by Chris Ryan
No doubt there were plenty in the Argentine navy who still carried a grudge against the British for the sinking of the cruiser Belgmno during the Falklands campaign, and no doubt either that some of them would leap at the opportunity to nail a Royal Navy submarine close inshore.
So all day we loitered at around a hundred metres depth, streaming a massive array sonar from our stern, alert for any indication of hostile warships. Our listening devices could pick up moving vessels a hundred miles off. Mostly it was fishing boats and inshore traffic, occasionally bigger ships heading up for Drake Passage into the Pacific.
We passed our time in the cabin, organising our kit and making it watertight. Nuclear subs are huge, but they cram a lot in. The passageway floors were stacked with crates of tinned food, so we had to watch our heads wherever we went. Our cabin was small for six men and all their equipment, and the crew got used to stepping over some trooper lying out on the deck checking the sights of a GPMG, or seeing us casually handling missiles capable of blowing a hole in the hull.
The day passed slowly underwater. Some of the guys snatched a bit of kip while they could. Jock and I spent a lot of time studying charts and maps. The plan was that on going ashore we would meet up with a guide, aUK national attached to one of the oil companies prospecting in the region. He would take us to a safe lying-up point. A lot was going to depend on his reliability.
Meantime, Doug had woken up and was back to his old trick of needling other members of the team. First he had a go at me about Jenny.
"So what was she like, Mark? Gagging for it, was she?"
It made me mad to listen to him harping on about Jenny like she was some scrubber, but I'd learned that it made his day if he got a response, so I held my tongue.
Then he tried it on with Kiwi. "Reckon Stanley must be like home to you. All them farmers screwing their frigging sisters and mothers. Just like back in New Zealand, eh?"
But Kiwi just laughed amiably. "Yep," he said, 'that's farmers." Doug left it at that. Maybe he knew that Kiwi might thump him one.
So it was Josh's turn.
I guess he thought that because he was a new boy, Josh was fair game. As troop sergeant, Doug had authority over him that he proceeded to use mercilessly. He kept inventing little tasks for him. "Fetch me out the night sight, I want to check the batteries," he'd say. Josh would jump up and dig out the night sight and bring it over. "No, I didn't mean that, I meant the Spyglass." So Josh would go back to the mound of equipment and fetch that out. Then Doug would want something else. Or he would send Josh down to the ops room to synchronise his watch. This went on and on through the afternoon.
Like a lot of younger guys fresh out of training, Josh had all his kit together, everything in its right pouch. I remembered being like that, checking my kit over and over again when we'd flown out to the last mission.
Josh's face fell when casualties were mentioned. "So where does the rescue come from if we're compromised?" he asked at one point.
"There isn't going to be any rescue, you prick," Doug jeered. "If we're busted we fight our way out on foot. Same as we did last time, eh, Mark?"
"That's about the size of it," I acknowledged. "Well, if you guys can handle it, I guess I can," Josh said.
"The fuck you can! When we were slogging it across the pampas you hadn't even made it to primary school. College boys like you don't know they're born. You only passed selection because they needed to get the fucking numbers up. I know that 'cause your instructor asked me to keep an eye on you."
"Jesus, Doug, when are you going to give it a rest?" Nobby said wearily.
But Doug wouldn't give up. The numbers game by which SAS selection standards were being lowered was his pet hate. He went on needling Josh for his perceived lack of soldiering skills. And when he got bored of that, he started to get personal. "You got a sister, ain't you? What's her name then?"
"My sister's called Judy."
"Judy, eh? You think she'd go for me then?"
Josh shrugged unhappily.
Doug didn't let up. "You going to introduce us then, when we're back in the UK?"
"Leave it out, Doug," I said.
"Ha, what's this, the big brother act again? Just like you and Andy?"
The mention of my brother's name sent a hot wave of anger through me. I jumped up. "Leave his name out of this!"
