Kilo Class

feet deep, but which would avoid the confusion of longitude roulette.

Boomer decided to run all day at twenty-five knots, and to begin searching for a polynya sometime after 2300. That way he could put Columbia on the surface around midnight in broad daylight, pass the PCS, and take any signal update from SUBLANT. He went over to the navigation room to check their likely position at that time, and was pleased to see they would be right above Hall Knoll, well past the direct line of the North Pole and running very firmly south, instead of north.

He also decided to get some sleep. At 0800 he handed the ship over to his XO, whose forenoon watch was just beginning. The Captain had been up throughout the night and slept soundly in his bunk for five hours, awakening in time for lunch, which he ordered especially — a bowl of minestrone soup, a rare sirloin steak, salad, and a mountain of french fries, which his wife would undoubtedly have confiscated at birth.

Boomer grinned privately at his brilliance in outwitting her and sprinkled the fries liberally with salt, another item Jo would have whisked from his hands before as much as a grain hit the plate. Come to think of it, Jo would not have been crazy about the thick blue-cheese dressing that flowed across the salad. There were not many reasons why Boomer was ever glad to be separated from his wife, but right here, in the banquet spread before him, was one of them. It was a fifteen-minute respite from his devotion to her. Commander Boomer chewed luxuriously. Still grinning.

By 1530, at the halfway point between the Morris Jesup Plateau and Hall Knoll, Dave Wingate had plotted them at their closest point to the North Pole, which lay more than two hundred miles directly off their starboard beam. Right now the gyro-compasses were working perfectly as Columbia crossed the limit of her northern journey. Three hundred miles off their port beam were the northern boundaries of the Queen Elizabeth Islands, the vast snowbound archipelago that sits atop the northernmost coastline of Canada. From here Columbia would be running southward, 550 feet beneath the ice pack.

The temperature inside the ship was a steady 71 degrees. Inside Columbia, cocooned against the unsurvivable conditions that surrounded them, the living was pleasant, if not easy. Everyone worked in shirtsleeves, and movies were being shown almost continuously in the crew’s mess hall. Above them an Arctic storm was raging. They lacked only one small comfort…the ability to surface at will. Every man knew they were imprisoned by deep pack ice. If their ship faltered, Columbia would quickly become a tomb — unless Boomer and Mike Krause could crash her through the gigantic granite-hard ceiling of ice that held her captive. All through the afternoon they ran on, down to Hall Knoll, above ocean valleys ten thousand feet deep. They were in the middle of it now, way past any point of return. If the reactor were to fail terminally, they could not even make it on the battery to the edge of the pack ice — the distances were simply too great. The crew were aware of the risks, but they tried to conduct themselves as if the situation were normal. But the strain and pressure would not evaporate entirely. Columbia was quieter than usual. It was as if both she, and her crew, were traversing these silent, rarely traveled waters with a still, small voice inside them, warning over and over, “Beware! Beware!”

From time to time, the sonar had revealed stretches of open water, and there were occasions when the moving ice mass above was plainly breaking up. Some of the floes looked to be around twenty feet across, with small dark channels in between. But as the evening of August 25 wore on, the pack ice seemed to tighten. Dave Wingate and Mike Krause had not seen any sign of a polynya for three hours.

At 2300 the officer of the deck ordered a five-knot reduction in speed, and the navigator’s assistant went on special alert for the bright light of an Arctic lake. For more than a half hour there was nothing. There was a light blue tint to the water, which suggested the entire ice layer was thinner — though thinner still meant the ice could be as much as ten feet thick. Columbia had run for long hours under drifting chunks as deep as fifty and sixty feet.

They passed a pressure ridge that cleaved almost a hundred feet down into the water. Boomer ordered the submarine to run at reduced speed nearer the surface, at depth 250 feet and fifteen knots. Forty-five minutes later, Lieutenant Commander Krause was watching the TV monitors when he spotted the bright clear light of a narrow polynya through the ice. He judged it to be a couple of hundred yards long. “That might do…MARK THE PLOT,” he called. “But we have to take it real steady, and be ready to submerge real quick.”

