Kilo Class

next to the navigator, Lieutenant Wingate, and his XO, Lieutenant Commander Krause. They had a long, long journey in front of them—11,700 miles. The nuclear boat would run at around 550 miles a day. They would be oblivious to the very worst the Southern Ocean could throw at them. The waters they would travel would be cold and deep, but calm — more than three hundred feet below the surface. Lee O’Brien had the reactor running perfectly and Columbia was in top condition. Had he not been in such bad shape with the President’s National Security Adviser, Boomer would have been at ease with the world. He knew that the NSA would not have instructed Admiral Mulligan to forward that withering, coded judgment unless he had been absolutely furious. Boomer felt somewhat defenseless about the whole incident; it was all true. He could have hit the fucking Typhoon. God, wouldn’t that have been awful? Trust Morgan to comprehend with slicing clarity Boomer’s derelictions.

The incident was still manifest in the minds of everyone concerned. There had even been a satellite signal from SUBLANT 15 minutes before they left, informing the Commanding Officer, personally, that K-10 had cleared its berth in Canton and was heading along the Pearl River. Destination unknown.

Despite his jacket Boomer shivered as Columbia shook off the Hawaiian Islands and pressed on down the Pacific. At 2030 he cleared the bridge with his two officers and took the submarine down, where she would stay — all the way down the east coast of Australia, around Tasmania, and along the Southern Ocean to the frozen hellhole of an island he had once visited, under more agreeable circumstances.

God knows what I’ll find, he thought. “I just better do exactly as they say, and no more. My career’s probably shot anyway. And I may not make Captain. I just don’t really wanna return to New London as a civilian.”

The Chinese Intelligence Service pressured their field officers in Taipei for more and more information. It trickled through slowly to the office of General Fang Wei. By October 24 there was no longer any doubt — the Taiwanese were developing a nuclear capability somewhere among the three hundred islands of the Kerguelen archipelago.

The General met with Admiral Zhang at Naval Headquarters in Beijing and aligned him with the latest information, some of which dealt with secret deliveries to the submarine base of heavily guarded containers from two of Taiwan’s nuclear power stations. It was plainly uranium.

Zhang spent another two hours studying the detailed chart of Kerguelen, compiled under the supervision of the Royal Navy’s hydrographer, Rear Admiral Sir David Haslam. At 1630 he drafted a signal for his friend and colleague Admiral Zu Jicai in the south. It ordered him to transmit the following message to the Kilo:

Locate and destroy Taiwanese laboratory/factory on Kerguelen. Avoid southeast area near French weather station at Port-aux-Francais (49.21N 70.11E) on southern coast of Courbet Peninsula. West coast also unlikely, high coastal terrain and unprotected from prevailing Antarctic weather.

Most likely area big bays to the northeast — Gulf of Choiseul, Rhodes Bay, and Gulf of Baleiniers. Possible ex-French nuclear submarine reactor power source could assist detection. Use whatever means necessary to complete destruction of Taiwanese facility.

Except for her daily communications routine at periscope depth, Columbia ran deep at around twenty knots all the way. By October 18 Boomer had covered 1,600 miles and was almost across the Central Pacific Basin. The submarine passed the Fiji Islands on October 21, and three days later entered Australia’s Tasman Sea. By noon on October 26 she was off Hobart, Tasmania, on latitude forty-five degrees, south of the big hotel on Storm Bay where Boomer and Bill Baldridge had delivered Yonder on the last day of February.

Ahead of them was 3,500 miles of the Southern Ocean, which in late October was subject to wild swings in weather patterns, often culminating in raging gales and mountainous seas. All of which Columbia would treat with supreme indifference.

The Black Ops submarine ran swiftly westward on the Great Circle route toward Kerguelen. The atmosphere was relaxed, as it had been ever since they burst clear of the Arctic pack ice. They had survived the submariner’s nightmare of being trapped under the water, and for most of them, this routine search of a desolate island was kid’s stuff. They were not going to shoot anyone, and no one was going to shoot them. They could slide up to the surface whenever they wished. The weather might be god-awful, but all weather is sublime compared to being trapped under the ice. Life in the nuclear hunter-killer was more relaxed than it had been at any time since they had left New London almost twelve weeks ago.

