap. After 200 miles on course 035 they were in deep water at the northern end of the Greenland Fracture Zone. At that point Boomer Dunning ordered the course change that would bring them into the Lena Trough.

“Conn…Captain…Come left 000. Make your speed twenty-five. Depth six hundred.”

Everyone felt the slight heel as Columbia altered course toward the pack ice that covers the top of the world. Swinging to the north it moved toward the giant floes, which would soon obliterate the light and seal the American submarine in the ice-cold water below.

The Greenland Sea grows deeper as it approaches the ice pack, and as it does so, the ice becomes more frequent. Great chunks, some of them fifty feet across, lurk treacherously just beneath the surface, like jagged concrete blocks ready to smash the sail of any submarine that is running too shallow.

The crew of Columbia could sense the heightened tension among the officers as the big nuclear boat plowed ever northward into block ice that was steadily becoming more dense. At first the floes above appeared only occasionally on the TV screen, but five hours after the course change, with the ship now within fifty miles of the cap, there were so many of these enormous, dark aquamarine hunks rushing by in the dim light above it was almost impossible to find a gap through which the sky could be seen.

Mike Krause found one thirty miles short of the ice cap, right on the 81 degree line. Boomer ordered Columbia to the surface, and she emerged into a field of loose ice, drifting through the light fog that hung over the water. The sun was completely obscured, and visibility was less than a hundred feet. Beneath the keel there was fifteen thousand feet of ocean.

They accessed the satellite and passed on their position, course, and speed to SUBLANT. “Package retrieved successfully.” Then they “sucked” the messages to them off the satellite, the principal one being SUBLANT’s ice report for the far end of their polar journey, which dealt with conditions in the waters which lie south of the Canada Basin, beyond the permanent limit of the Arctic ice. Right here, opposite Point Barrow in northern Alaska, Columbia would face a 125-mile run across the desperate, frozen wastes of the Beaufort Sea before edging southwest into the equally dangerous Chukchi Sea.