Kilo Class (1998)

by Patrick Robinson

  “Looks damned narrow up there, too.”

  “Sure does. And up toward the northern ice edge it will be very difficult. You can’t see the fucking stuff on sonar. And all the time the ice is grinding and snarling and fucking you about. If you put your periscope up, there’s a good chance it’ll get bent by a chunk of ice.

  “See this, Arnie. Right after Severnay it gets even more lousy—more shallow, and covered by ice. Right there, Columbia would be well behind the eight ball, strapped for speed. More or less powerless, probably with no idea where the Kilos were, except from us, with the next choke point the far side of the Bering Strait.”

  He was about to go on when the door swung open and Admiral Mulligan walked into the room. “Okay, gentlemen. Lay it on me. Give me the bad news,” he said, seeing the concerned faces of his two colleagues.

  Admiral Dixon outlined the situation as Joe Mulligan moved over to the chart desk where the SUBLANT commander had already marked up significant points of depth and ice. He studied it carefully. “You’re right, I’m afraid. There’s no way Columbia could run fast enough for long enough to catch them up there. That part of the ocean is a damned nightmare along the edge of the pack ice…you can’t see, you can’t hear, and it’s so shallow you can’t run away if you get caught. Where are the Kilos now? Right here…yes. The situation is nearly hopeless.”

  “Nearly, sir?” said the submarine chief, with exaggerated deference, knowing perfectly well what was coming.

  “There is a way out of this…I think we might have to ask Commander Dunning and his team to make a trans-polar run, straight under the North Pole…dive the boat in the Atlantic, and come out in the Pacific.”

  The three men were silent for a moment. As exsubmariners they were well acquainted with the complexities of these trans-polar runs. They had been made by nuclear submarines in the past, but rarely. And some had failed, stopped by the ice and shallow water in the northern approaches to the Bering Strait. There is, of course, no land at the North Pole—nothing for a submarine to hit. The Arctic is just a vast floating ice cap. The ocean beneath it is twelve thousand feet deep in some places, but a whole lot less in others.

  One of the original explorers likened the picture to a twelve-foot-high room. “The ceiling is the base of the ice cap…the floor, the ocean bed. Now imagine a matchstick suspended six inches from the ceiling…that’s the nuclear submarine running dived right across the top of the world.”

  The Arctic Circle is nothing like the Antarctic, which is a continent. Land. Valleys and mountains. The Arctic does not exist except as shifting, floating ice, under which is mostly very deep water.

  Admiral Mulligan spoke again. “We’ve done a lot of work up there over the years…much of it still based on the first polar transit underwater by a US nuclear boat more than forty years ago…Nautilus, commanded by Andy Anderson. The trouble is you need time to prepare for these journeys, and Columbia’s got none.”

  “What’s the timing factor?” asked Admiral Morgan.

  “Lemme see…Boomer makes twenty knots all the way under the ice, across the north of Greenland, Iceland, and Alaska…could arrive Point Barrow in northern Alaska seven and a half days from right now. The Russians cannot make better than ten knots on the surface in those conditions. They should get to the same place in about eleven days. Boomer will be waiting…”

  “Brilliant,” rasped Admiral Morgan. “We got ’em.”

  “Yes. We got ’em, if Commander Dunning and his team feel they can make a trans-Polar underwater run,” said Admiral Mulligan, grimly. “And, if the conditions are right in the Chukchi Sea. Still, if the Russians can run this little convoy through the ice, I guess we can, too. Does Boomer have anyone on board with any experience?”

  “He has some himself,” replied Admiral Dixon. “He’s worked up there under the ice…but more important his XO, Mike Krause, knows a lot about it. I’m not sure if he ever went right through. He may have a few years ago.”

  “But, hell, we don’t even know if they have the right charts and books on board, do we?” asked Mulligan.

  “Yes, we do,” replied Admiral Dixon. “They haven’t.”

  “Beautiful,” said Admiral Morgan. “You got a plan, John?”

  “We get our ice skates on,” said Admiral Dixon. “I’ll draft a signal, and we’ll put it on the satellite…we’ll probably have to make an air drop with extra supplies, information, and spares…. Where do you think, sir? Somewhere up by Jan Mayen Island? That way Boomer won’t have to hang around waiting.”

  “Right. West of the island, I’d say,” replied the CNO. “You better get moving on this, right now.”

  The periscope of USS Columbia broke the surface of the rough, gale-swept North Atlantic just southwest of Tórshavn in the Faeroe Islands at midnight local time, on August 22. Comms accessed the satellite and reported the submarine’s position: 62.00N, 7.00W. They sucked off a message from SUBLANT.

  Commander Dunning ordered Columbia down into smoother waters and waited for the printout of the communication. He was not, however, in any way prepared for what he read:

  Assess K-9 and K-10 heading EAST along North Siberian coast in company with one Typhoon Class on inter-Fleet transfer, four modern ASW escorts, one Arktika Class icebreaker, and a Fleet replenishment ship. Opportunities for attack by you in N. Siberian waters and Bering Strait considered minimal, and too dangerous.

