The south yielded nothing. Except the French Met Station. And all through the two days and two nights, Columbia rolled and pitched through the water like a stranded whale in the mountainous seas. They broke more cups and plates in the wardroom than they had all year as the submarine struggled through conditions for which she was not best designed. Twice they lost trim and broached to the surface, and Boomer finally ordered them to seven knots, which gave them better control.
Mike Krause noted that even the names of places were in tune with their mission: Cape Challenger, Savage Bay, plus a succession of deep fjords, guarded by heavy, heaving swells at the entrances, powerful enough, said Lieutenant Wingate, to capsize an oil tanker.
At the end of the second run along the south coast, Boomer considered the task well and truly completed. They had observed nothing of any interest, and the CO had not even seen a fjord or a bay through which he would care to navigate — the Bay of Swains, Larose Bay, and the twelve-mile-long fjord of Baie de la Table looked to him lethal. “If the Taiwanese were hiding in one of those, they deserved their fucking atom bomb or whatever it was,” thought Boomer. “Poor bastards’ll never get out alive.”
At dawn on November 7, Boomer turned Columbia north off Cap Bourbon. In Mike Krause’s opinion, the chart was showing one of the most treacherous coastlines in the world — strewn with jagged islands upon which survival was out of the question. They were strewn with craggy uneven rocks, just above and below the surface. Strewn no doubt with the skeletons of ships and their masters, who over the centuries had run out of luck in weather conditions that were usually frightful.
They steamed past the Îsle de l’Ouest, staring in awe at the snowcapped 2,200-foot Peak Philippe d’Orleans, which rose up over the western headland of the island, six miles from the mainland. Lieutenant Wingate informed the CO they should remain at least seven miles from the shore for the next twenty miles because of the treacherous rocky shoal that lies three miles off the entrance to the Baie de Bénodet and the Baie de l’Africain. Full of submerged rocks, its foul ground extended for over two miles.
As Columbia passed by in a force six westerly, leaving the shoal safely to starboard, Boomer could see through the periscope the huge swells become white breakers, driven shoreward before the wind, thundering into the shallow waters of the ridge, three miles offshore. “Holy shit,” said the CO. “What a place. You couldn’t hold a surface ship in that water…you’d just get driven onto the rocks.”
So another day and another night passed in their slow, tortuous journey, searching for a place that could never be — a place inhabited by human beings and a place where natural life was unthinkable, unless you were a seagull or a penguin. But the job had to be done, and Boomer, laboriously and doggedly, did it.
At the end of the light on November 8, they passed the Îles Nuageuses, the Cloudy Islands, right off the northwest point. But no shelter awaited them there, and Boomer turned away to starboard, to the deeper water near the huge rock Captain Cook had named Bligh’s Cap. As always, the Global Positioning System provided precise navigational data, and Boomer knew that without it, the entire search would have been a nightmare.
Then, on a new, dark, gale-swept morning, they headed southeast for Cap Aubert in the event that the Taiwanese had set up shop in a cave or a tunnel facing due north.
By midday it was growing dark, and Boomer Dunning elicited a groan from Lieutenant Commander Dickson, who was manning the periscope, by observing that he was probably the first man in history to be looking for a tunnel at the end of the light.
With the weather building ominously to the northwest, they ran on past Cap d’Estaing for another five miles, swung wide around the shoals, and ducked down the fifteen-mile-long fjord of Baie de Recques, where the water was a couple of hundred feet deep and relatively calm, sheltered from the weather.
The storm raged for the rest of the day and all night, with great blizzards of snow and sleet slashing across the water. Tucked right in the lee of the north shore, Columbia hardly noticed it. The following morning, November 10, they emerged to a brighter day, and Boomer elected to make a seventy-mile journey east-southeast right out beyond the kelp beds, which extend to Cape Sandwich on the distant easterly limit of the island. From there he would drive slowly back, working around the islands of the Golfe des Baleiniers and Baie de Rhodes, before arriving close to Cox’s Rock.
This was the landmark in his mind, the black sea-swept hunk of granite he and Bill Baldridge had been able to see at the seaward end of Gramont when Bill had spotted the periscope. That was the only real signpost he had, and the latest communication from SUBLANT suggested that the Taiwanese Hai Lung 793 might show up in these waters in a week’s time.
This would give him ample time to make a thorough search of the archipelago in the heart of Kerguelen, and to get back into position to observe the incoming Taiwanese by November 18. This time, of course, he would not need to see the Dutch-built submarine’s periscope to know it was present. The sonar system in Columbia would pick up the noise of hull 793 in a heartbeat. Or less.
And so, for almost a week, Boomer and his team groped around the windswept waterways to the northeast. They stayed at PD and spent much time avoiding kelp beds and making sure they stayed clear of rocks. David Wingate seemed to be glued to his charts. They crept back and forth down the Baie de Rhodes, traversed the short channel up to the mouth of Baie de Londres. They circumnavigated Howe Island, and Gramont, both ways. But they heard not a sound. The only good news was a satellite signal from SUBLANT, which informed the Commanding Officer that Columbia would not be reporting to the Arabian Gulf and would be returning to New London at the conclusion of the Kerguelen patrol, on November 19. Christmas at home, thank God, Boomer thought. And a unique circumnavigation of the world, too. Though they could never claim it.
At dusk on a bright November 16, Boomer ordered them to a position two miles north of where he and Bill Baldridge had seen the periscope from the deck of Yonder, in the Gulf of Choiseul. If the Hai Lung should show up, they had a fair-to-middling chance of locating it, but it was not an ideal position for a watchful submarine. The inner waters of this relatively narrow bay, surrounded by land from the north-northwest all the way south and back to the northeast, were a real headache for a sonar operator. So was the relatively shallow water — six hundred feet max — not to mention the constant threat of a rough sea.
Lieutenant Commander Krause did not like it, and Boomer felt very uneasy. That evening he and Jerry Curran spent much time discussing the problem until finally the CO said bluntly, “You know, Jerry, if that Dutch sonofabitch came sneaking through here at night, in a sea, we might never see her, and we might not even hear her. She could just go right by and we’d never know…there has to be a better way.”
“I know it’s a pain in the ass, sir, but I think we should get right out of here, a hundred and fifty or so miles back out to the northeast, beyond the big shoal area, where there’s deeper, quieter water and we can probably pick up an incoming snorkeling submarine as far out as the second convergence, thirty miles plus. It’s hopeless right here, too noisy, too shallow, and too confining. If we can get a decent distance offshore, in the open sea, the Hai Lung has much less chance of getting past us, if he’s on a direct course from Bali, which of course he must be. And if he is snorkeling, which he is quite likely to be.”
“You’re right, Jerry…we’ll move our operational area right now. We’ll be in good shape before midnight and we’ll follow the Taiwan boat right in, soon as she goes by.”