Kilo Class (13 page)

“Then, sir,” replied Admiral Dixon, “we will have to think again. But this way is the only shot we have, without showing our hand. Otherwise they’ll go all quiet, and clever, maybe even make a run for it, perhaps down the Denmark Strait, or inshore. Or even straight back to the Barents.”

“Yeah. That would be a bitch.
Columbia
in the wrong place. No overheads. Shifting the MPA to Iceland, or Norway, and back. Dealing with poor quality SOSUS right inshore. We’d be just sitting here, guessing.”

“Yessir,” replied Admiral Dixon. “If it starts to go that way, we’re gonna need more assets brought in. On the double.”

“Forget about that, Johnny. If we have to tell the President we lost the Kilos and need more units, he’s gonna have a fit. It will be almost impossible to keep it Black. I’ll probably have a fit myself. This thing has to work according to our present plan. So think positive, guys, the goddamned Chinese don’t even know we’re coming. They won’t get clever unless we do something careless. Just remember, this operation has to work first time. Otherwise we’re in the deepest possible shit.”

By December 23 the
Columbia
command team had been assembled at the SUBLANT HQ. Each member had been hand picked by Commander Dunning and flown down from the New London base. Now working in the Limited Access Cell, cut off from the rest of the world, they plotted the destruction of Beijing’s submarines.

The Combat Systems officer, Lieutenant Commander Jerry Curran, a tall, bespectacled man who many believed was the best bridge player in the Navy, had arrived that morning. Boomer’s Executive Officer, Lieutenant Commander Mike Krause, had made the journey to Virginia in company with the twenty-nine-year-old Navigation Officer, Lieutenant David Wingate, whose work would be vital during the long, dark days deep in the GIUK Gap. Lieutenant Bobby Ramsden, a twenty-nine-year-old from Maryland, was in charge of the sonar room. Each team member was sworn to secrecy. Each was forbidden contact with the outside world.

A final briefing was attended by Admiral Morgan, who flew down with Admiral Mulligan in a helicopter. That evening, Commander Dunning, Mike Krause, Jerry Curran, David Wingate, and Bobby Ramsden were flown back to Connecticut in a Navy chopper, where
Columbia
awaited them.

She was ready for sea. During the previous few days her engineers had worked her over, checking every working part, every mounting, replacing anything suspect. The slightest rattle on a prowling nuclear beat will betray her position. Every man knew that this mission, whatever it was, could be shot to pieces by one careless test.

The electronic combat systems were checked, rechecked, and then checked again.
Columbia
would carry fourteen Gould Mk 48 wire-guided ADCAP torpedoes to the GIUK Gap. She was also loaded with eight 1,400-mile-range Tomahawk missiles and four Harpoon missiles with active radar-homing warheads. Boomer hoped these would not be necessary, and they wouldn’t, save for the intervention of the entire Russian Northern Fleet on behalf of the Chinese Navy.

What would be necessary, however, was the small arsenal of decoys
Columbia
would carry. These were the systems designed to seduce an incoming torpedo away from the American submarine. Boomer thought it was entirely possible that one of the Chinese Kilos would open fire on them. In Boomer’s view they should anticipate instant retaliation the moment
Columbia
sent her own torpedoes active, a desperate last-second shot from a doomed ship. Boomer’s men knew the lethal Russian torpedo would come straight back down the American torpedo’s own track. Straight at the hull of
Columbia
, a classic operational procedure in submarine warfare. That was where the decoys came in. And they better come in real quick, was Boomer’s thought.

Columbia
carried Emerson Electric Mk 2’s, and a Moss-based Mk 48 with a noisemaker. Her IBM sonars were the BQQ 5D/E type, passive/active search and attack. On station,
Columbia
would use a low-frequency, passive towed-array, designed to pick up the heartbeat of the oncoming Kilos.

The seven-thousand-ton
Columbia
operated on two nuclear-powered turbines, which generated thirty-five thousand horsepower driving a single shaft. If necessary, she could work a thousand feet below the surface. She was scheduled to clear the New London Base at 2030 on December 24.