Doug thrust his face in mine. "Not so easy without him to back you up, is it?" He was swaying about on the balls of his feet as he always did when he was about to swing a punch. He was a dirty fighter, fast on his feet and hard as nails. I could put him down, but if I didn't get the first punch in, he'd do some damage.
Luckily, at that moment Jock came in. "What gives?" he snapped, seeing the pair of us squaring up to one another. "We're on a mission, for Christ's sake!"
Doug snorted and turned away. I sat down again, the anger still burning in my gut.
"What was all that about?" Josh muttered.
"Nothing," I told him. "We go back a long way, that's all."
At a prearranged time just before five in the afternoon we came up to communications depth to receive messages from our trailed antenna. There were further reports about the salmonella outbreak, which had spread into the civilian population at Port Stanley, and advice on treatment. We discussed the possibility that it might be some kind of biological attack by the Argentines, targeted against the R.A.F. Jock agreed with me that, without fighter protection, the islands were left wide open.
Josh wondered how a bacterial agent might be introduced. "What do they do? Drop it in the water supply?"
"Doubtful," Jock said. He expected that public water supplies, even in Stanley, were filtered and chlorinated and treated with ultra-violet specifically to protect against hazards like salmonella. "Besides, the quantities are too great. To contaminate the drinking supply you'd need a road-tanker load of the bugs." Agents and materials needed to be prepared and handled correctly. He thought it likely that any salmonella would have to have been introduced directly into food, probably via the R.A.F mess. If it had been in today's breakfast, that would explain why we were OK we'd left before eating.
I was thinking that it must have been a highly potent strain, whatever it was, if a pilot could be feeling well enough to take off and yet half an hour later be too sick to land his plane.
I wondered how much Jock and the skipper really knew about the background to the current crisis. The government in London must have been very nervous to risk a nuclear submarine close inshore, and to authorise inserting an armed party into a country we were not officially at war with. I thought about my glib words to Jenny, that this was peacetime. For how much longer?
Around five-thirty we abandoned our holding pattern and headed westwards under cover of darkness. It had been a very long day. An hour later, our speed dropped to ten knots as we approached the 100-metre line. The commander explained that we were entering an undersea canyon, as much as five miles across and 500 feet deep at the entrance, that had been gouged during the last ice age. It wound back to within a few miles of the coast and would provide us with deeper water during the approach to our destination. Over the past two decades, British submarines had surveyed scores of similar natural features in the region, charting their twists and turns in the knowledge that, in war, possession of such undersea maps could mean the difference between destruction and survival.
The submarine's active and passive sonars, coupled with the echo-sounding fathometer and inertial navigation system, enabled her to plot a course accurate to within a metre. It was an eerie sensation even so, sliding along in the black water, 200 metres below the surface, knowing that sheer walls of rock loomed over the vessel on either side, and that the smallest miscalculation in handling could result in a catastrophic collision.
The atmosphere became noticeably more intense as the minutes ticked off. In spite of the air-conditioning our cabin smelt stale with the tang of cleaning oil from the weapons. With every mile that passed the depth above o
ur tower lessened and the canyon narrowed. If we did detect an enemy we would have to come up to fifty metres in order to turn. We were like a big fish swimming up a tunnel. We had just thirty metres of water under our keel, and the upwards-looking high-frequency under-ice sonar registered the same to the surface.
An hour from our drop-off point we had begun donning our black emergency survival suits and packing our kit into dry bags, when there was an alert. The sonar teams had picked up a ship's screws ten miles dead ahead. High-speed turbines: very probably a patrol vessel. Immediately the skipper ordered Dead Slow and we settled gently towards the sea bed. We couldn't actually touch bottom without risking damage to our sonar dome but we rested about ten metres up and sat silent, hoping that the shallow-water clutter of the waves overhead would smother the sounds of our reactor pumps. Every small sound in the boat seemed suddenly magnified.
"Contact bearing 040 degrees. Course 190. Speed eighteen knots. Range 20,000 decreasing."
