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.”
Boomer smiled despite the clear and obvious problems that lay ahead. “We’ll just have to play it by ear, and hope to God things are a bit better when we arrive.”
“Aye, sir.”
At 2200, on August 24, just north of the 81st parallel, Columbia crossed the permanent ice shelf northeast of Greenland. Six hundred feet under the surface, she passed across the unseen frontier that ends the North Atlantic, and entered the waters of the Arctic Ocean. When next she surfaced she would be in the Pacific Ocean, on the far side of the world.
As midnight approached, Columbia’s quarry, the two Kilos bound for Shanghai, were a thousand miles to the east, making ten knots on the surface of the Barents Sea in their nine-ship Russian convoy. At 2355 the Kilos were forty-two miles northwest of the headland of the great jutting Russian island of Novaya Zemlya.
As he headed due north in a straight line under the pole, Boomer was already 250 miles closer to the Bering Strait, where they were all headed. The American was steaming forward at more than double the speed of the Sino-Soviet convoy. If Columbia’s reactor stayed healthy, and the ice cover allowed, the race would be no contest.
Commander Dunning went to the maneuvering control room at 0030 to visit Lieutenant Commander Lee O’Brien. Boomer found the Chief Engineer on this watch himself, accompanied by his three-man team, including an electrician, and his chief mechanic, Earl Connard, who was at the reactor control panel. O’Brien was concentrating on catching any emergency and monitoring the power — power that sprang from the fission of ancient uranium atoms.
Lieutenant Commander O’Brien looked up when the Captain walked in. “Hi, sir,” he said cheerfully. “We’re chugging along pretty good right now. Tell the truth, she’s never run better. Dead smooth. Nothing to report.”
“Good job, Lee,” said Boomer. “We got a ton of depth right here…no objection if we wind her up to thirty knots?”
“Nossir. That’ll be fine. Sooner we get out of this frozen rat trap the better, right?”