The principal officers of
Columbia
were now sealed off from any contact beyond their own number. Most were wondering about wives and families, but they were promised an excellent dinner, which would be prepared especially for them. It was probably as bad for Boomer as for anyone. He guessed correctly that Jo would not take the girls up to the Cape house but would remain in Groton throughout the long holiday. While he spent Christmas Eve with his senior staff, he knew that his beloved Jo and the children were a mere three miles away, and he could not even give any one of them a present.

In the gathering gloom of the afternoon, Lieutenant Commander O’Brien and his team began to pull the rods — the slow and careful procedure of bringing the nuclear power plant up to the temperature and pressure needed to deliver the required energy for all of
Columbia
’s needs. You could run a small town off the nuclear reactor in a Los Angeles Class submarine.

By 1850 they were almost ready. The last of the crew was aboard. Down below they were finalizing the next-of-kin list, which detailed every single member of the ship’s company, and the names of those the Navy should contact in the event
Columbia
was hit and failed to return to the surface. The name of Mrs. Jo Dunning was at the top of the list, accompanied by her telephone number and the address of Commander Dunning’s ranch-style home on a hillside overlooking the sea.

Some of the younger crew members were carefully completing letters home, which would serve as their final wills should
Columbia
not return. It was snowing lightly along the Connecticut shore, and by 1930, the base seemed deserted, barring the few line handlers, their duty officer, and Boomer’s Squadron Commander. The snow seemed to muffle all sound as it billowed high around the dock lights that surrounded the great hull.

The order to “attend bells” was issued. By 2010 Commander Dunning and Lieutenant Wingate were on the bridge, at which precise time Boomer ordered the engineers to “answer bells.” The Executive Officer ordered all lines cast off, and the tugs began to pull the big hull off the pier. And Boomer announced the ship formally under way, in the cold northwest wind, on this cold Christmas Eve. Commander Dunning called to let go the tugs, waiting for them to clear, before ordering, “Ahead, one-third.”

Columbia
began to move forward, slowly at first through the harbor, covering the first few yards of her deadly mission to the GIUK Gap. Just the sight of her cruising out into the darkness seemed to cause the night to simmer with peril. For someone.

Boomer, warmly wrapped in a greatcoat, remained on the bridge with his navigator as they ran fair down the channel and out into the waters of Gardiner’s Bay. Their initial course would take them out through the gap between Block Island to the north and Montauk Point to the south. Big almost weightless snowflakes were now falling on these dual-purpose waters, which serve as both the playground of vacationing New Yorkers, and the submarine freeway into and out of the New London base. There was already a layer of pulverized white frost out on the casing of
Columbia
as she effortlessly cut her way through the short winter chop.

Boomer would stay on the surface while the water was relatively shallow, and would go to periscope depth somewhere southeast of Martha’s Vineyard. They would not go deep until they reached the edge of the continental shelf and turned north, away from their initial easterly course.

By dawn on Christmas Day,
Columbia
had covered 300 miles. Coming to periscope depth, Boomer briefly accessed the satellite, for routine traffic. He then ordered the submarine deep for the 3,500-mile north-easterly run to the Shetland Isles. They steamed along at a steady twenty-five knots, knocking off 600 miles a day, five hundred feet below the surface. They crossed the Great Atlantic Ridge above the fracture zone on the fiftieth parallel, but mostly they ran through ocean water two and a half miles deep.

The six Orion P-3C’s passed
Columbia
high over the Atlantic two nights before Boomer and his men reached the Shetlands. The maritime patrol aircraft then curled away on a more easterly course, lumbered north over the Southern Irish county of Donegal, and followed the rugged northern coastline, before heading into the Mull of Kintyre — a long area of land which hangs like an old shillelagh off the west coast of Scotland.