The enemy vessel was on our starboard bow headed towards us. At this rate she would acquire us within fifteen minutes. Given current weather conditions we could probably outrun her given enough start, but then her sonar would certainly pick up the sound of our engines. It would mean breaking cover. On the other hand if we stayed where we were much longer we risked a torpedo.
"Range 18,000 metres decreasing," the sonar operator called. "Speed seventeen knots." The ship's speed was dropping. It might be slowing down to turn away; alternatively it might have guessed there was a big sub out ahead and reduced speed to improve the capability of its own passive sonar.
"Like a man picking his way through a forest at night, who stops to listen," the skipper murmured to Jock. His coolness astonished me.
Three minutes of silence, then, "Range 16,400. Speed fifteen knots. Now bearing 045 degrees," came the operator's voice. The vessel was a little over eight miles off, slowing further and turning away from us, but not by much. She might be questing about, trying to locate us. We would know if her sonar started pinging us.
Another man on the sonar watch sang out. "Sonar trace conforms to signature of Foxtrot Alpha 3." The atmosphere of intense concentration among the crew continued unchanged.
"Argentine naval rescue craft," the skipper explained for our benefit. "Built by our own Vosper-Thorneycroft for the Dutch navy and sold by them to Argentina. Dual-use capability that's to say, sonar-equipped for inshore ASW. We've tracked her before. Probably out after a fishing boat in trouble. Let's hope she wraps it up smartly."
An air-sea rescue boat could be a threat to us if it came close enough, though, and this one was fitted out for anti-submarine warfare. And if there was a rescue launch out, there was a possibility that it was backed up by a helicopter overhead. Even if that weren't the case, it would be a simple matter for her to fix us with her sonar while radioing Rio Grande for aircraft with depth charges and torpedoes.
And then abruptly, without warning, somewhere in the boat an alarm pealed.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The noise was so loud we almost leapt out of our skins. It seemed incredible that it would not be audible out on the patrol boat.
"Bridge," the captain snapped into a microphone. "What's the problem?"
"Forward turbine room reports smoke, sir. Lots of it."
"Shut watertight doors. Fire party close up."
"Aye, aye, sir. Shutting all watertight doors and hatches. Fire party close up," the officer of the watch repeated.
All of us on the team had been through this drill before in the course of exercises. Fire is a constant and deadly hazard underwater. Modern subs are stuffed full of electric cabling and plastic insulation that if heated can generate deadly toxic fumes.
Heavy steel hatches slammed shut, clunking home like safe doors, isolating the upper deck from the bridge area. A seaman appeared in the door and tossed smoke masks into our laps and told us to be ready to put them on if ordered.
We were trapped in a narrow undersea canyon in shallow water on a hostile coast with a patrol vessel bearing down on us, and now the boat was on fire. In short, the situation was fucked up. I was willing to bet, though, that the captain would be as calm and collected as if he were tied to a pier at Devonport dock. He couldn't fight the fire personally; other people would do that. They were well trained and could be relied upon to do their job in a speedy and efficient manner.
In the event of a fire, then the water- and smoke tight doors would confine it to a single compartment on the lower deck. Water sprays would dowse the flames, while a fire party equipped with breathing equipment and extinguishers tackled the source of the blaze. If necessary, and should the flames prove too fierce, then the captain would give the order "Execute CO2 drench' to flood the compartment with carbon dioxide gas, stifling the oxygen from the fire. It would be bad news for anyone in the compartment without breathing equipment, but that was why he was commanding a nuclear submarine and why the men trusted him because he had the guts to do it.
The alarm was still shrilling. Why didn't someone switch the bastard thing off? There was a pounding on the locked hatch in the passage; a brief exchange over the intercom and the hatch was opened to allow a party of seamen through with tools and extinguishers. They went aft through the bridge area and clattered down the ladder to help fight the flames on the lower deck. Briefly through the open hatch I saw the operations centre functioning as before. The sonar operators' attention would still be fixed on their job of tracking the patrol vessel.