  Proceed forthwith to deep water in Aleutian Basin via Polar route. Report any special requirements for navigational advice, books, charts, spares, equipment ASAP, and in time for air drop west of Jan Mayen by MPA AM 24th. Report position in time for drop.

  Latest ice reports Point Barrow area and Beaufort Sea will be passed to you within twenty-four hours, and as they become available.

  Boomer gulped. “Under the Pole…holy shit…MIKE!…get a look at this…”

  Lieutenant Commander Krause read the message. “I’ve never been right through, sir,” he said. “But I’ve been halfway and back twice…both times from the other end, up through the Bering Strait. In fact it’s not that bad in the deep water, but there are a few awkward spots north of Point Barrow, where the bottom shelves right up, and you can get ice-pressure ridges coming down a hundred and twenty feet below the surface—a couple of our submarines have been forced back over there…ran out of real estate where the downward ice ridges almost hit the shoals on the bottom.”

  “Shit,” said Boomer. “Are you sure we’re ready for this?”

  “I guess we better be. That message from SUBLANT was an order.”

  “Right. What do we need?”

  “A couple more charts, and a couple of books, hopefully Commander Anderson’s account of his journey in 1958, plus a couple of more recent patrol reports. We’ll also want additional upward-looking fathometer spares. Plus spares for the periscopes, which are apt to get knocked around in the overhead ice. Still, it’s the right time of year. We might be all right…I’ll round up our navigator and check out all the gear, then get a signal off to SUBLANT.”

  Boomer studied the chart and estimated the distance to the rocky Norwegian island of Jan Mayen as 750 miles. “Tell ’em we’ll be at 72N 10W for the drop point, waiting at periscope depth. Make it a floating package with a dye marker,” he said. “We’ll listen out on UHF channel thirty-one thirty hours from now.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  With that, the long black hull of Columbia accelerated toward the deep Arctic waters, over the Icelandic Plateau, toward the Eggvin Shoal. There, in difficult shelving water, the icy Maro Bank guards the western approaches to Jan Mayen, on the edge of the winter pack ice.

  “Steer course 355 for six hundred and fifty miles,” said Boomer. “Speed twenty-five. Depth six hundred.” He turned to Lieutenant Wingate and added, “Right there we’ll come right to 015 for four hours and make that our pickup spot.”

  The Commander then called for a navigation meeting with Lieutenant Commander Krause and Lieutenant Wingate one hour hen
ce. The time passed swiftly—Columbia came to periscope depth to pass their rendezvous signal, and Boomer elected to stay for twenty minutes, pending a reply from SUBLANT. It arrived via the satellite almost immediately:

  Drop point confirmed 72N 10W. Floating package dye marker. UHF 31. 0600 local August 24. MPA from US Naval Air Station Keflavik, Iceland, to make rendezvous. Call-sign BLUEBIRD ONE FIVE. Transmit UHF for homing 0550.

  Columbia went deep again, and the three officers gathered in the navigation area, where the CO asked Lieutenant Wingate for his preliminary plan.

  “I suggest we head north in deep water, sir…up between Greenland and Spitzbergen, and then enter the Arctic Ocean, under the pack ice, through the Lena Trough—that’s right here where the permanent ice shelf begins. We’ll be on course 035 after the drop point, with an adjustment after two hundred miles to course 000. We wanna make that adjustment right at the Greenland Fracture zone…right here, sir…over the Boreas Abyssal Plain…it’s fifteen thousand feet deep there.”

  “Yup, Dave. I got it. Then you’re plotting us straight on for another seven hundred miles running due north, straight at the Pole?”

  “Yessir. Right to here…where it says Morris Jesup Plateau. At that point the water is suddenly going to get appreciably more shallow…this is the one-thousand-meter contour right here at the northern tip of the plateau. Our sounder will show it like an underwater cliff, shelving up from three thousand to a thousand meters in twenty miles. By then we will have curved around to 310,…take us a couple of hundred miles south of the Pole itself.”

  “Good call, Dave,” said Lieutenant Commander Krause. “That way we’ll avoid all that crap when the compasses go berserk and start spinning around. What do they call it? Longitude roulette?”

  “Well, sir, I’ve never worked under the ice. But I know our gyros get real confused north of 87. Something to do with the lessening of the Coriolis effect as you reach the earth’s spin axis. Anyway, if you reach the Pole, every direction is, obviously, south.”

  “That’s it. If you stand on the North Pole and take a few paces in any direction, you have to be heading south, toward Russia, Canada, the Atlantic, Pacific or wherever. Hard to know which. That’s longitude roulette.”

  “Yessir. We just gotta avoid violent changes of course, otherwise the gyros go ape. I got a book of words here that explains it. But in my view we’re better to avoid the whole damn shemozzle, and stay south…right here, straight across Hall Knoll…our entire journey from here to the Bering Strait is four thousand miles…but we’re only under the polar ice cap for fifteen hundred miles…three days at our speed. Not bad, right?”

  “Good job, Dave,” said Boomer. “I guess Hall Knoll is about our halfway point…and right here you got a course change?”

