* * *
HMS Truculent was in her element. By Saturday afternoon her huge black hull was sliding silently through dark waters west of the Hebrides where the Atlantic is over two thousand metres deep.
Cruising north at eighteen knots, Truculent had stayed a hundred metres down for nearly twenty-four hours. Above and below, water layers of different temperature created acoustic barriers. The submarine moved in a ‘shadow zone’ where the risk of being detected by surface ships was minimal. That depth was also good for detecting other submarines. With her sensitive towed sonar restored to working order, Truculent could hear other boats over a hundred miles away if conditions were right.
The executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Tim Pike, had completed his rounds, looking for gripes to deal with before they became a problem or a danger. There’d been few. Truculent was a well-run submarine.
The control room watches lasted six hours, the tactics officer (TASO) and the navigator (NO) alternating as watch leaders.
Pike had little to do at that stage of the patrol, with the sea around them so deep and so empty.
He came into the zone for promotion in a month and was using his spare time for studying. He’d already passed the course to command a submarine, aptly named ‘The Perisher’; if you fail it you have to leave the Submarine Service for good.
He’d commanded a diesel sub for two years after that, but was now lining himself up to take charge of an SSN.
‘Day-dreaming again, Tim?’
The weapon engineer, Lieutenant Commander Paul Spriggs, nudged his arm.
‘Yeah. Wondering what’s in store for us.’
‘This patrol, you mean? The captain’s special orders. Hasn’t he briefed you yet?’
‘Nope. Not yet. I expect he will soon.’
‘On the other hand . . .’
‘He may not.’
‘Exactly. Something’s up with him. You’ve noticed how preoccupied he is. Hardly speaks at meals. Only smiles at my jokes out of politeness.’
‘We all do that, Paul.’
‘Oh, really? How extremely depressing.’
His chubby face looked genuinely perplexed. He pushed back the dark hair that fell across his forehead.
‘But you’re right,’ Pike agreed. ‘He doesn’t seem to be with us on this trip. I might try to draw him out later. We’ve got a communications slot coming up in fifteen minutes. Perhaps he’ll get a “family-gram” that’ll cheer him up.’
‘Be safer to write him one yourself!’
Tim Pike pulled a long face and crossed the cramped control room to the navigation table. Three paces and he was there.
‘Where are we, Nick?’ he asked the navigator who was duty watch leader.
‘Here, to be exact.’
The young lieutenant pointed to a cross on the continuous pencil line he’d drawn on the chart.
‘The SINS puts us northeast of Rockall and west of the Vidal Bank. In about an hour we should alter course to zero-four-zero to keep us in the deep water east of Rosemary Bank.’
‘We’ll need a little dog-leg for a communications slot before that. Almost due east? What do you think?’
The navigator pulled out a chart with a different scale, showing their position in relation to the British Isles. To listen to the signals from CINCFLEET at Northwood, they used a long wire antenna that floated just below the surface so as not to reveal themselves to watching radar. To receive signals they had to align the antenna by pointing it towards the transmitter in the north of England.
‘Almost exactly one-one-zero. Done this before, sir?’
‘Once or twice. I expect you’d like an Omega fix, too?’
‘Certainly would. What’s the time of the comms slot?’
‘18:00 to 18:30. We’ll be at four knots and sixty metres.’
‘Right.’
Cavendish plotted the details. The wire would also pick up low-frequency signals from Omega coastal navigation beacons. He’d get a position fix to within a mile, enough to confirm the inertial navigation system hadn’t drifted. For a more accurate fix they’d need to poke a periscope or satellite receiver above the water, and risk revealing their presence.
Pike slipped out of the control room and rapped gently on the door frame of the captain’s cabin. A curtain hung in the doorway, and Pike heard a hurried scuffling behind it.
‘Yes?’
He pushed aside the curtain. Commander Hitchens was at his desk.
‘Good evening, sir. We’re proceeding as planned in deep water at eighteen knots. We have a broadcast we’re scheduled to monitor in about thirty minutes. With your permission, sir, I’d like to reduce speed to four knots, bring her up to sixty metres and deploy the floating wire.’
