Kilo Class

from its berth in Canton.

“Not a sign of the damned thing, sir. If it’s been running at nine knots it could be nearly twenty-five hundred miles from base now. And it could have headed in any direction — back to the north or anywhere else. Beats the hell out of me.”

“And me, George. Of course it might just be circling Taiwan, or even on patrol up around South Korea…that’s the whole trouble with the little bastard…you can’t see it, and you sure as hell can’t hear it at its low speed. Who knows? Let me know if anything shows up. I don’t like that little sonofabitch out there on the loose.”

Columbia cleared the Australian Antarctic Rise at 2100 on the night of November 2 and came steaming in toward Kerguelen, from the east, at 0100 on November 5. Seven hours later, a hundred miles off the Courbet Peninsula, still running at six hundred feet, the Commanding Officer addressed the ship’s company over the public address system.

“This is the Captain speaking, and as you all know we will soon be approaching the island of Kerguelen. I want to alert everyone that I do not regard this search-and-find operation as strictly routine and without danger.

“A couple of years ago a Woods Hole oceanic research ship vanished with all hands around the island of Kerguelen, our present destination.

“Some of you may have read the reports of the tragedy, in which twenty-nine people were lost. In my view the Cuttyhunk was attacked. And it may have been attacked by some foreign Navy patrol craft, which was here to protect the guys we’re trying to locate. In short, it may also try to attack us, and we don’t know if it is carrying any antisubmarine kit, depth charges, or mortars, but if I was in charge of protecting something here in these narrow seaways, I sure as hell would be!”

That received a predictable burst of laughter. But the Captain continued, “Let’s face it, guys, no one is a match for us. We’re the best, and we’re in the best ship. But my orders are specific — we’re here to search and locate and report. We’re not here to attack anything.

“So let’s just get our heads straight. We might be in dangerous waters, so we need to stay in peak form…keep our eyes and ears open at all time. Let’s conduct this search like the professionals I know we all are. We are not here to attack, except in the event of a clear and obviously aggressive action against us — one which we judge to be ‘them or us.’ Because there is always only one answer to that — not us.”

Everyone liked that. “That’s it. Let’s get to it.” The CO concluded, “The search begins at 0800, first light. I intend to take nothing for granted. We don’t know who or where our enemy may be. But we sure as hell want to see him before he sees us. That’s all.”

Columbia slipped through the cold dark waters beneath a howling Antarctic gale and came to periscope depth, nine miles off the high granite headland of Cape George, the southeastern tip of the Island. With the wind out of the northwest, there was some lee farther inshore, but not out here, and the US submarine wallowed in the big swells with thirty feet between trough and crest.

“Can’t see much in this,” growled Boomer. “Who has the conn?…Okay remain at PD…continuous visual IR and ESM lookout. I’m gonna survey the south coastline…we’ll probably have to go in closer to see anything… bottom’s about three hundred feet here…watch the fathometer…don’t go inside two hundred feet and don’t trust the chart — it’s old, and probably suspect.”

They steamed through the grim, gray day and again came to periscope depth. Boomer could see the towering, forbidding southeastern coastline of Kerguelen. The weather had improved and the sea was calmer in the lee, but the light was poor and the sky overcast. The sun had not yet lit up the granite cliffs of the great curved hook of Cape George.

Peering through the periscope, Boomer took a few seconds to acclimatize himself to the sullen, hostile magnificence of this dreadful place. It was a feeling he had not encountered since last he stared at the rock face of Kerguelen seven months ago. And he remembered it well. He shuddered and handed the periscope to the watch officer.

While the weather held, his plan was to move quietly westward along the southern coastline at periscope depth. They would run at five knots, using passive sonar with a constant IR and ESM watch. At this latitude there would be eight hours of daylight between 0800 and 1600. Boomer would search all night, using his infrared, picking up not so much light as heat. And heat was probably his best chance. He decided to spend forty-eight hours on the south coast, which was more than seventy miles long. Then turn north up the forbidding eighty-mile-long windward west coast, beyond Cap Bourbon.