The US aircraft came roaring out of the darkness into Machrihanish shortly after dawn. The first giant Galaxy C5A was already in and parked, having made the journey the previous overnight and landed in broad daylight. The Americans who would man the airfield were hard at work, in shifts, organizing electricity, heat, and water supply. Boomer and his men continued straight on, past the Rockall Rise, and headed, slower now, for the waters off the southern side of the Shetlands. The Captain reached his holding area and cut the engines back as he accessed the American communications satellite. It was 1600 on January 1, and there was a message awaiting him, beamed down from the overhead, inside five seconds.

The Kilos had cleared Pol’arnyj at 0500 that day and not returned, traveling north into the Barents Sea, in line ahead, making seven knots. They had been unaccompanied and had dived before they reached the trawler waiting fifteen miles offshore. Inside that special-fit trawler was more American tracking expertise per square foot than at Fort Meade, but it had immediately
lost
contact when the Kilos slid under the surface, and the regular patrolling American SSN was not yet in position.

The “fishermen” had lost the Kilos before the SSN could find them. And now no one knew precisely where they were. For the moment,
Columbia
could only wait until SOSUS provided some kind of a solution.

Back in Virginia, Admirals Mulligan, Morgan, and Dixon had just gritted their teeth and sent the news on to
Columbia
by satellite. “Well, both Kilos will be forced to snorkel two nights from now,” said Admiral Morgan, who was back in his natural element, tracking foreigners at all hours of the day and night. “I still think we’ll pick them up.”

On January 3, the third night of the journey along the Barents Sea, the Kilos came to periscope depth to snorkel, and SOSUS heard them up. But the contact was fleeting, right at the end of their charging cycle, and the patrol SSN was too far away to pick them up before they went silent. But at least SUBLANT had a rough fix, and they were able to make a first estimate on the Chinese SOA (speed of advance) of seven knots. Admiral Dixon ordered
Columbia
to a new holding area close to the Faeroe Islands. Neither he nor Admiral Mulligan believed the Chinese were alerted, but both men thought it possible they might suddenly go for the western side of the Faeroes. Boomer just had to wait patiently for SOSUS to start the hunt in the next twenty-four hours.

The Kilos came up snorkeling at 2300 hours the following night. SOSUS alerted the P-3C operators roughly where to start looking with the sonobuoys. But the weather was bad, and the sea was rough, and sonar conditions were consequently poor. The MPA men were able only to narrow the Kilos’ position down to about a hundred square miles, with an SOA of not more than seven knots, and not less than five. Admiral Dixon ordered the patrol aircraft into the air on the fifth night of January, standing by to follow up
any
SOSUS contact on either side of the Faeroes. But this was fruitless. The Kilos never showed. Everyone missed them.

THE FIRST TWO. The vast patrol area where the US Navy’s Black Ops submarine waited, listening for the distant engines of a Kilo Class diesel-electric
.

Night six was better. Again SOSUS gave the “heads-up” at 2315. The patrol aircraft picked up the two submarines shortly after midnight, snorkeling. There was now time to localize. They established that the Kilos were on the offshore eastern route, closest to the UK — the route Admiral Dixon had expected and hoped for. SUBLANT’s satellite message to
Columbia
was succinct. It gave the Kilos’ positions, course, and speed at 0100 on January 6. It ended with, “Plan to intercept, two nights from now.”

The seventh night was spent in comfortless ignorance.

On night eight Boomer Dunning was out in his attack area, moving up from the Faeroes knowing that nothing had been heard from the Kilos in almost forty-eight hours. Back in SUBLANT, Admiral Morgan believed they would come up early to recharge the batteries. “They have to be low,” he said, banging his fist on the desk. “These guys
must
come up to snorkel.”

The hour of 2100 came and went. So did 2200. At 2300, irritation was beginning to set in, not only at SUBLANT but also in the operations room of USS
Columbia
, where Commander Dunning was trying to get his thoughts in order. “They
must
snorkel soon or their batteries will be completely flattened,” he said, exasperated. “They
cannot
have crept by me. They
cannot
stay on batteries much after 0400, of that I
am
certain.”