  THE POLAR ROUTE. The most dangerous submarine journey in the world—sealed in, under the Arctic pack ice for three days, running deep and fast, from the Atlantic straight through to the Pacific.

  “Yessir. A whole lot of small course changes just past the Pole will put us about south for a beeline on Point Barrow. We’ll cross the Canada Basin in about a day and a half, and hope to come out from under the permanent ice on the coast of the Beaufort Sea, right opposite Point Barrow.”

  “Right there we have the only really difficult area,” said Lieutenant Commander Krause. “That last hundred and twenty miles in the Beaufort Sea. If it’s been a warm summer there will be less than one-tenth of the usual ice-covering a hundred miles north of Point Barrow. We’ll still be in a thousand meters of water—and even the biggest pressure ridge in the overhead ice won’t reach down more than a hundred feet from the surface.

  “So we’re fine. But, if it’s been a cold summer we may get very open pack ice, one-tenth cover, right down to Point Barrow itself, which means we’ll have to stay submerged. Then, if the conditions below are simply appalling we will have to surface. I’ve been up there when it’s been bad, damned great lumps of ice wallowing around all over the place, and thick fog. You can’t see on the surface and it’s too dangerous underneath.”

  “I don’t want to go on the surface at all, unless I can’t help it,” said Boomer. “Still the ice report from SUBLANT will tell us a lot about that before we start. And anyway, we can probably gut it out for a day or so, the ice should clear a few more miles to the southwest, and it is daylight, all the time.”

  Lieutenant Wingate wanted more information on the freshwater lakes that stud the Arctic ice cap, especially in summer. They are known by the Russian word polynya, and any submarine trying to get a GPS fix or to communicate while under the ice cap must find one—which can be quite bewildering, as they vary in size from just a few feet wide, to quite large expanses of water hundreds of yards across.

  “How do you find them?” the navigator asked.

  “With the greatest difficulty,” Lieutenant Commander Krause answered.

  “During a crossing like ours, which will be quite fast and stretch over three days, we would expect to see probably half a dozen,” he continued. “The only way to see them is by the light, which is much duller when it’s filtered through several feet of pack ice. But at the polynya the ice is very thin, and the light comes through brightly. Basically we are looking for a bright light in the wilderness directly above. We should be able to see it on the sail TV.”

  “Say it’s still a couple of feet thick,” the navigator said. “How do we get through it?”

  “We rise vertically and hit it, with the sail…hard.”

  “Will the ice break?”

  “If it’s thin enough. Then we just pop up into an Arctic lake and take a look around. Get some fresh air.”

  “How about if we misjudge it, and the ice is too thick?”

  “That’s inclined to be bad news. You kind of bounce off the ceiling a little, and hope to God you don’t damage anything.”

  “Jesus…that means you might damage the periscope or a mast…and you’re still trapped.”

  “We don’t go up with any mast raised,” said Boomer. “They are all safely lowered, but…yes, Dave…we are stuck below the ice cap until we find thinner ice cover…another polynya. But don’t forget, we do have the upward fathometer, which gives us some idea of the thickness.”

  “Guess we’re always looking for the bright spots, correct?”

  Mike Krause smiled. “That’s us, Dave. Always looking for the bright spots.”

  The Captain reentered the conversation. “When you’re trapped under the polar cap,” said Boomer, “your real problems are apt to be avoidable…and by that I mean fire, radiation, steam leaks, planes control, etc. And, of course, a reactor scram.

  “The worst of these is probably a scram…a shutdown of the reactor. The tough part is restarting the damn thing, because right there you’re on battery, which doesn’t last long. There’s just about enough juice for one try at rapid recovery. But if the battery gets exhausted before you can get the reactor moving again, then you gotta run the generators to recharge…and for that we need air…the one item we don’t have. Not without a polynya.”

  “So we need to record the position of every one we pass?” said Lieutenant Wingate.

  “Just that,” said the XO.

  “And that’s my dilemma,” said the CO. “Do I leave the reactor scrammed, and run for the last polynya on battery, or do I risk everything on one throw, using all of our battery power to restart the reactor. It’s a tough one, if it happens. If I get it wrong, we’re dead.”

  “Shit!” said the navigator.

  “But,” said Boomer, “a far more likely occurrence is fire, or major steam leak. That’s when you really have to get into the fresh air. And right now we should get everyone activated…checking this baby from top to bottom for even the slightest possibility of that kind of trouble. Check, and double-check.”

  Columbia continued on its northward course, arriving west of Jan Mayen in the small hours of the morning of August 24. Dave Wingate brought them to the drop point, 72N 10W
at 0400, and the Captain ordered the ship to periscope depth to report their position to SUBLANT. The submarine then went deep again. She would begin transmitting at 0550—ten minutes before the US maritime patrol aircraft was scheduled to arrive with their package,

  They returned to PD, raised the UHF aerial, and transmitted on Channel 31 pausing for ten seconds every minute to listen for the MPA homing in on the signal. At 0558, they received a reply: “This is Bluebird One-Five…request yellow smoke.”