They had renewed their supply of videos at Pearl, everyone was tanned and fit, and Lieutenant Commander Curran, in partnership with Dave Wingate, was in the process of winning a long-running contract bridge tournament, in which all other contestants were like lambs to the slaughter. “Jerry’s got fucking X-ray eyes,” was the verdict of Lee O’Brien, the mathematician of the engine room, who found it incomprehensible that anyone could count the cards, as they were played, more accurately than he could.

The only other serious bridge player in the entire crew was Chief Spike Chapman, the highly trained ship’s systems boss, who worked long hours at the console that controls every mechanical and electrical function in the submarine, except for propulsion. He could count the cards and he could play well, but his regular partner, Lieutenant Commander Abe Dickson, tended to bid rashly, and even as a guest in the wardroom, Chief Chapman was occasionally heard to sigh, “Jesus Christ, Abe, sir…couldn’t we play it safe…just once?” His barely controlled exasperation caused everyone to fall about laughing, as the Deck Officer set off up the mountain of seven hearts before finding out that three would have been a more realistic contract.

The Commanding Officer was not a bridge player. Which was just as well because Boomer had been very self-absorbed throughout the journey, not really at all like his usual self. His closest officers in the crew were slightly baffled by this, but then, none of them had read the communication from Admiral Arnold Morgan.

But there was something more on the mind of Commander Dunning. And it was a feeling of general unease about Kerguelen. He was the only man on board who had been there, and he was the only man on board who had taken a serious interest in the mysterious disappearance of the Cuttyhunk. Boomer was normally rock solid in his judgments, and he never mislaid a truly salient fact. With regard to the disappearance of the Cuttyhunk, Boomer had concluded, there was just such a fact, and he had recorded it — the last satellite message of radio operator Dick Elkins: “MAYDAY…MAYDAY… MAYDAY!!..Cuttyhunk 49 south 69…UNDER ATTACK… Japanese…”

As far as Boomer was concerned this meant Cuttyhunk had most definitely come under attack, otherwise the radio operator would not have dreamed of sending such a highly charged communication. The fact that the signal had ended with such brick-wall finality was compounded by the undisputed fact that the entire ship’s company plus even the ship itself, plus all of the scientists, had vanished.

It was obvious to Boomer that Elkins’s Japanese were plainly Taiwanese, the group for whom he now searched. They had clearly attacked the Cuttyhunk with some fairly heavy-duty hardware. Their motive was equally conspicuous in Boomer’s mind: simple fear of discovery. The Woods Hole research ship had certainly posed no military threat.

If the Taiwanese had not hesitated to open fire on US citizens and either sink or confiscate their ship, they would not hesitate to open fire on Columbia. And he already knew they had submarines in the area; he and Bill Baldridge had seen one with their own eyes.

Boomer did not know what additional shore defenses the Taiwanese might have, but he took the view that his surveillance project had to be conducted with unerring care. He had specific orders to shoot only in accordance with the international rights of self-defense, and to remain undetected. He proposed to carry out these instructions to the letter.

However, the Commanding Officer of Columbia shared none of the general cheerfulness that was apparent in the rest of the crew. When they came within a hundred miles of Kerguelen he proposed to change their mind-set drastically. Until then he was perfectly happy for the videos to run, and for Abe Dickson to overbid his hand with reckless disregard for the conventions of the game…a criticism Admiral Arnold Morgan all too obviously leveled at Boomer himself.

Fort Meade, Maryland. On October 26 Admiral George Morris made his morning report by telephone to the NSA’s office in the White House. His statement was the same as it had been yesterday, and the day before. As it had been every day since October 15, when the satellite’s photograph shot at 1500 local had shown K-10 missing