‘Any other submarine activity?’
‘Nothing at all, sir. We’ll check the surface picture before we deploy the wire.’
‘Very good. Carry on, Tim.’
‘Er, one other thing, sir . . .’
‘Yes, what is it?’
‘I was wondering if sometime this evening might be an appropriate moment to discuss our mission profile.’
Hitchens fixed Pike with his unnervingly blue eyes.
‘Sorry. Not yet. I’ll brief when the time’s right.
‘From Wednesday we’re dropping out of the exercise. Special op. I’ll tell you that much, but it’s not for general knowledge yet. This one really is very sensitive. You’ll have to trust me.’
‘Oh. Right. Okay then, sir; I’ll carry on if I may.’
‘Yes, please. And make the pipe to the ship’s company, will you?’
‘I will, sir.’
Pike returned thoughtfully to the control room. There was nothing he could put his finger on, but something wasn’t right with his captain.
Philip closed his eyes and held his breath.
Damn it! Pike’s request had caught him by surprise. He should’ve been ready for him, and he wasn’t.
He ran through their brief conversation. It had been okay. He’d handled it. But he had to be prepared for next time, have an answer for their questions.
He expelled the air from his lungs.
Philip needed the men under his command. He was driving a nuclear-powered, hunter-killer submarine – one of the most deadly weapons-systems in the world. Those bastard Soviets would soon be finding out just how deadly, he told himself. But he couldn’t operate it on his own. Co-operation and obedience from men like Pike and Spriggs would be vital if his mission was to succeed.
Philip knew what he had to do. That much was clear. How to manage it, however, was a different matter. There was still time to think the details through. Until Wednesday he’d follow the exercise brief. After that, he’d be his own master.
The loudspeaker clicked. Pike’s voice boomed forth authoritatively.
The ‘pipe’ was heard on loudspeakers throughout the submarine. The broadcast to update the crew was made at least twice a day, a communication essential to team spirit on board.
The first lieutenant spoke for two minutes, telling the 130 men on board of the day’s sonar contacts. They’d included a school of whales.
He talked of the upcoming communications slot, knowing some of the crew would be expecting the forty-word ‘family-grams’ that kept them in touch with their homes. He ended by reading the menu for the evening meal.
The next pipe – that’d be the time, Philip decided. Start to prepare them for what was to come. Little by little. Step by step.
His eyes strayed to the photograph he’d doggedly kept on his desk, to preserve his mask of normality.
He looked at her image and his guts turned inside out again. He closed his eyes tightly. Would he ever be able to look at Sara’s picture without wanting to kill her?
She’d been everything he’d dreamed of when they’d met fifteen years earlier. He’d been serving on a Swiftsure class submarine at the time, circling the globe as part of a military sales drive. They’d gone ashore in Hong Kong, to a reception
at the British High Commission. Their host had been accompanied by his stunningly pretty daughter – Sara. He’d fallen in love with her instantly.
Sara had glowed that evening; as they circulated socially, her eyes reached across the room to him like a light-house beam. Excitement had almost choked him. Until then, apart from brief relationships, the only woman in Philip’s life had been his own straitlaced mother. Sara was vivacious, sensual and provocative; if his mother had ever had such qualities, she’d successfully repressed them after the trauma of her husband’s disappearance. In Hong Kong he sensed he’d finally met a woman with the power to cut through his shell of inhibition, and free him from the dour restraint of his upbringing.
His mother had tried to prevent their marriage. Nineteen was far too young for a girl to marry, she’d declared. He’d ignored her, terrified that if he didn’t bind Sara to him quickly he’d lose her to someone else.
Now he’d lost her anyway.
They’d been immensely happy together for their first two years. He’d had a shore-based job in Scotland, and the sense of personal liberation he’d hoped for became a reality.
Then he’d been given a commission at sea. Sara had been devastated by the separation and had applied intense emotional pressure on him to change his job. Philip had retreated into his shell, as he had learned to do as a youth when pressured by his mother.