Josh glanced at me, a bit pale. If there's one thing we hate in the SAS it's having to sit on our hands in a crisis. "What d'you reckon?" he said. "An overheated bearing?"
"More likely an electrical fault," Jock told him casually. "A bundle of wires heat up, reach flashpoint and bing! Smoke alarm."
"Yeah, that's what I figured," said Josh.
I smiled inwardly. He reminded me of myself at his age fresh-faced, eager, but a bit apprehensive. This was his first time on a real combat mission. Now things were starting to go wrong he was trying to keep the nervousness out of his voice. I wanted to reassure him, then I remembered how angry it used to make me when Andy tried to do the same to me all those years ago. I was beginning to understand what it meant to feel like an older brother.
The alarm bell cut out suddenly. Over the intercom we could hear the operators calling down the range to the patrol boat. The distance was opening up again as the boat turned. Had it overrun the mouth of the canyon and put its helm over to circle round and pick up the scent again? I tried to picture where the forward turbine room was in relation to the reactor. I've never trusted that radioactive stuff. They had given us little radiation badges to wear, but all they did was measure the size of the dose that killed you. Interesting to the scientists, but not a fuck of a lot of help otherwise.
"If that fire spreads to the reactor room then we're in mega-trouble," Nobby observed, as if reading my thoughts.
"Us and all this end of South America," said Doug.
Surely someone would be able to shut down the reactor before we all blew up or melted or whatever it was a runaway nuclear reactor did. But if we did manage a controlled shutdown, that would still leave us lying on the bottom of the canyon without power. At a rough estimate we currently had just under 200 feet of water over our heads.
Departing a submarine via the escape hatch is something I have had to do as part of my SAS training. It is not a method recommended for the claustrophobic. There are two escape hatches, one either end of the boat. In our case we would have to use the forward hatch located in the torpedo storage area. It consists of a steel tube just wide enough for one man to crawl up into, with a watertight hatch at each end. You open the bottom hatch and climb in with an emergency air breathing set. The lower hatch is then closed and the tube flooded. It's pitch black inside, and the experience is like being buried alive and drowned simultaneously. If all goes well the pressure within the tube equals the water pressure outside and the top hatch can be opened. You c
limb out, pull the inflation cord on your life jacket and swim up to the surface.
That's the theory. There are a number of things that can fuck up, most of which involve getting stuck in the tube and running out of air. The procedure is so dangerous even submariners rarely practise it. It's better than drowning or suffocating in a disabled submarine but not much.
Even if we made it to the surface, it wasn't as though our troubles would be over. We were still ten miles out from the shore at night in near-polar waters, without boats in a force-seven gale. Our survival suits would give us only limited warmth. I envisaged the winds blowing our bodies ashore after we had died of hypothermia.
I was wondering if the fire was accidental. If the salmonella outbreak at Stanley could be part of a biological attack, then it would certainly be one hell of a coincidence for the one submarine present at the time to catch fire. On the other hand, why plant an incendiary when a high explosive would do the job better? None of it made sense.
We went back to our cabin. There was nothing we could do to help and we'd only get in the way. Nobby Clark cracked a joke about being roasted or boiled. Jock grinned at him and went on studying his map. Kiwi was reading a paperback; he seemed completely unconcerned. The rest of us lay on our bunks or fiddled with our equipment.
There was the ominous thud of a small explosion from somewhere down below.
"Air bottle going up," said Doug.
"Steam pipe fracture more like," said someone else.
The alarm bell resumed and was joined by another with an alternating note. The Argies would have to be deaf not to hear the racket. Jock yawned with elaborate unconcern and looked at his watch. "Seven o'clock. Another two hours to go. Well, I hope the Navy get things under control in time for us to go ashore on schedule."
The hatch outside was unlatched again and more people could be heard coming through. A waft of smoke reached us. Doug said that this showed they had the fire under control and were reopening the hatches. "Or else," Nobby suggested brightly, 'the back end of the boat is burning and the mate lots are jumping ship."
