“That’s my view, Lee. Come up and have a cup of coffee when you’re off watch.”
Boomer went down two decks to the big bank of machinery that forms part of the ship’s air-purification system. He found engineman Cy Burman at work with a wrench and spanner, making an adjustment to the carbon dioxide scrubber. This is Navy jargon for the wide gray bank of purifiers that controls and keeps down the levels of carbon dioxide, the lethal, insidious gas that would wipe out the entire crew, if anything more than 4 percent is permitted into the air supply. Boomer watched Cy working and reflected that at this moment, as at all times, the man in command of this bank of machines held the lives of everyone in his hands. He stopped and chatted for a few moments, but sensed that the engineman was edgy.
“Not a major problem, Cy?” he asked.
“Nossir. Not even a problem…just a small adjustment I’d like to make…no one’s gonna even notice. But while we’re down here, without much prospect of fresh air, I want this thing at maximum efficiency.”
Less than a hundred miles into the pack, the tension throughout the ship was obvious. Up in the conn, he found the watch crew working quietly together, checking that Columbia held to her course and depth as she raced under the heavy ice.
From the far side of the compartment housing the navigation systems, Boomer could see the long trace of the fathometer sounding regularly off the ocean floor far, far below. The smooth line of the soundings was a comfort, providing no sense of the deep lonely echoes, bouncing back through ice-cold water, which fell away to a thinly charted ocean bottom almost three miles below the keel.
The hunched figure of young Wingate could just be seen through the light of the operational area. Right beside him, Boomer could see the yeoman tending the ice detector, waiting for a polynya, watching the stylus rapidly tracing the shape of the forty-foot-thick ice ceiling that stretched with cruel and jagged indifference 480 feet above Columbia’s sail.
Boomer walked over and joined them, stared at the swiftly moving stylus, and asked, “How’s it going?”
“Pretty regular, sir, at about forty feet thick,” replied the yeoman. “But fifteen miles back it suddenly went crazy, and drew a huge downward indent, like some kind of a stalactite…must have been nearly a hundred feet deep into the water.”
“Pressure ridge,” said Boomer. “We have to be really quick on those…not at this depth, because none of ’em are six hundred feet deep. But they can stretch down a hundred and twenty feet, and you really don’t want to hit one of those sonsabitches. They not only look damned ugly, they’re as hard as fucking concrete.”
“I’ve never been exactly certain what causes them, sir,” Lieutenant Wingate said.
“Oh, just the pressure of the ice. You imagine two vast floes, millions and millions of tons, crushing into each other from different directions because of wind or current…it just forces the huge ridges downward, and those ridges are our enemy until we reach the north coast of Alaska. When you see a big downward pattern on this little machine, we’re coming up to one of them.”
“Yessir. By the way, do we expect to see icebergs?”
“Not really. Not up here. The pack ice above us is too closely rammed together. If you go up in an aircraft above the cap, it looks like a kind of patchwork, a huge pattern, made up of hundreds of big floating jigsaw pieces, some of ’em miles across. They are crammed close but not necessarily joined, not in one solid stretch. They are separate, and they drift and float, grinding into each other, right up there over our heads, right now. Icebergs are different — they are vast hunks that break off from the land ice shelves, or even off the edge of the polar ice pack…but you don’t find ’em right here because they can’t break off and float. You may get ’em down toward the Bering Strait, lying deep, right where we’re going.”
“Aye, sir.”
Through the bright northern night, Columbia ran due north up the Lena Trough. By 0700 Lieutenant Wingate had plotted them up over the Morris Jesup Plateau, where the bottom comes sweeping upward for almost a mile and a half, the depth changing steadily from 11,000 feet to only 3,500 feet, until the great underwater plateau provides its unmistakable landmark. Dave Wingate’s fathometer worked steadily as the echoes sounded off the relatively shallow bottom.
Right there, above the Jesup heights, the navigator spoke to the Captain, and Boomer ordered a course change that would swing them away from their due north bearing. “Conn…Captain…come left slow to 330, maintain speed twenty-five, depth six hundred.” His words would steer Columbia on a course two hundred miles south of the Pole, angling left to 270 across the 86th parallel, in water that would run ten thousand feet deep, but which would avoid the confusion of longitude roulette.
Boomer decided to run all day at twenty-five knots, and to begin searching for a polynya sometime after 2300. That way he could put Columbia on the surface around midnight in broad daylight, pass the PCS, and take any signal update from SUBLANT. He went over to the navigation room to check their likely position at that time, and was pleased to see they would be right above Hall Knoll, well past the direct line of the North Pole and running very firmly south, instead of north.
He also decided to get some sleep. At 0800 he handed the ship over to his XO, whose forenoon watch was just beginning. The Captain had been up throughout the night and slept soundly in his bunk for five hours, awakening in time for lunch, which he ordered especially — a bowl of minestrone soup, a rare sirloin steak, salad, and a mountain of french fries, which his wife would undoubtedly have confiscated at birth.
Boomer grinned privately at his brilliance in outwitting her and sprinkled the fries liberally with salt, another item Jo would have whisked from his hands before as much as a grain hit the plate. Come to think of it, Jo would not have been crazy about the thick blue-cheese dressing that flowed across the salad. There were not many reasons why Boomer was ever glad to be separated from his wife, but right here, in the banquet spread before him, was one of them. It was a fifteen-minute respite from his devotion to her. Commander Boomer chewed luxuriously. Still grinning.
By 1530, at the halfway point between the Morris Jesup Plateau and Hall Knoll, Dave Wingate had plotted them at their closest point to the North Pole, which lay more than two hundred miles directly off their starboard beam. Right now the gyro-compasses were working perfectly as Columbia crossed the limit of her northern journey. Three hundred miles off their port beam were the northern boundaries of the Queen Elizabeth Islands, the vast snowbound archipelago that sits atop the northernmost coastline of Canada. From here Columbia would be running southward, 550 feet beneath the ice pack.
The temperature inside the ship was a steady 71 degrees. Inside Columbia, cocooned against the unsurvivable conditions that surrounded them, the living was pleasant, if not easy. Everyone worked in shirtsleeves, and movies were being shown almost continuously in the crew’s mess hall. Above them an Arctic storm was raging. They lacked only one small comfort…the ability to surface at will. Every man knew they were imprisoned by deep pack ice. If their ship faltered, Columbia would quickly become a tomb — unless Boomer and Mike Krause could crash her through the gigantic granite-hard ceiling of ice that held her captive. All through the afternoon they ran on, down to Hall Knoll, above ocean valleys ten thousand feet deep. They were in the middle of it now, way past any point of return. If the reactor were to fail terminally, they could not even make it on the battery to the edge of the pack ice — the distances were simply too great. The crew were aware of the risks, but they tried to conduct themselves as if the situation were normal. But the strain and pressure would not evaporate entirely. Columbia was quieter than usual. It was as if both she, and her crew, were traversing these silent, rarely traveled waters with a still, small voice inside them, warning over and over, “Beware! Beware!”