Kilo Class (1998)

by Patrick Robinson

  Columbia returned to the safety of the deep and accelerated away. Midnight came and they were still looking for a place to surface. At 0106 Mike Krause saw it—a yawning bright light, which seemed to suggest a polynya with only thin ice on the surface. It was a long open channel, dark blue and a hundred feet wide. Columbia slid right past, even though she was making less than fifteen knots. The helmsman executed another Williamson to bring her back to the polynya as they slowed. It took ten minutes to maneuver her right back under the polynya. Ten difficult minutes before Boomer Dunning commanded, “All Stop…Rudder and planes amidships…check all masts fully lowered…we’re going for a vertical ascent.”

  The ship’s buoyancy was adjusted and the Black Ops submarine began to rise very slowly. The XO had taken over the diving officer’s stand, and the Officer of the Deck, Lieutenant Commander Abe Dickson, stood back ready to help, and to learn from Mike Krause.

  Columbia kept rising. The XO called out the depth, and Boomer checked the TV monitor. He stared into it and was again shocked by the number of twenty-foot-long ice lances jutting down toward him at the south end of the polynya. He called out for Mike Krause to keep the submarine slowly rising. What really concerned him was that he could not discern ripples on the surface water; the picture seemed hard and smooth. Columbia was going to have to bust through the ice. The question was, how thick was it?

  Mike Krause took a look at the TV and said he thought it must be thin, the light seemed so bright. But there was no doubt the polynya had a firm ice crust to it, maybe five feet below the surface.

  And then, despite their slow ascent, they hit the overhead ice with a shuddering impact. They smashed it all right, but at what cost?

  Boomer ordered the main ballast tanks blown as Columbia shouldered her way out of the ocean into a trackless twilight of a snowscape at exactly 0127. As they burst upward into the air, blocks of flat ice from the base of the polynya slithered off Columbia’s hull, sliding down and crashing back into the water that now surrounded her. The sail’s ice detector was nonoperational, and it had been so since they slammed into the crust. The XO guessed they’d somehow clobbered the upward-looking fathometer when they had used the sail as a battering ram. “Guess it was a bit thicker than we thought,” he growled. “Christ knows what’s the matter with this…but at least up here we can check it.”

  Boomer ordered the main ballast tanks to full buoyancy before he led Abe Dickson up the ladder, through the two hatches, and out into the Arctic daylight. The air was frigid, and a light wind out of the north wafted across the American submarine with teeth like iced razor blades. Everything was white, flat, and endless. The light was not as bright as it had seemed 150 feet below the ice pack, but the snow was a dazzling white, and Boomer could see for miles.

  Within moments a team of technicians arrived topside to check the fathometer. It took them only a few minutes to ascertain that the transducer had broken upon impact. There were two spares on board. The repair would be carried out in extreme conditions; none of the men would work for more than twenty minutes in these temperatures, crouched on top of the sail, handling tools so cold they could stick to a mechanic’s flesh. The technicians measured the temperature at thirty degrees below zero. They’d need a heat gun to blow hot air while they vulcanized the leads to make a watertight seal after they had completed the electrical joints. Boomer was quite surprised to discover that he was shivering violently after only eight minutes outside, even in his Arctic jacket, pants, hat, and gloves. He ordered everyone below to get fully kitted against the cold.

  They now raised the mast and accessed the satellite, calling in their position, and their plans for the next twenty-four hours. Then they collected their own signal, originated by SUBLANT, just half an hour before.

  K-9 and K-10 still heading east in Kara Sea. In company with escort as previously stated. 252400AUG, position 78N 90E, speed 10 knots on the surface. Heading for Strait of Vil Kitskogo south of Bolshevik Island. Good hunting.

  Boomer took the message into the navigation area where Lieutenant Wingate located the correct chart and placed a mark on the spot where the American satellite had recently photographed the Russian convoy. The navigator made a few measurements. “We’re doing it, sir. I have us four hundred and eighty miles closer to the Bering Strait…and once we’re under way, moving much faster.”

  Topside, the mechanics and the two electricians took turns fitting the new transducer. The job would take more than two hours. While they worked, the men could feel a weather front coming in from the north. The wind was rising. Even more eerie was the dull roaring sound they heard. It seemed to be only a few miles away, and by 0300 they could see a heaving wave far out on the horizon, rumbling and cracking over the ice, slowly rolling toward them. The Captain was on the bridge when the crew saw it, and he turned his binoculars to the Arctic phenomenon. The wind was now whipping the snow off the top of the giant ice wave as it ground its way toward Columbia.

  “In one hour, that ice wave is gonna arrive here and crush this ship like a tin can,” snapped Boomer. “How close to ready are the guys on the transducer?”

  “FORTY MINUTES, SIR,” someone yelled. “Two more waterproof seals.”

  Boomer turned his glasses back to the north and tried to get a distance fix on the line of ice slabs rising twelve to fifteen feet in the air in an upward pressure ridge hundreds of yards long. All around Columbia there were nothing but endless flat ice fields, and the jagged wall of rafted ice, possibly two miles off their starboard beam, now fractured the smooth, level plain of the Arctic snowscape.

  Boomer leaned forward on the edge of the bridge to steady the binoculars. He wanted to see if he could discern movement on the ridge to equate with the distant thunder of the floes. But the wind seemed to whip between the glasses and his eyes, which were watering uncontrollably—the involuntary tears freezing hard on his cheeks within seconds.

