Kilo Class (47 page)

“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
.”

Boomer ordered it instantly, and way out on the horizon the American aircraft came thundering in at 350 miles per hour, just a hundred feet above the water, reducing the area over which its radio could be intercepted.

The navigator, sitting right next to the pilot, spotted the dense smoke now billowing off the surface of the water. “
Okay… Bluebird One-Five… MARK DROP… Now! Now! NOW
!… Columbia…
over
.”

The big waterproof package, stuffed with everything the submarine had requested, hurtled through the air and crashed into the ocean right into the middle of the yellow smoke.

“
Bluebird… this is Blackbird… thank you… roger and out
.”

The MPA banked hard to starboard and climbed away to the south, back toward the US Icelandic base. The submarine surfaced gently, water cascading off the casing. The deck team hooked the package adroitly. They were back below, with the hatch shut, inside two minutes. And once more Boomer Dunning took the black hunter-killer beneath the long dark swells of the North Atlantic.

They worked all through the day and for most of the night preparing their instruments for the 1,500-mile run beneath the polar ice cap. After 200 miles on course 035 they were in deep water at the northern end of the Greenland Fracture Zone. At that point Boomer Dunning ordered the course change that would bring them into the Lena Trough.

“Conn… Captain… Come left 000. Make your speed twenty-five. Depth six hundred.”

Everyone felt the slight heel as
Columbia
altered course toward the pack ice that covers the top of the world. Swinging to the north it moved toward the giant floes, which would soon obliterate the light and seal the American submarine in the ice-cold water below.

The Greenland Sea grows deeper as it approaches the ice pack, and as it does so, the ice becomes more frequent. Great chunks, some of them fifty feet across, lurk treacherously just beneath the surface, like jagged concrete blocks ready to smash the sail of any submarine that is running too shallow.

The crew of
Columbia
could sense the heightened tension among the officers as the big nuclear boat plowed ever northward into block ice that was steadily becoming more dense. At first the floes above appeared only occasionally on the TV screen, but five hours after the course change, with the ship now within fifty miles of the cap, there were so many of these enormous, dark aquamarine hunks rushing by in the dim light above it was almost impossible to find a gap through which the sky could be seen.

Mike Krause found one thirty miles short of the ice cap, right on the 81 degree line. Boomer ordered
Columbia
to the surface, and she emerged into a field of loose ice, drifting through the light fog that hung over the water. The sun was completely obscured, and visibility was less than a hundred feet. Beneath the keel there was fifteen thousand feet of ocean.

They accessed the satellite and passed on their position, course, and speed to SUBLANT. “
Package retrieved successfully
.” Then they “sucked” the messages to them off the satellite, the principal one being SUBLANT’s ice report for the far end of their polar journey, which dealt with conditions in the waters which lie south of the Canada Basin, beyond the permanent limit of the Arctic ice. Right here, opposite Point Barrow in northern Alaska,
Columbia
would face a 125-mile run across the desperate, frozen wastes of the Beaufort Sea before edging southwest into the equally dangerous Chukchi Sea.

The variable here is the quality of the summer. If it were warm,
Columbia
would run into clear water with ice floes floating around occasionally. But if the summer should be bad, with serious heavy ice still there through July,
Columbia
would face an eighty-mile journey across a half-frozen Beaufort, waters that would force her to stay dived, waters that shelve up treacherously… three thousand meters… then two thousand… then one thousand… then two hundred as they reach the Beaufort Shelf, which protects the northern coastline of Alaska. This short stretch can be a submariner’s horror.

The news was not good. Boomer could see Mike Krause and Dave Wingate going over the report. Both men were frowning. Boomer too was anxious because of the closeness of the big floes that surrounded the submarine right now. He ordered the ship dived again, and the planesman leveled her out at six hundred feet.
Columbia
continued to head due north, at high speed, running directly at the ice cap — millions of tons of snarling, frozen ocean that would imprison them for three days. The lives of every man in the submarine were entirely dependent upon the huge, sweetly running GE PWR S6G nuclear reactor.

With the ship settled on her course, Boomer joined his XO and requested the news from the ice report. “It’s no use pretending, sir,” the Lieutenant Commander from Vermont said. “Conditions in the Beaufort over the far side are on the lousy side of average. Winter stayed too long this year, and the summer has hardly existed. The last hundred miles in toward Point Barrow are the problem. There’s drifting pack ice for the first fifty miles. And it’s not much better for the next twenty or thirty. As you know, sir, that’s when we run into the shoals. There’s no way we can make reasonable speed on the surface, and we don’t want to surface anyway… if we do have to surface, will there be enough clear water for us to keep going?

“Right here there’s only two hundred feet… what we don’t need is a big pressure ridge, which will force us down to clear the sail from the ice, only to ground the hull on the bottom. Should keep it interesting.”