Kilo Class Read Online Free PDF Page A

great mountain and into the harbor from the other direction. It’s like a wind tunnel in there. The katabatics are gonna give us a problem. We’re gonna have to run right up into one of the fjords.”
    “Fjords?” said Bob. “I thought they were more or less a northern thing.”
    “According to this chart, Kerguelen’s got more fjords than Norway,” said Kit. “I’ve been studying it for hours now. The whole place must have been a succession of glaciers once. The fjords here cut so deep back into the land I can’t find one spot on the whole island more than about eleven miles from saltwater. I bet if you measured every inch of the contiguous coastline it’d be about as long as Africa’s!”
    Lander laughed. He liked the adventurous young Texan. And he liked the way he always knew a lot about where they were, not just the position, course, speed, and distances. It was typical of Kit to know that Captains James Cook and William Bligh had sailed through these waters a couple of hundred years ago.
    Just then Tug Mottram returned to the bridge, bang on time, as he always was. “Morning men,” he said. “Is this goddamned wind ever gonna ease up?”
    “Not yet, anyway,” said Lander. “The cold front is still right here. I guess we should be thankful the darned blizzard’s gone through. Wind’s still sou’westerly, and it’s freezing out there.”
    “Kit, you picked a spot for us?” asked the Captain.
    The Texan stared at his chart. “Kind of,” he said slowly, without looking up. “About another eight miles southwest there’s a deep inlet called Baie Blanche — a fjord really, ten miles long. A mile wide and deep, up to four hundred feet. At the end it forks left into Baie de Français, which I think will be sheltered. But it also turns right into another fjord, Baie du Repos. This one’s about eight miles long, narrow but very deep. The mountain range on the western side should give some shelter. The swells shouldn’t come in too bad, not that far up, and I don’t see any kelp marked. I’m recommending we get in there.”
    “Sounds good to me. Oh, Bob, on your way to your bunk tell the engineers to be ready to start work on the hull at around 0800, will you?”
    “Okay, sir. I’m just gonna catch an hour’s sleep. Then I’ll be right back for a bit of sightseeing.”
    Kit Berens finally looked up and informed the Captain he was about to put a message on the satellite, stating their position and describing the minor repairs that would delay them for less than a day.
    In the communications room, positioned on the port side of the wide bridge, Dick Elkins, a former television repairman from Boston, was talking to a weather station when Kit Berens dropped his message on the desk. “Intercontinental. Direct to Woods Hole,” Kit said.
    And now, at last, they were getting a lee. The water was flatter, and
Cuttyhunk
steadied, sheltered by the rising foothills on the starboard side as they ran down to the Baie Blanche.
    Kit Berens was back hunched over his charts, his steel ruler sweeping across the white, blue, and yellow sheets. He finally spoke. “Sir, I wanna give you three facts.”
    “Shoot,” said the Captain.
    “Right. If you left this island and headed due north, you would not hit land for eight thousand five hundred miles and it would be the south coast of Pakistan. If you went due west you’d go another eight thousand five hundred miles to the southern coastline of Argentina. And if you went east, you’d go six thousand miles, passing to the south of New Zealand and then six thousand five hundred more to the coast of Chile. My assessment is therefore that right now we’re at the ass-end of the goddamned earth.”
    Tug Mottram laughed loudly. “How about south?”
    “That, sir, is a total fucking nightmare. Five hundred miles into the West Ice Shelf, which guards the Astrid Coast. That’s the true Antarctic coastline. Colder and more windswept even than here. But they do have