  But there was movement. He was sure of that. In the pale sunlight he could see the great chunks rise up, and then make a prolonged roll forward, forcing more ice upward and onward.

  “Jesus Christ,” muttered the CO to the crew on deck. “This ice is on the move…but I don’t want to go back under with the ice detector still up the chute. We can’t stay up here…this polynya’s gonna start closing in on us real soon.”

  He wondered how long they had, but as he stood there, he could hear a kind of high shrieking sound, punctuated by an almighty CRACK! as a mile-long split suddenly appeared in the ice to port, and then, just as suddenly, closed again.

  Boomer Dunning had never seen anything as dangerous as the shifting floes that formed Columbia’s lethal harbor.

  “When can you have those seals tight?” he called to the electrician.

  “Thirty minutes, sir.”

  “Okay, keep at it,” Boomer replied. In his mind, he knew he might lose this race as he turned to stare at the ponderously rolling wall of ice, rumbling closer.

  Mike Krause came on the bridge, his tall, slim frame lost in the bulk of his heavy-duty Arctic kit. He instinctively turned toward the rumble, raising his binoculars. “Christ,” he murmured gazing out at the moving wall. “We don’t wanna hang around in the path of that fucking lot for very long, sir.”

  “You’re right there,” replied the CO. “But we don’t want to go under without the ice detector either. We’re just slightly between the rock and the hard place right here.”

  “How much longer to fix the transducer, sir?”

  “Latest estimate was thirty minutes.”

  “Christ, sir. That pressure ridge looks about ready to crush us in the next ten.”

  “I’ve been trying to get an accurate fix. It’s difficult…but one thing’s for sure…that ridge looks a lot closer now than it did fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Yup. And the noise level is rising…sounds higher…like a scream. Guess that must be from the floes grinding together. Can you imagine the forces behind that pressure, sir?”

  “C
an I ever. And I wonder where it starts from…how many miles away, either the wind or the current is causing the wave to happen.”

  Just then the roar of the ice grew louder, and suddenly there were three explosions off the starboard side as the five-foot-high walls of the polynya split apart, sucking in water and sending great slabs of ice cascading into the water around Columbia.

  “Guys, we’re gonna have to get outta here,” Boomer called to the electricians as icebergs ten feet wide and heavy as cast iron banged against Columbia’s casing. “How quick can you make it work?”

  “Might be through in fifteen.”

  The sound of the ice was growing so loud Boomer had to shout to be heard. The thunderous rumble was now replaced by a howl like a rising wind, a penetrating screech regularly interrupted by the distinct crash and thump of massive ice blocks tumbled one on top of the other.

  Worse than the hellish din was the grinding of their harbor walls as they closed in on them. What had been a thirty-yard channel to starboard was now only about ten yards wide, and it kept splitting, edging closer.

  Boomer reckoned they had ten minutes. Mike Krause would have guessed five. Both men could now see the jagged shapes of the slabs, like an Ice Age Stonehenge, rolling in from the right of the submarine, each massive slab landing with a staggering KERRRUMP.

  “Two minutes, sir…gimme two minutes…we’re almost there…it might not last forever…but it’ll work for a few days.”

  Boomer held his nerve. “Great job, guys,” he said, gripping the edge of the bridge as a new landslide of ice crashed into the polynya, rising up in the water, scraping the hull of the Black Ops submarine and causing deafening noise inside. The entire ship vibrated, and for the first time the crew experienced a chilling fear.

  But still Boomer Dunning did not order the bridge cleared. Two more minutes ticked by, and the wall of the polynya was flush against the starboard hull, pushing Columbia back across the narrowing polynya. Topside they could hear nothing above the bedlam of the moving ice.

  The chief electrician’s cry of “Repair complete, sir!” was whipped away by the wind. The first time Boomer and the XO realized the transducer was in place was when the five-man team began clambering down through the hatch, two of them with numb, frostbitten fingers.

  “Clear the bridge!” Boomer commanded as he and Mike Krause dropped down the ladders behind the repair party. Hatches were shut behind the topside watchmen, and just before 0400 Boomer ordered the main vents open and buoyancy adjusted to help them down.

  Columbia began to sink below the treacherous crush of the moving ice cap, which would shortly render the polynya nonexistent. The upward fathometer was working perfectly, and at 150 feet, Boomer put them on a new course. “One-nine-zero…speed twenty-five…depth six hundred.”

  Before them stretched a long, slightly curving eight-hundred-mile course across the ten-thousand-foot deep Canadian Basin. At twenty-five knots, they would make it in thirty-two hours…1130 on the morning of August 27. Whether or not they would be able to surface when they cleared the permanent ice and reached the waters of the Beaufort Sea was, at this stage, a matter for pure conjecture. What mattered that moment was their last-minute escape from the viselike grip of the Arctic ice cap.

  Halfway along their course, four hundred miles south of Hall Knoll, they would cross the 80th parallel. Boomer considered it unlikely that they would find a spot to surface around here, and he was nervous about time. He understood the critical need for the Columbia to be in position awaiting the arrival of the Kilos. He was determined that he would have the element of surprise—the advantage of the stalker who sets his own ambush. He was not about to squander his advantage by wasting valuable hours trying to batter his way 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 t
hey 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.