He then alerted the CO—“We have a possible polynya, sir.”

Boomer arrived in the conn. “ALL STOP!” he ordered. “Turning back, slowing down for a second look.”

Columbia made a careful Williamson turn, and Boomer ordered the planesman to head upward slowly, to 150 feet. Boomer ordered the periscope up with fifty feet above the sail, and decided to take a look around himself. What he saw was chilling. Columbia was nearly stationary just under a narrow inverted crevasse — terrifying craggy stalactites of ice, twenty feet thick, jutted down in almost every direction. If she ascended vertically, she might make it through unscathed. One deviation from the vertical, and she would crunch into the ice pilings that guarded the polynya.

“Jesus Christ,” said Boomer. “Flood her down NOW…we’re outta here.”

Columbia returned to the safety of the deep and accelerated away. Midnight came and they were still looking for a place to surface. At 0106 Mike Krause saw it — a yawning bright light, which seemed to suggest a polynya with only thin ice on the surface. It was a long open channel, dark blue and a hundred feet wide. Columbia slid right past, even though she was making less than fifteen knots. The helmsman executed another Williamson to bring her back to the polynya as they slowed. It took ten minutes to maneuver her right back under the polynya. Ten difficult minutes before Boomer Dunning commanded, “All Stop… Rudder and planes amidships…check all masts fully lowered…we’re going for a vertical ascent.”

The ship’s buoyancy was adjusted and the Black Ops submarine began to rise very slowly. The XO had taken over the diving officer’s stand, and the Officer of the Deck, Lieutenant Commander Abe Dickson, stood back ready to help, and to learn from Mike Krause.

Columbia kept rising. The XO called out the depth, and Boomer checked the TV monitor. He stared into it and was again shocked by the number of twenty-foot-long ice lances jutting down toward him at the south end of the polynya. He called out for Mike Krause to keep the submarine slowly rising. What really concerned him was that he could not discern ripples on the surface water; the picture seemed hard and smooth. Columbia was going to have to bust through the ice. The question was, how thick was it?

Mike Krause took a look at the TV and said he thought it must be thin, the light seemed so bright. But there was no doubt the polynya had a firm ice crust to it, maybe five feet below the surface.

And then, despite their slow ascent, they hit the overhead ice with a shuddering impact. They smashed it all right, but at what cost?

Boomer ordered the main ballast tanks blown as Columbia shouldered her way out of the ocean into a trackless twilight of a snowscape at exactly 0127. As they burst upward into the air, blocks of flat ice from the base of the polynya slithered off Columbia’s hull, sliding down and crashing back into the water that now surrounded her. The sail’s ice detector was nonoperational, and it had been so since they slammed into the crust. The XO guessed they’d somehow clobbered the upward-looking fathometer when they had used the sail as a battering ram. “Guess it was a bit thicker than we thought,” he growled. “Christ knows what’s the matter with this…but at least up here we can check it.”

Boomer ordered the main ballast tanks to full buoyancy before he led Abe Dickson up the ladder, through the two hatches, and out into the Arctic daylight. The air was frigid, and a light wind out of the north wafted across the American submarine with teeth like iced razor blades. Everything was white, flat, and endless. The light was not as bright as it had seemed 150 feet below the ice pack, but the snow was a dazzling white, and Boomer could see for miles.

Within moments a team of technicians arrived topside to check the fathometer. It took them only a few minutes to ascertain that the transducer had broken upon impact. There were two spares on board. The repair would be carried out in extreme conditions; none of the men would work for more than twenty minutes in these temperatures, crouched on top of the sail, handling tools so cold they could stick to a mechanic’s flesh. The technicians measured the temperature at thirty degrees below zero. They’d need a heat gun to blow hot air while they vulcanized the leads to make a watertight seal after they had completed the electrical joints. Boomer was quite surprised to discover that he was shivering violently after only eight minutes outside, even in his Arctic jacket, pants, hat, and gloves. He ordered everyone below to get fully kitted against the cold.