Kilo Class

The variable here is the quality of the summer. If it were warm, Columbia would run into clear water with ice floes floating around occasionally. But if the summer should be bad, with serious heavy ice still there through July, Columbia would face an eighty-mile journey across a half- frozen Beaufort, waters that would force her to stay dived, waters that shelve up treacherously…three thousand meters…then two thousand…then one thousand…then two hundred as they reach the Beaufort Shelf, which protects the northern coastline of Alaska. This short stretch can be a submariner’s horror.

The news was not good. Boomer could see Mike Krause and Dave Wingate going over the report. Both men were frowning. Boomer too was anxious because of the closeness of the big floes that surrounded the submarine right now. He ordered the ship dived again, and the planesman leveled her out at six hundred feet. Columbia continued to head due north, at high speed, running directly at the ice cap — millions of tons of snarling, frozen ocean that would imprison them for three days. The lives of every man in the submarine were entirely dependent upon the huge, sweetly running GE PWR S6G nuclear reactor.

With the ship settled on her course, Boomer joined his XO and requested the news from the ice report. “It’s no use pretending, sir,” the Lieutenant Commander from Vermont said. “Conditions in the Beaufort over the far side are on the lousy side of average. Winter stayed too long this year, and the summer has hardly existed. The last hundred miles in toward Point Barrow are the problem. There’s drifting pack ice for the first fifty miles. And it’s not much better for the next twenty or thirty. As you know, sir, that’s when we run into the shoals. There’s no way we can make reasonable speed on the surface, and we don’t want to surface anyway…if we do have to surface, will there be enough clear water for us to keep going?

“Right here there’s only two hundred feet…what we don’t need is a big pressure ridge, which will force us down to clear the sail from the ice, only to ground the hull on the bottom. Should keep it interesting.”

Boomer smiled despite the clear and obvious problems that lay ahead. “We’ll just have to play it by ear, and hope to God things are a bit better when we arrive.”

“Aye, sir.”

At 2200, on August 24, just north of the 81st parallel, Columbia crossed the permanent ice shelf northeast of Greenland. Six hundred feet under the surface, she passed across the unseen frontier that ends the North Atlantic, and entered the waters of the Arctic Ocean. When next she surfaced she would be in the Pacific Ocean, on the far side of the world.

As midnight approached, Columbia’s quarry, the two Kilos bound for Shanghai, were a thousand miles to the east, making ten knots on the surface of the Barents Sea in their nine-ship Russian convoy. At 2355 the Kilos were forty-two miles northwest of the headland of the great jutting Russian island of Novaya Zemlya.

As he headed due north in a straight line under the pole, Boomer was already 250 miles closer to the Bering Strait, where they were all headed. The American was steaming forward at more than double the speed of the Sino-Soviet convoy. If Columbia’s reactor stayed healthy, and the ice cover allowed, the race would be no contest.

Commander Dunning went to the maneuvering control room at 0030 to visit Lieutenant Commander Lee O’Brien. Boomer found the Chief Engineer on this watch himself, accompanied by his three-man team, including an electrician, and his chief mechanic, Earl Connard, who was at the reactor control panel. O’Brien was concentrating on catching any emergency and monitoring the power — power that sprang from the fission of ancient uranium atoms.

Lieutenant Commander O’Brien looked up when the Captain walked in. “Hi, sir,” he said cheerfully. “We’re chugging along pretty good right now. Tell the truth, she’s never run better. Dead smooth. Nothing to report.”

“Good job, Lee,” said Boomer. “We got a ton of depth right here…no objection if we wind her up to thirty knots?”

“Nossir. That’ll be fine. Sooner we get out of this frozen rat trap the better, right?”

“That’s my view, Lee. Come up and have a cup of coffee when you’re off watch.”