Her face smiled at him from the frame. Deceptive, cruelly deceptive. Laughing eyes. Laughing at him? Mocking him?
In the control room, Pike hung the microphone back on its hook and bowed theatrically to the navigator.
‘All yours, Pilot!’
Cavendish raised an eyebrow at the mock courtesy, then turned to the helm.
‘Ten up, planesman. Keep sixty metres. Revolutions for four knots.’
The rating at the controls pulled back on the control-stick and watched the gauge. The deck began to tilt as the hydroplanes lifted the nose of the submarine. Pike grasped one of the overhead cable-ducts to steady himself.
‘Sound room. I want a check for surface contacts!’ Cavendish called.
‘Aye, aye, sir!’
HMS Truculent came up fast from the depths, passing through the thermocline which had refracted their faint sound downwards, keeping them hidden from listeners on the surface. Her speed dropped from eighteen knots to four, at which it was safe to trail the wire antenna without breaking it.
‘Level at sixty metres, sir,’ the helmsman called.
‘Deploy the wire.’
On the outside of the fin a small aperture appeared, and the VLF antenna began to unreel. Black plastic strips trailed from the wire to disguise it as seaweed.
In the sonar compartment the tattooed hands of the ratings tuned their acoustic processors to the new sounds of surface ships, or ‘skimmers’, as they were known.
Sensors outside the hull analysed water temperature and salinity and fed the data into a computer which predicted the refracted paths that the sounds would follow through the water.
‘Cavitation on port bow, chief!’ shouted one of the junior sonar ratings. Chief Petty Officer Hicks looked over his shoulder at the VDU, and confirmed it.
On the green ‘waterfall’ display, low frequency ‘spikes’ of sound detected by the bow sonar showed as overlapping vertical stripes. Hicks counted them.
‘Two shafts. Six blades. That’s Illustrious,’ he announced with confidence. The last intelligence report had told them the British aircraft carrier was in the area.
‘Range and bearing?’
The rating keyed in additional data from the towed array. Bearings from the two sonars were triangulated by computer.
‘Range, 32.4 miles, bearing 039, Chief.’
The CPO pressed a button which transferred the data to the Action Information panel in the control room. There the carrier appeared on the tactical display as a triangle – a friendly target.
‘What about her escorts?’ demanded the officer-of-the-watch through the intercom.
Eyes scanned the screens and ears strained at headphones.
‘Nothing else registered, sir,’ came the eventual reply from the CPO.
Sound in water seldom travels in straight lines. HMS Illustrious had at least two frigates keeping her company, but Truculent couldn’t hear them. The sound waves from the warships curved downwards away from the surface, then curved up again many miles distant, to a so-called ‘convergence zone’. Truculent was in just such a zone for the carrier’s noise signature to reach her, but not yet in one for the frigates.
Hicks stood up, desperate to stretch his legs. He stepped into the control room, leaving the sonar ratings to plot the remaining contacts – distant trawlers fishing the edge of the continental shelf around Scotland.
He crossed to the Action Information plot, and yawned as he watched it begin to fill with contacts from the sound room.
‘Keeping you up, are we, Hicks?’ Pike quipped.
‘Off watch in an hour, sir. Boring day! Once we’d finally sorted out the 2026, there’s been sod-all to do.’
‘Did you report that to the captain? He wanted to know.’
‘Yes, sir. Have no fear.’
Pike looked at his watch. Time for the broadcast. He stepped into the communications office as Cavendish ordered the final manoeuvre to align the boat to receive signals.
‘Planesman, steer one-one-zero, revolutions for four knots!’
At three sites inside Britain, enormous Very Low Frequency transmitter arrays, masquerading as civilian wireless stations, broadcast a constant stream of information for submerged submarines. Weather and intelligence reports are transmitted as routine, on an hourly cycle, backed up at fixed times with specific messages for individual submarines.
The communications room was tightly controlled. Only those with top security clearance could enter the tiny cabin next to the control room. From floor to ceiling, racks of equipment left little space for the signals officer and radio operator.
