Kilo Class

through the goddamned ice cap for a further update. In his opinion the die was cast. The Russians were making for the Bering Strait, and so was he. He knew their course, he knew their maximum speed, and he knew their destination. He was going to be there well in front.

He went into the navigation room again and pulled up the big chart that detailed the Arctic oceans. He measured and remeasured. Whichever way he cut it, when Columbia emerged from beneath the permanent ice opposite Point Barrow, he was going to be 600 miles northeast of the Strait. At that precise time, 1130 on the morning of August 27, the Kilos would be 1,200 miles northwest of the Strait, in shallow, icy water approaching the Novosibirskiye Islands in the East Siberian Sea. Unless the conditions on his side of the Chukchi Sea were drastically worse, he would win this race hands down. And there wasn’t a damn thing the Russians could do about it.

The thirty-two hours passed swiftly. The watches came and went, Boomer ate french fries at every meal, and the fathometers kept working, one of them feeling, with its icy fingers, the contours of the far distant bottom. The upward ones ceaselessly sketched the irregular pattern of the ice ceiling above.

It stayed light all the way, and none of the pressure ridges stretched down more than a hundred feet. Shortly after 1100 on August 27, Columbia entered the Beaufort Sea. Though you would not have known it. The ice pack remained solidly above the submarine as Boomer held his course due south and made directly for Point Barrow.

The first fifty miles were routine; the water was never less than three thousand feet deep. But then the bottom began to shoal upward to meet them. Within two hours they were in under five hundred feet. Boomer was not anxious to go farther inshore, and thirty miles short of the Point he ordered a change of course: “Come right to 225…speed twelve…depth two hundred.”

They were approaching the most dangerous part of the journey, the notorious shallows of the Eastern Chukchi Sea. Overhead there was still heavy drifting ice. They had passed two deep pressure ridges in the past hour. What Boomer dreaded most was the possibility of having to dodge both the ridges and possible icebergs, while staying clear of the seabed. In the long waters of the Northwest Alaskan coast leading down to Point Lay, it was possible to run into sixty-five-foot shallows, under a surface laden with massive ice floes.

A bad summer in the Chukchi was as bad as a grim winter off Greenland. The ice tends to break off from the shelves that pack along the coasts of both Alaska and Siberia, and then they drift south. Some of these floes can be two miles across, and they raft up, one climbing over the other, pushing the giant bottom hunk downward to a possible depth of maybe seventy feet, like deep-drafted icebergs. The Chukchi abounds with this kind of hazard, but it is rare in August, and Boomer Dunning cursed his luck that the ice forecasts were so bad.

They pushed on along the coastline of Alaska, when suddenly the stylus on the upward fathometer jumped, sketching swiftly, and apparently recklessly, two giant downward shapes in the water. The yeoman watching the machine called for attention, and Lieutenant Commander Dickson and Mike Krause dead-heated in front of him. “This is a pressure ridge,” said Krause slowly. “Almost certainly rafted ice…but I’m damned if I can make this out…”

He pointed at the next deep-drafted obstacle, jutting down with a jagged edge almost 120 feet from the surface. He studied it for fleeting seconds, and then hissed, “Jesus Christ! It’s a fucking iceberg…and God knows how wide it is.”

By now Boomer was also in there. “Depth?” he questioned.

“Two hundred feet, sir…sounding sixty below the keel.”

“We’ll have to go deeper,” snapped the CO. “Make your speed three knots…take her down…very slowly…no angle…call out speed.”

“Sir…five knots…reducing.”

“Sounding…fifty feet, sir.”

“Three knots, sir.”

“Sounding forty feet, sir.”

Ahead of them in a matter of yards now was the colossal blue-gray bulk of the iceberg, and the recording pen kept racing lower. “ALL STOP!” Boomer ordered. He knew they were committed to slide underneath the iceberg, and he hoped to God not to jam the submarine between the berg and the bottom. If they hit the iceberg, the sail would probably be damaged. The worst scenario would be if they jammed. Death would come painfully and slowly, probably by starvation while the reactor continued to provide endless fresh air, heat, and water.

All four men watched the pens. No one spoke, and Columbia still went forward now at less than a knot. There were fewer than fifteen feet under the keel, and the seven-thousand-tonner crawled forward, periscopes down, masts down, heads down, like a poacher sliding under a protective fence.

But this fence was almost six hundred feet wide, and its base was uneven, and Columbia’s sail was only three feet from the ceiling.

“Sounding ten feet, sir.”

It was tight, but not as tight as it was going to be. The stylus was edging lower, showing a two-foot downward bulge at the base of the ice — not just an outcrop, but a long ridge. Columbia could not turn, or even swerve. She continued to crawl forward.

“Sounding five feet, sir,” the yeoman called calmly as they waited for the shuddering crunch of the sail against the iceberg’s base, or the scrape of shale along their keel.

The two hundred yards beneath the iceberg seemed like an eternity, but all at once the stylus took on a new life and began to draw in a higher line. Columbia edged up off the bottom, and now the line was a dramatic sweep into clear water as the berg slipped away astern. She was through, clambering almost along the bottom, but through.

“Make your speed three knots,” said the Captain. “Planesman, keep her level and plane up to a hundred and fifty feet…we got water above.”

Three hours later, at 0530 on the morning of August 28, Columbia was clear of the heavy ice. There were still intermittent chunks floating around, but it was safe to go to PD in the bright dawn and access the satellite. The signal from SUBLANT was by now routine. The Kilos had been photographed a little over a thousand miles northwest of the Strait — still four days away. Boomer had all the time in the world to position himself for the attack.

He passed his PCS, informing the submarine chiefs in Norfolk that he would swing south off Point Lay and make his way to the narrow radar-swept gap of the Bering Strait, which divides the USA and the former Soviet Union.

There was only a hundred feet of water in here, and there was always ice drifting around, whatever the time of year. Boomer planned to run through the center at PD, then come west toward the Siberian coastline, remaining in the outer limits of American waters, west of St. Lawrence Island. His speed had to be kept low in these shallow waters, and they would need to avoid the rare, but still dangerous, floes that sometimes littered the strait beneath the often choppy windswept surface.

With luck, he would have three or four days to lay his ambush. And it had better be a good one. The Russians had thus far taken inordinate precautions with K-9 and K-10. If they believed the United States might attack again, they would be particularly wary south of the Bering Strait, where American waters run right into Russian waters, and where a US nuclear boat could take out a couple of unsuspecting Kilos with comparative impunity. But K-9 and K-10 were not unsuspecting. They were armed, protected, and ready.

Commander Dunning knew that Columbia might be fired upon. And he knew his crew would have to operate right at the top line of their ability. He thanked God for the one single paragraph contained in his orders that made him truly lethal — the one signed by the Chief of Naval Operations himself, the one cleared by the President of the United States. “In the event of a threatened attack on Columbia, by any foreign power, the Commanding Officer is empowered to use preemptive self-defense.”

Basically this meant he could fire first. Because to fire second might be too late.

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