The south yielded nothing. Except the French Met Station. And all through the two days and two nights, Columbia rolled and pitched through the water like a stranded whale in the mountainous seas. They broke more cups and plates in the wardroom than they had all year as the submarine struggled through conditions for which she was not best designed. Twice they lost trim and broached to the surface, and Boomer finally ordered them to seven knots, which gave them better control.

Mike Krause noted that even the names of places were in tune with their mission: Cape Challenger, Savage Bay, plus a succession of deep fjords, guarded by heavy, heaving swells at the entrances, powerful enough, said Lieutenant Wingate, to capsize an oil tanker.

At the end of the second run along the south coast, Boomer considered the task well and truly completed. They had observed nothing of any interest, and the CO had not even seen a fjord or a bay through which he would care to navigate — the Bay of Swains, Larose Bay, and the twelve-mile-long fjord of Baie de la Table looked to him lethal. “If the Taiwanese were hiding in one of those, they deserved their fucking atom bomb or whatever it was,” thought Boomer. “Poor bastards’ll never get out alive.”

At dawn on November 7, Boomer turned Columbia north off Cap Bourbon. In Mike Krause’s opinion, the chart was showing one of the most treacherous coastlines in the world — strewn with jagged islands upon which survival was out of the question. They were strewn with craggy uneven rocks, just above and below the surface. Strewn no doubt with the skeletons of ships and their masters, who over the centuries had run out of luck in weather conditions that were usually frightful.

They steamed past the Isle de l’Ouest, staring in awe at the snowcapped 2,200-foot Peak Philippe d’Orleans, which rose up over the western headland of the island, six miles from the mainland. Lieutenant Wingate informed the CO they should remain at least seven miles from the shore for the next twenty miles because of the treacherous rocky shoal that lies three miles off the entrance to the Baie de Benodet and the Baie de l’Africain. Full of submerged rocks, its foul ground extended for over two miles.

As Columbia passed by in a force six westerly, leaving the shoal safely to starboard, Boomer could see through the periscope the huge swells become white breakers, driven shoreward before the wind, thundering into the shallow waters of the ridge, three miles offshore. “Holy shit,” said the CO. “What a place. You couldn’t hold a surface ship in that water…you’d just get driven onto the rocks.”

So another day and another night passed in their slow, tortuous journey, searching for a place that could never be — a place inhabited by human beings and a place where natural life was unthinkable, unless you were a seagull or a penguin. But the job had to be done, and Boomer, laboriously and doggedly, did it.

At the end of the light on November 8, they passed the Iles Nuageuses, the Cloudy Islands, right off the northwest point. But no shelter awaited them there, and Boomer turned away to starboard, to the deeper water near the huge rock Captain Cook had named Bligh’s Cap. As always, the Global Positioning System provided precise navigational data, and Boomer knew that without it, the entire search would have been a nightmare.

Then, on a new, dark, gale-swept morning, they headed southeast for Cap Aubert in the event that the Taiwanese had set up shop in a cave or a tunnel facing due north.

By midday it was growing dark, and Boomer Dunning elicited a groan from Lieutenant Commander Dickson, who was manning the periscope, by observing that he was probably the first man in history to be looking for a tunnel at the end of the light.

With the weather building ominously to the northwest, they ran on past Cap d’Estaing for another five miles, swung wide around the shoals, and ducked down the fifteen-mile-long fjord of Baie de Recques, where the water was a couple of hundred feet deep and relatively calm, sheltered from the weather.

The storm raged for the rest of the day and all night, with great blizzards of snow and sleet slashing across the water. Tucked right in the lee of the north shore, Columbia hardly noticed it. The following morning, November 10, they emerged to a brighter day, and Boomer elected to make a seventy-mile