The young, black-haired sub-lieutenant in charge ran his own plastic security card through a slot on the cipher machine, then punched out a personal code number on a numeric key-pad. Nearly all signals traffic was in code, but the laborious task of enciphering and deciphering was done electronically.
The teleprinter began to chatter. The radio operator leaned over to check that the transmission wasn’t garbled.
‘Faroes, force ten,’ he read. ‘Grey-Funnel Line’ll be chuckin’ up!’
‘You can feel it down here,’ Pike pointed out as the submarine heaved gently with the surface swell sixty metres above them.
‘Glad you volunteered for submarines?’ Sub-Lieutenant Hugo Smallbone grinned, knowing full well the torrent of complaint his remark would release.
‘Didn’t fuckin’ volunteer for submarines! Told to come here, wasn’t I? The one soddin’ boat in the Navy that’s not supposed to communicate, and I get the job of radio operator!’
‘At least you’re not chucking up!’
‘Prefer that to bein’ down here. The money’s what keeps me in this branch.’
The sub-lieutenant smiled patronizingly. He stood up to tear the first sheet from the printer.
ROUTINE 191800Z OCT
INT SITREP AT 1730Z
RO6 F229 F84 59.20N 008.50W
S 37 W HEBRIDES
‘So that’s where they think we are,’ commented Smallbone at the reference to S 37 which was HMS Truculent.
R06 was Illustrious, the F numbers her frigate escorts. The position given was timed for half an hour earlier.
A string of chart references followed. They marked the last known positions of two Soviet Victor class nuclear attack submarines, and three AGIs – Soviet intelligence-gathering trawlers.
The teleprinter bell rang twice.
‘Ah! Something for us,’ remarked Pike.
He peered more closely at the dot matrix print tapping out across the page.
IMMEDIATE. S 37. SECRET. COMMANDING OFFICER’S EYES ONL
Y.
CONFIRM RECEIPT BY SSIX AT 2000Z. FOSM.
INSERT COMMANDERS KEYCARD FOR MESSAGE.
‘Here you are, Bennett. Got some work for you. Satcom at twenty hundred.’
‘P’rhaps they’ve found me another job . . .’
‘No chance!’
The sub-lieutenant tore the sheet from the teleprinter, placed the top copy on a clipboard and took the carbon. As he left the wireless room he added, ‘Look smart. I’m getting the captain.’
‘A satcom will not be popular,’ Pike frowned. ‘We’re just about in range of the “Bears” here.’
‘Bear’ was NATO’s code name for the big Soviet TU–95 long-range maritime reconnaissance bombers which patrol the Norwegian Sea to track NATO warships. With Exercise Ocean Guardian underway, they’d be mounting extra missions. Raising a satcom mast above the surface could get Truculent spotted by the Bear’s radar.
Hugo Smallbone was in awe of Commander Hitchens. A rather immature twenty-one-year-old, he found almost anyone over the age of thirty intimidating. He nearly collided with Hitchens as the captain hurried from his cabin.
‘That for me?’ Hitchens asked, indicating the signal in Hugo’s hand.
‘Sir. It’s just come in.’
He handed it over and watched Hitchens’ face, expecting annoyance. But the expression in Hitchens’ eyes was one he’d never seen there before. Panic.
‘Thank you, Hugo,’ Hitchens whispered, controlling himself quickly. Then he spun on his heel and went back into his cabin. ‘Be right with you,’ he muttered over his shoulder.
The sub-lieutenant hovered in the corridor. He could hear the soft clicks of the combination lock on the captain’s safe, as Hitchens opened it to collect his security card.
‘Still here?’ Hitchens remarked, surprised to find Hugo hadn’t moved.
‘Let’s get on with it,’ he continued briskly, leading the way to the wireless room. ‘Bloody nuisance, this need to transmit. Last thing we want.’
‘That’s what the first lieutenant said, sir . . .’
‘What? You’ve told him about this signal? What the hell do you mean by it?’
‘He was in the wireless room, sir . . .’
Hitchens thrust the sheet of signal paper under Smallbone’s nose.
Shadow Hunter Page 5