Boomer went down two decks to the big bank of machinery that forms part of the ship’s air-purification system. He found engineman Cy Burman at work with a wrench and spanner, making an adjustment to the carbon dioxide scrubber. This is Navy jargon for the wide gray bank of purifiers that controls and keeps down the levels of carbon dioxide, the lethal, insidious gas that would wipe out the entire crew, if anything more than 4 percent is permitted into the air supply. Boomer watched Cy working and reflected that at this moment, as at all times, the man in command of this bank of machines held the lives of everyone in his hands. He stopped and chatted for a few moments, but sensed that the engineman was edgy.

“Not a major problem, Cy?” he asked.

“Nossir. Not even a problem…just a small adjustment I’d like to make…no one’s gonna even notice. But while we’re down here, without much prospect of fresh air, I want this thing at maximum efficiency.”

Less than a hundred miles into the pack, the tension throughout the ship was obvious. Up in the conn, he found the watch crew working quietly together, checking that Columbia held to her course and depth as she raced under the heavy ice.

From the far side of the compartment housing the navigation systems, Boomer could see the long trace of the fathometer sounding regularly off the ocean floor far, far below. The smooth line of the soundings was a comfort, providing no sense of the deep lonely echoes, bouncing back through ice-cold water, which fell away to a thinly charted ocean bottom almost three miles below the keel.

The hunched figure of young Wingate could just be seen through the light of the operational area. Right beside him, Boomer could see the yeoman tending the ice detector, waiting for a polynya, watching the stylus rapidly tracing the shape of the forty-foot-thick ice ceiling that stretched with cruel and jagged indifference 480 feet above Columbia’s sail.

Boomer walked over and joined them, stared at the swiftly moving stylus, and asked, “How’s it going?”

“Pretty regular, sir, at about forty feet thick,” replied the yeoman. “But fifteen miles back it suddenly went crazy, and drew a huge downward indent, like some kind of a stalactite…must have been nearly a hundred feet deep into the water.”

“Pressure ridge,” said Boomer. “We have to be really quick on those…not at this depth, because none of ’em are six hundred feet deep. But they can stretch down a hundred and twenty feet, and you really don’t want to hit one of those sonsabitches. They not only look damned ugly, they’re as hard as fucking concrete.”

“I’ve never been exactly certain what causes them, sir,” Lieutenant Wingate said.

“Oh, just the pressure of the ice. You imagine two vast floes, millions and millions of tons, crushing into each other from different directions because of wind or current…it just forces the huge ridges downward, and those ridges are our enemy until we reach the north coast of Alaska. When you see a big downward pattern on this little machine, we’re coming up to one of them.”

“Yessir. By the way, do we expect to see icebergs?”

“Not really. Not up here. The pack ice above us is too closely rammed together. If you go up in an aircraft above the cap, it looks like a kind of patchwork, a huge pattern, made up of hundreds of big floating jigsaw pieces, some of ’em miles across. They are crammed close but not necessarily joined, not in one solid stretch. They are separate, and they drift and float, grinding into each other, right up there over our heads, right now. Icebergs are different — they are vast hunks that break off from the land ice shelves, or even off the edge of the polar ice pack…but you don’t find ’em right here because they can’t break off and float. You may get ’em down toward the Bering Strait, lying deep, right where we’re going.”

“Aye, sir.”

Through the bright northern night, Columbia ran due north up the Lena Trough. By 0700 Lieutenant Wingate had plotted them up over the Morris Jesup Plateau, where the bottom comes sweeping upward for almost a mile and a half, the depth changing steadily from 11,000 feet to only 3,500 feet, until the great underwater plateau provides its unmistakable landmark. Dave Wingate’s fathometer worked steadily as the echoes sounded off the relatively shallow bottom.

Right there, above the Jesup heights, the navigator spoke to the Captain, and Boomer ordered a course change that would swing them away from their due north bearing. “Conn…Captain…come left slow to 330, maintain speed twenty-five, depth six hundred.” His words would steer Columbia on a course two hundred miles south of the Pole, angling left to 270 across the 86th parallel, in water that would run ten thousand