Kilo Class

out the details, softly now, in the high-tension calm that grips a submarine before an attack. Boomer Dunning glanced again at the screen…then he ordered:

“STAND BY ONE…Stand by to fire by sonar.”

“Bearing 120…range five thousand yards…computer set.”

“SHOOT!” ordered Commander Dunning. Everyone in the area heard the thud as the heavyweight Mk 48 swept away. The faintest shiver ran through the submarine as the torpedo set off.

“Weapon under guidance, sir.”

Boomer Dunning ordered the weapon armed, and another minute passed. Columbia seemed to hold her breath. There was just the hum of the air in the ventilation, and outside the hull the only sound was at the approximate level of a computer or word processor.

Fifteen hundred yards away the Mk 48 was searching passively as it ran fast through the water at thirty knots.

Now, eight minutes after firing, the American Mk 48 picked up the Kilo and switched to active homing as it was released by Columbia. The torpedo accelerated and came ripping through the water straight at Captain Kan’s submarine. Kan was an experienced commanding officer, but his ship was full of elation, their guard was temporarily down, and Kan was still giggling nervously at what he had done. Some of his officers were concerned at his demeanor, and they were in no way prepared for an attack. K-10 was at periscope depth, and the Mk 48 was only three hundred yards away when a cry came out of the sonar room.

“TORPEDO…TORPEDO…TORPEDO…RED ONE SEVEN FIVE…ACTIVE TRANSMISSIONS…INTERVAL 500 YARDS…BEARING STEADY…”

Too close and too late. The pressure hull of the Kilo split as the big American torpedo blasted its way into her port quarter. The Kilo was known to be able to absorb a pretty good hit, but not one from a weapon like this. Boomer Dunning’s perfectly aimed Mk 48 blew a gaping six-foot hole in K-10 at exactly 1921 on the evening of November 18. Captain Kan died, still grinning at his own malevolence; there were no survivors and no witnesses. No one lived longer than thirty seconds after impact.

The entire crew was either drowned or slammed to pieces against machinery by the onrushing water, which roared through the compartments, crushing bulkheads one by one as she went down. The submarine, upon which the far-distant Admiral Zhang Yushu had staked so much, sank slowly to the floor of the Southern Indian Ocean in two thousand feet of freezing water. No one would ever quite know where she rested. Or indeed what had happened to her. Though there would be those in Moscow and Beijing who might make educated guesses.

A half hour later, Commander Dunning sat down to write his signal yet again. He kept it short: “Russian-built Kilo arrived Kerguelen 172224NOV. Hai Lung arrived 182148NOV. Believe Kilo destroyed Taiwan factory we located 49.65N 69.20E one mile from dead-end Baie du Repos. In accordance with my original orders, issued 011200AUG03, I sank K-10 at 2221 on 19 NOV, off northern KERGUELEN — Commander Cale Dunning, USS Columbia.”

It was 1350 in SUBLANT when Boomer’s signal arrived. Admirals Mulligan and Dixon were in a meeting awaiting news from Kerguelen, and they contacted Arnold Morgan immediately, requesting assistance in drafting the response.

Columbia’s commanding officer read the reply at 2315 local: “Not a bad shot…for a D-A SOB…Morgan.”

The message was addressed to him, direct from the office of the President’s National Security Adviser in the White House. And it started with the one phrase Boomer thought was lost to him forever: “Personal for Captain Cale Dunning, Commanding Officer, USS Columbia.”

EPILOGUE

Cape Cod Times, November 25, 2004

Port-Aux-Francais, Kerguelen. November 24. The mystery of the vanished Woods Hole research ship, Cuttyhunk, was finally solved last night when six of the missing scientists were rescued by meteorologists at this remote French weather station.

The group, attempting to walk across the ninety-mile-long Antarctic island, were picked up by helicopter on the shore of the Baie de la Marne after their radio transmissions were received by one of the station’s fourteen electronic masts.

They had been missing for twenty-three months and are believed to be the only survivors of the twenty- nine-strong expedition, which is thought to have come under attack on December 17, 2002, at the entrance to one of the island’s northwestern fjords.

Last night none of the group was prepared to give an interview, save to confirm that Cuttyhunk is still floating, damaged by gunfire but moored in deep water in a sheltered cove at the end of the Baie du Repos on the northern end of the island. One of them stated the research ship had been their prison.

Staff at the weather station last night confirmed the names of the six scientists: Professor Henry Townsend, Dr. Roger Deakins, Arnold Barry, William Coburg, Anne Dempster, and Dr. Kate Goodwin.

Tonight, the Times’s syndicated columnist Frederick J. Goodwin, a cousin of one of the rescued scientists, is flying to the US Base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, to join a Navy frigate going south to evacuate the group from the almost inaccessible island. Mr. Goodwin, who has campaigned for many months to instigate a search on Kerguelen, has been granted exclusive rights to talk to the scientists.

Their amazing story will be transmitted from the frigate to the Cape Cod Times and will begin in these pages next week.

AFTERWORD By Admiral Sir John Woodward

Kilo Class is Patrick Robinson’s second novel, and once more I acted as his technical adviser on Navy matters. As with Nimitz Class I was operating on the inner edges of an imaginative plot, which contained a core of valid reality.

The events that unfold in this book may at first seem difficult to understand. By that, I mean why should the United States have taken such extreme action against the Russians and the Chinese merely to prevent the delivery of seven submarines?

At first sight, it might seem reckless overreaction. But upon close examination, it becomes less violent and more logical. China has ordered this small fleet of Kilo Class submarines, brand-new, directly from the Russians. It is plain enough what they want them for — primarily to block the Taiwan Strait, to deny the customary rights of passage through an international strait. The issue is simple: China believes the strait is not international, that Taiwan is nothing but an offshore part of China. Therefore the waters that separate them are purely Chinese.

The Pentagon is well aware that ten Kilo Class submarines would permit the Chinese to keep at least four on patrol continuously. And the United States, which has occasionally passed Carrier Battle Groups through the strait, particularly when China has been seen to make threatening moves in the area, would be extremely wary of this. In my view, no US CVBG would venture into the strait in the clear face of a submarine threat, merely to make a political point. Just in case a big carrier should meet a similar fate to that of the Thomas Jefferson.

There is a xenophobia about China and its rulers. They have a large but ill-equipped Navy, essentially a coastal Navy, which operates almost exclusively in the waters off the extensive eastern shoreline, from the Mongolian border to the South China Sea. But China’s ambitions are no secret. They seek wealth and status, power